The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist is a 42-year-old respected journalist dedicated to exposing corruption in the banking and business world. On the morning of December 20, he loses a libel suit brought against him by billionaire Hans-Erik Wennerström and faces a three months prison sentence and 150,000 kronor in damages. Blomkvist endures the scrutiny of his highly publicized fall from Millennium, the political magazine that he co-owns, and where he works as both writer and publisher. At the courthouse, Blomkvist responds to his peers from various news outlets as they question him for sound bites. They refer to him by the nickname “Kalle,” an allusion to Astrid Lindgren’s tales of a child detective and Blomkvist’s past as a young journalist who rose to fame after solving a series of bank robberies. The nickname irritates Blomkvist, but he remains composed and tepidly answers their questions. He manages to avoid William Borg, a rival reporter who arrives at the courthouse to gloat.

Blomkvist catches a bus to a local café and assesses how to best salvage his career and the future of the magazine. Though his sentence is not ruinous, he feels humiliated by the professional setback. Wennerström, a “yuppie with a celebrity lawyer” (19), has tarnished his reputation as a credible journalist. Blomkvist flashes back a year and a half earlier to the roots of the debacle. Robert Lindberg, an old school friend, had given Blomkvist a tip on Wennerström, the successful CEO of an investment company. Lindberg suggests that Wennerström had embezzled government funds from the Agency for Industrial Assistance (AIA), an early 1990s program to develop industries in the former Eastern Bloc. Lindberg claims, off the record, that under the guise of establishing a packaging company named Minos in Poland, Wennerström used the bulk of the funding for speculative investments.

Dragan Armansky is the head of Milton Security, a firm that specializes in private security operations and personal investigations. On the morning of Blomkvist’s verdict, Armansky conducts a meeting between his top investigator, Lisbeth Salander, and their client, Dirch Frode, a retired lawyer in his late sixties who has requested a full investigation of Mikael Blomkvist.

Salander is 24 years old and an exceptionally gifted researcher. With her punk aesthetics of piercings, tattoos, and combat boots, she is Armansky’s most enigmatic and unconventional employee. In a series of flashbacks, Armansky recalls how Holger Palmgren, the company’s advisor and an advocate for troubled youths, convinced him to hire Salander as an office clerk four years earlier. At first, Armansky resolves to fire her for her general antisocial and insubordinate behavior in the first month of her employment. However, he changes his mind when she exposes security lapses in his own staff and produces a remarkably sourced and incriminating exposé on a confidential client. Impressed with her “magic” (38) skills at uncovering secrets, Armansky offers Salander a research position and regards her with a mixture of attraction and charity. After Armansky drunkenly attempts to hug her at a Christmas party, Salander, who is usually staunchly private, confronts him in a rare personal exchange. She tells him that she appreciates his support but is looking for neither a lover nor a father. The two agree to a friendship and Armansky promotes Salander to a freelance investigator with the right to work when and how she chooses.

The narrative returns to the present day, where Salander delivers her report on Mikael Blomkvist, her latest assignment. Frode initially regards Salander’s appearance with a mixture of doubt and curiosity but is quickly impressed with her investigation. She details Blomkvist’s ordinary upbringing, decent schooling, and modest income. He has an open relationship with Erika Berger, a longtime friend and colleague whose husband accepts the arrangement. Salander confirms Blomkvist’s clean record as a reporter with integrity or “trust capital” (57) and compares him to “Practical Pig in The Three Little Pigs” (54). The only peculiarity in her findings is his uncharacteristic passivity during the Wennerström trial. Salander surmises that Blomkvist may have been threatened or set up. Frode hires her to continue her investigation on Blomkvist and Wennerström, with a focus on corroborating her suspicions of a conspiracy.

After the café, Blomkvist returns to the Millennium offices to arrange for his temporary leave of absence. Erika Berger is part-owner and editor-in-chief of the publication and Blomkvist’s occasional lover. She disagrees with his tactic of stepping down to protect the magazine’s credibility but acknowledges that their ad revenue has declined. Blomkvist advises that they can fight back against Wennerström when the magazine is less vulnerable, and she accedes to his decision.

With her husband’s knowledge, Berger spends the night with Blomkvist. In the early hours of the morning, while she sleeps, Blomkvist reflects on their 20-year open relationship and compares his desire for her to drug addiction. Their affair began in journalism school and, after marrying other people, they started Millennium together and resumed their relationship. Despite his wife’s hope that the affair would end after the birth of their daughter, Blomkvist continued to sleep with Berger. His marriage ended in divorce, whereas Berger’s husband, Beckman, accepts Blomkvist as her lover.

Unable to fall back asleep, Blomkvist rereads the court documents and expresses his disdain for immoral corporate executives and financial reporters like Borg, who cater to them as celebrities. One of his reasons for founding Millennium was to expose corporate greed, yet this morning Blomkvist reads his own press release announcing his departure from the magazine. He laments his concession, asserts that it is a temporary retreat, and affirms that he will eventually bring Wennerström to justice.

Berger spends the weekend with Blomkvist, and the following Monday, he receives a phone call from the lawyer Dirch Frode. Frode invites him to visit a potential client in Hedestad but offers no further details. Blomkvist is at first skeptical, but when he learns that the client is the elderly Henrik Vanger, the former industrialist with an ethical reputation, he tells Frode he will consider the invitation. Blomkvist browses the internet and compiles a quick file on Vanger, noting his declining ventures which his grandnephew, Martin, now heads as the CEO.

Meanwhile, Salander visits her 46-year-old mother at the Äppelviken Nursing Home. Her mother appears confused and mistakenly calls her by her sister’s name, Camilla. Salander patiently tells her she is Lisbeth and suggests they watch television together.

On Christmas Eve, Blomkvist visits his ex-wife and his daughter, Pernilla. Pernilla believes in her father’s innocence and he withholds his judgment when she tells him she has joined a church. He then visits his sister, Annika Giannini, a lawyer and women’s rights advocate. During the festivities at Annika’s house, Blomkvist phones Frode and agrees to travel to Hedestad, which is three hours away by train. The day after Christmas, he arrives at Henrik Vanger’s residence, a large, stone farmhouse on Hedeby Island that is accessible via a bridge from the main town. Blomkvist marvels at how much the snowy, picturesque landscape contrasts with downtown Stockholm.

During their meeting, Blomkvist learns that his father once worked for Vanger and that Blomkvist spent a childhood summer on Hedeby in 1963, when he was three years old. Vanger’s 13-year-old grandniece, Harriet, babysat Blomkvist. Blomkvist does not recall Harriet or his stay in Hedeby and presses Vanger to explain why he has called him back to the town.

Vanger offers Blomkvist two assignments. The first is writing the sordid history of the Vanger family. Vanger has long despised most of his relatives’ greed and dishonesty, particularly his oldest brother, Richard, who was Harriet’s grandfather. Richard was a Nazi leader and, after his death in 1940, his widow and son Gottfried relocated to Hedestad where Vanger took responsibility for Gottfried’s upbringing. As an adult, Gottfried had an alcohol addiction and volatile marriage with Isabella Koenig. He moved alone to a remote cabin on the island and died in an accidental drowning. Isabella was too unstable to care for their two children, Martin and Harriet, and Vanger raised them as his own. Vanger concludes his family history by revealing his second assignment: Under the guise of writing the family’s history, Blomkvist’s real objective is to investigate which family member murdered Harriet and has been tormenting Vanger with mysterious, pressed flowers for the past decades.