Pippi Longstocking,with dragon tattoo

An old colleague of Larsson’s has said they once talked about how certain characters from children’s books would manage and behave if they were older. Larsson especially liked the idea of a grown-up Pippi,a dysfunctional girl,probably with attention deficit disorder,who would have had a hard time finding a place in society but would nonetheless take a firm hand in directing her own destiny. That musing led to the creation of Lisbeth Salander,the central character in Larsson’s trilogy. So how does Lisbeth compare to Pippi,the creation of the earlier Swedish author Astrid Lindgren?

SINGULAR BEGINNINGS: Pippi first appeared in 1945,living all alone except for a horse and a monkey. Her mother is dead. Pippi eats pancakes,drinks lots of coffee—sometimes while up in a tree—and goes to school when she feels so moved. Though courageous and loyal,probably not a role model. In the first Larsson book,Lisbeth’s mother is in a nursing home,her father has disappeared and she’s on her own. She eats Billy’s Pan Pizza,drinks a lot of coffee—sometimes while hacking computers—was bullied at school and never finished. Also courageous and loyal,but definitely not a role model.

ODD LOOKS: This is how Pippi appeared to her young neighbours: “Her hair,the colour of a carrot,was braided in two tight braids that stuck straight out.” She wore,“on her long thin legs” a pair of “long stockings,one brown and the other black”. Lisbeth is tattooed and nose-ringed,with inky hair. Though in her mid-20s,she is a “doll-like” woman,with “delicate limbs,small hands and hardly any hips,” looking as if she “had just emerged from a weeklong orgy with a gang of hard rockers”.

STRENGTH AND SKILLS: Pippi “was so very strong that in the whole wide world there was not a single police officer as strong as she.” She owns a gun and policemen who ask her to be “a good girl” get grabbed by their belts and “carried down the garden path,out through the gate,and onto the street”. Lisbeth,in one of her defining confrontations,is pitted against two creepy bikers. “The situation was ridiculous. There stood a skinny girl who could fit into his breast pocket getting cheeky with two fully grown men.” Lisbeth employs some Mace and a pistol,and then “the toe of her boot shot up with full force and was transformed into kinetic energy in his crotch with a pressure of about 1,700 pounds per square inch”.

Larsson,a journalist,died in 2004,before his first Millennium book made it to the bookstores. But in delivering his manuscript to his publisher,he said: “My point of departure was what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Would she be called a sociopath because she looked upon society in a different way and has no social competence?”

His fictional alter ego,Mikael Blomkvist,is a nod to another Lindgren character,the master detective Kalle Blomkvist. And the nameplate for Lisbeth’s new apartment reads “V. Kulla”—Pippi’s house was called Villa Villekulla. But don’t remind Lisbeth of her sunnier literary ancestor. “Somebody’d get a fat lip,” she says,“if they ever called me Pippi Longstocking.”