Corporation, Crime, And Serial Killers In Stieg Larsson`s `the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo`

Money is a consistent concern in crime fiction: in the Sherlock Holmes series the crimes are predominantly financial or property based, and crime in the Golden Age detective fiction is usually motivated by money. Likewise, finance is at the centre of Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which examines contemporary concerns over the dominance of corporate power. Larsson's experience as an investigative journalist is strongly felt in his work, his amateur detective being the financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and the influence of the Expo magazine, which the author co-founded and was the editor-in-chief for from 1995 until his death in 2004, can also be perceived in the exposure of social problems on a national scale that the text works towards. By considering the author's locating of his serial killer Martin Vanger as the CEO within a powerful family corporation, this essay seeks to explore the similarities between the business world and the serial killer that the text exposes. Girl interacts with the contemporary anxiety that money is a corrupting force. The text opens with a miscarriage of justice, where the influence of the corporate gangster Hans-Erik Wennerström results in the protagonist Mikael Blomkvist being wrongly convicted of libel. Leaving the court Blomkvist thinks to himself: 'This is how it is to be a criminal'. Ethically, being a criminal does not affect Blomkvist, he describes libel as 'a lightweight crime' (p. 15), but he is concerned with the financial repercussions: '[f]rom a financial point of view, however, it was serious' (p. 15). Being subject to finance is a central concern, as it is Blomkvist's poor financial situation that the industrialist Henrik Vanger exploits, who sums up his offer to hire Blomkvist as a private detective as: 'I want to buy a year of your life' (p. 105). The sinister undertones to the imagery of purchasing Blomkvist portrays Henrik's financial power as disturbing, and Blomkvist later voices this same concern when he questions Henrik's influence over the magazine Millenium and its editor-in-chief Erika Berger: And above all - what price did she put on her own credibility, and when had she become transformed from an independent editor into a corrupted one? (p. 242)

Like with Blomkvist, the text portrays Henrik as buying Berger, indicated by her credibility having a 'price', and the influence of money is negatively portrayed as being that which transforms Berger into a 'corrupted' editor in Blomkvist's eyes. The power of the corporate figure, then, is deeply alarming in the text. Henrik's nephew, Martin Vanger, is threatening as an experienced corporate figure and a serial killer. Martin's success as a negotiator is his ability to use superior logical skills, indicating in the text when the journalist Blomkvist describes him as 'a negotiator experienced from many industrial battles' (p. 401). The imagery of 'battles' portrays the corporate industry as a strategic arena, and the violence it denotes suggests a link between his role as a corporate figure and his violence as a serial killer. Indeed, Martin's use of language is also described in terms of creating physical violence: 'Martin's words hit Blomkvist like a punch in the face' (p. 401). The skills from Martin's corporate background are suggested to be the same abilities that allow him to operate as a successful serial killer, as his killings are 'so well planned that no-one was even aware that a serial killer was at work' (p. 417). His kidnapping process even mimics the acquisition of companies: I have to identify my prey, map out her life, who she is, where does she come from, how can I make contact with her, what do I have to do to be alone with my prey. (p. 403)

Like with a corporate takeover, Martin first identifies his subject, gathers information, and then acquires them. By this implication, 'Hostile Takeover' (p. 400), the heading of the fourth section of the text, becomes synonymous with rape, which is reinforced by the national statistic about violence against women that accompanies the heading: '92% of women in Sweden who have been subjected to sexual assault have not reported the most recent violent event to the police' (p. 399). The same predatory impulse that motivates Martin Vanger as a killer directly relates to his power as a corporate figure. Girl expresses the concern that the same predatory impulse that motivates Martin exists within the corporate world. This is largely achieved by the mirroring of Henrik Vanger's influence over Blomkvist to that which Martin describes his victims as developing: 'They start to trust me and develop a certain camaraderie with me' (p. 403). For Martin, this relationship brings him a sadistic satisfaction, describing the situation as 'the godlike feeling of having absolute control over someone's life and death' (p. 402.) Henrik is not depicted as a sadist but is illustrated as being firmly in control, Blomkvist describing Henrik as having exploited their relationship by 'playing on my emotions' (p. 460) and the fact that 'he knows I like him too' (p. 460). Just as Martin's power is his logical prowess, so Henrik too is portrayed by Blomkvist as having triumphed over him intellectually, when he exclaims him to be a 'clever bastard' (p. 460) who uses his financial power to control him, threatening that 'he would have to revise his attitude towards Millennium' (p. 460) if Blomkvist were to publish the details of Martin's crime. Moreover, we can consider the Vanger family as acting as a microcosm of Sweden, which Karsten Wind Meyhoff points out in her visiting of the Scandinavian Police Procedural: [I]n the text, the privately controlled Swedish company Vanger represents the many major Swedish companies controlled and owned by powerful families.

