On the Tail of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ; Frank Barrett Tours Stockholm, the City at the Centre of a Literary Phenomenon You Wander Right World Behind the Into the Intrigue [Eire Region]

Summary

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ABBA, saunas, Volvos, Ikea, Pippi Longstocking, H& M, the Nobel Prize, Bjorn Borg, free love, stunningly beautiful women...surely nothing can surprise us about Sweden. It's a country where the people drive safe cars, produce unfeasibly hard-to-assemble flatpack furniture, love meatballs and, in especially wacky moments, have a fondness for rolling naked in the snow. Yet all is not as meek and mild as it seems. Behind Sweden's cheery facade lurks real danger.

In the past few years, Irish readers have woken up to the extraordinary boom in excellent Swedish detective fiction. Initially inspired by the Martin Beck novels of husbandand-wife team Sjowall and Wahloo in the Sixties, the genre has grown with bestselling works from Hakan Nesser and Henning Mankell, author of the Wallander novels, which was filmed last year for the BBC with Kenneth Branagh.

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Extract

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On the Tail of the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ; Frank Barrett Tours Stockholm, the City at the Centre of a Literary Phenomenon You Wander Right World Behind the Into the Intrigue [Eire Region]

At first, this Swedish crime fixation seems rather preposterous. And yet bad things do seem to happen in Sweden, rather a lot.

Within about ten minutes' walk of each other I visited three places in Stockholm where shocking events took place that have reverberated around the world.

Olof Palme, the prime minister of Sweden, was shot dead on Sveavagen Street in February 1986 while walking home with his wife from the pictures.

A short stroll from here, at the magnificent Hamngatan NK department store, Sweden'...

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