The Girl Who Cashed All The Checks

Although it has been heavily embargoed and no preview copies have been sent out I was able to
acquire an early manuscript copy of the controversial new Stieg Larsson novel that his estate has commissioned. I present here the first two pages of The Girl In The Spiders Web. Hopefully the publishers wont make me take this down. I can cheerfully report that although the book was written by a hack Swedish novelist it is up to the high standards of the previous Larsson books. See for yourself:

The Girl In The Spiders Web

Mikael Blomkvist, the ruggedly handsome editor of Millennium magazine woke to the sound of laughter. He opened his eyes and looked around the spare but tastefully decorated bedroom. It was empty. He peered through the window of his apartment on Hantverkargatan Street but no one was on the balcony with an axe or lying flat on his skylight ready to jump through it and murder him. That kind of thing hadn’t happened in months. 
             Not since his last case - a nasty one where a greedy father and brother had ripped off a journalist's widow leaving her with nothing.

            The laughter was coming from the living room. Blomkvist pulled on his Nukes Out T shirt and Cuban Army camo pants and stopped at the mirror on the wall. Yes he still looked ruggedly handsome, he thought and walked into the living room where Helen Hagen was sprawled on the sofa wearing one of his shirts and watching television.

            Hagen was a beautiful 28 year conservative American who had been debating with him the previous evening at a packed event at Stockholm University. The debate had been entitled “American Foreign Policy Is a Force For Good”, she had been for the motion, he had been against. Not only had Blomkvist won the debate, turning the hostile crowd in his favour but he had also won over Hagen and had bedded her after showing her that Noam Chomsky’s denials of the Cambodian genocide were perfectly understandable in the context of the American perfidy and lies that prevailed in the Western media in the post Watergate era.

            He sat down beside her on the sofa.

            “What are you laughing at?” he asked.

            “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It’s an old episode,” she said in that annoying American twang of hers.

            He watched the show for a few minutes. It was a fake dialectic, the sort of thing Marcuse had predicted in 1968, where the population is offered the illusion of choice and dissent, the better to control them.

            Blomkvist said nothing and went to make some Eritrean Popular Front fair trade coffee.

            “You got a phone call,” Hagen said.

            “From whom? The Zionist capitalists who control the media?!” he asked with alarm.
            “Someone called Lisbeth Salendar. She didn’t leave a message but she sounded like she was in trouble.”

            “I must go!” Blomkvist said pulling on a fair trade sweater, fair trade shoes and a raincoat given him by Olaf Palme for being such a great guy. He ran out of the apartment. 

            It was early morning in Stockholm but already the streets were filled with people: bourgeois businessmen on their way to brothels filled with underage trafficked Russian girls, fat American tourists with their noses stuffed in McDonalds wrappers, complacent young people with their faces in iPhones built by slave labour in far off China.

            When he arrived at Salendar’s apartment she had already left but Salander’s girlfriend, a cool punk rock singer called Bug was waiting for him. Bug was a musician and in the public eye a lot but she was a positive role model for young women, rejecting the patriarchy, the capitalist record companies and the corporate shills. She was a confirmed lesbian with a mohawk and a completely appropriate body fat ratio for her height. In fact she may even have been a little overweight. Not that being underweight or overweight would have mattered to her because she was confident in who she was and unconcerned by contingent western standards of beauty. That’s how cool she was. Yes, a little bit overweight, Blomkvist decided, damning his eyes for objectifying the young woman. Plump even. Ok chubby. But in a good way.

            “Lisbeth isn’t here,” Bug said.

            “I like big butts and I cannot lie,” Blomkvist said.

            Bug stared at him.

            “I, I, don’t know why I said that,” Blomkvist stuttered, horrified.

            “Was that Sir Mixalot?” Bug asked.

“I don’t know. I appreciate the culture of African American musical artists but at the same time I loathe the sexism of much of the hip hop community.”

            Bug looked him up and down. “Well aren’t you a tall drink of water,” she said admiringly.

            “What trouble is Lisbeth in this time?” Blomkvist asked quickly. He knew he was irresistible but he just didn’t have the time or energy to convert yet another lesbian thirty years his junior.  

            “Lisbeth made a surveillance tape of a man who tortures women,” Bug said.

            “All men torture women,” Blomkvist said solemnly.

            “Don’t go all Andrea Dworkin on me,” Bug said. “Just stay focused and watch the tape.”

            Blomkvist and Bug watched the tape. The violence inflicted on the women was shocking. Blomkvist called up the owner of Millennium magazine.

            “A famous rich Swedish industrialist has been kidnapping and torturing young women,” he said.

            “Who is this? What time is it?” a sleepy voice replied.

“Let me take twenty minutes out of your morning to explain exactly how these young women were violated and tortured in graphic, lurid detail,” Blomkvist said.

“Wait, who is this?”