By this standard, the predatory impulse and the manipulation of power that we see in Henrik and Martin Vanger is a critique of the corporate power that dominates Sweden as a whole. The text also critiques the corruption of power in the welfare state. Larsson's dysfunctional private investigator, Lisbeth Salander, is legally placed under the guardianship of Advokat Bjurman, who is given control of all of her finances, and the author explicitly makes known that this is 'one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose' (p. 202). In control of her money, Bjurman uses his power to sexually abuse Salander, describing her as 'better than a whore. She gets paid with her own money' (p. 200). Like Martin Vanger, Bjurman is a sadist, using physical violence to control women, as he implies when he tells Salander that '[i]f you don't treat me well, you have to be punished' (p. 224). The text illustrates this abuse as occurring outside the notice of society by juxtaposing Salander's rape with Blomkvist's consensual sexual relationship with Cecilia Vanger, who takes an active role sexually: '[Cecilia] pressed against him when he kissed her breasts' (p. 197). This is in stark contrast to Salander who 'did not move' (p. 197) when Bjurman 'put his hand over her right breast and left it there' (p. 197), and Salander's inability to resist is vividly imagined when Bjurman forces her to perform fellatio: 'he kept his grip on her neck and pulled her fiercely towards him' (p. 199). Furthermore, Salander's perception of the police as 'a hostile force who over the years had put her under arrest or humiliated her' (p. 203) prevents her from reporting the crime to the authorities. The verb humiliate connotes a mental abuse at the hands of the police, and, combined with the physically abused by her guardian, Salander is a victim of the Swedish state's corruption. Girl investigates the influence of money in contemporary Sweden, then, portraying finance as an empowering force that is used to oppress members of society. At the end of the text, the function of the Stock Exchange is portrayed negatively through Blomkvist's television interview: There are only fantasies in which people decide from one hour to the next that this or that company is worth so many millions, more or less. (p. 520)

The use of 'fantasies' has connotations of the same sexual deviance that characterise Martin Vanger and Advokat Bjurman, and we can consider the original Swedish title of the text as far more appropriate than the English publication, as Anna Westerstål Stenport and Cecilia Ovesdotter Alm suggests: 'the text's original title in Swedish, (Män som hatar kvinnor' [Men Who Hate Women] makes clear that gender relations are central to plot'. Larsson's text seeks to expose the dominance of corporate power in Sweden and the corruptive influence of money, which allow for the abuse of women to occur unnoticed by society. Word Count: 1640

Bibliography Primary Texts Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, trans. Reg Keeland, (London: Maclehose Press, 2008)

Secondary Sources Meyhoff, Karsten Wind, 'Digging into the Secrets of the Past: Rewriting History in the Modern Scandinavian Police Procedural', in Scandinavian Crime Fiction, ed. Andrew Nestingen and Paula Arvas (Cardiff: Univesity of Wales Press. 2011), pp. 69-88 Stenport, Anna Westerståhl and Alm, Cecilia Ovesdotter, 'Corporations, Crime, and Gender Construction in Stieg Larsson`s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: Exploring Twenty-First Century Neoliberalism in Swedish Culture', Scandinavian Studies, 81:2 (2009), 157-178

Internet Sources Expo. Available at http://expo.se/2010/about-expo_3514.html [accessed 11/06/2012]).