“First he would tie them up, then—"
      "I think you have the wrong number, I'm not--
      "Then he would bring out the chains and dildoes."
      "I'm hanging up, weirdo."
      Click. Dialtone. "My God. They are already closing in," Blomkvist said his eyes wide with terror.

Inferno by Dan Brown

(The new Dan Brown novel Inferno will be released on May 15. I was lucky enough to get a galley from Doubleday and remarkably chapter 1 of Inferno is called The Lost Squirrel and coincides exactly with the chapter I found online and released here on this very blog 2 years ago...Amazing, eh?)

Chapter 1 The Lost Squirrel

Robert Langdon woke from a dreamless sleep in his Cambridge apartment near Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest college of higher learning. Sleep, he knew, was a habit shared by all mammals and most invertebrates. No one understood why sleep was so necessary for these life forms but Robert Langdon knew that dolphins only slept with half their brain at any one time, otherwise they would drown. Dreams were another of the many domains of Robert Langdon's expertise. Freud, of course, was not the first to interpret dreams; famously Joseph of the Israelites, exiled in the land of Egypt, had become an expert dream reader for the pharaohs.

Robert Langdon got out of bed and walked across the carpet. Carpets had been covering the homes of human beings since weaving was discovered by the Sumerians in the second millennium BC. His carpet had not however come from Sumeria, but rather from the Ikea on I-95. It was 5.55 in the morning the same time philosopher Immanuel Kant woke each day for his constitutional walk around the city of Konigsberg. Kant was so regular that shopkeepers could set their watches by him. Now of course Konigsberg had been renamed Kaliningrad and was no longer in East Prussia but rather in the odd Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Chuckling Robert Langdon wondered if the Knights of the Teutonic order would have been happy with that state of affairs.

“Oh tempora, oh mores,” he said in Latin, once the universal language spoken by all cultured peoples but now a mere tool for academics and the esoteric tongue of the Vatican.

In the kitchen the Harvard University wall calendar told him that it was Tuesday. Tuesday, he thought, remembering that it was named for the Norse god Tiu, the equivalent of the Roman god Mars. Tuesday was the second day of the week, coming between Monday and Wednesday. Tuesday and Thursday were the only days of the week that began with a T, although Thursday's T was a soft one, not a hard one.

Robert Langdon opened his Northland 3000 refrigerator, the most expensive fridge in the world. He took out a pint of milk. Milk he knew came from the lactation glands of cows. All female mammals lactated. He wondered if duck billed platypuses did so. Hmm, he thought, if only there was some device that could give him that information easily. Some kind of encyclopedia - perhaps stored electronically. If such a device existed you wouldn’t need everything explained all the time, because you could assume that people weren’t idiots and they could just look stuff up they didn't know.

He poured the milk into his bowl of cornflakes. Cornflakes of course had been developed by William Keith Kellogg as a health food, but now were consumed across the world by all cultures. He ate quickly. The Harvard University pool where he swam each morning opened at 6:30 and that only gave him fifteen minutes to get dressed in his trousers and polo neck. Trousers of course had been popularized by Beau Brummel following the sans culottes revolution in F-

The phone rang. “Is this Bob Langdon?” a guttural voice asked. A voice that seemed to be speaking from another dimension entirely, maybe even another universe. Modern physics had proven that many universes existed - the multiverse it was called - but telephone conversations between the universes had never been thought possible. Perhaps until today!

“This is Semiotics Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.”

“I’m a Boise State man myself, listen Bob, we live just across the street and your car alarm has been going off for the last fifteen minutes, can you come out and turn it off, please.”

Robert Langdon knew that alarms had existed since Roman times when the sacred geese on the Capitol hill had alerted the sleeping citizens that an attack by the Celts was imminent.

"Can you go outside, please, pal. We want to get back to sleep.”

"Did you know that dolphins only sleep with half their br..." Robert Langdon began but the phone was dead. It reminded him that the first phone call had been made in this very city by Alexander Graham Bell who had unfortunately not taught at Harvard but rather at the inferior Boston University.

Professor Robert Langdon dressed and went outside. The alarm on his Porsche Boxster S was indeed sounding. Porsche was a German company founded in 1931 by Ferdinand Porsche, but that was not important right now, what was important was the alarm.

He turned it off with a push on his infrared key button. Robert Langdon was worried. What could possibly have set off this alarm in the first place? He examined the car’s roof. It was covered with squirrel poop. Squirrels were a type of rodent common in North America and Europe. The squirrel was in the tree, naked and afraid. Could it have jumped on the roof and started the alarm, shat itself and jumped off. No. That didn't seem likely at all. What struck Robert Langdon about the poop was the fact that if you cocked your head and looked at it in a funny way it seemed to be arranged in an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and key to the ancient wisdom of the Zohar. A chill coursed through him.

“I have a terrible feeling,” he said out loud to no one in particular “that I am about to be thrust into another one of my strange adventures.”

The wind blew from the north, which in this hemisphere was where the polar regions lay. He turned up the collar on his coat and headed towards the Georgian buildings of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.