Tattooed By Politics: Michael C. Moynihan On Radical Swedish Detective Fiction

I confess that I could not finish reading Swedish author Stieg Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

I gave up on the novel not because of Larsson's leftist, anti-capitalist views - Lord knows I've read a good many books by leftist novelists. I laid the novel down because I thought it dull.

Michael C. Moynihan in his Wall Street Journal review of Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, begins with noting that Larsson's Girl With the Dragon Tattoo offered "cartoonish tales of capitalists doing battle with righteous journalists and anarchrist hackers."

Moynihan goes on to write that Larsson, a former member of a Viet Cong support group, has a literary heir of sorts in Mankell, a Swedish crime writer, former Maoist agitator and author of the Kurt Wallander detective series. The Troubled Man is the latest novel in the series.

 "Like Larsson, Mr. Mankell is a writer of middling talent and radical political beliefs," Moynihan writes.

You can read Moynihan's interesting piece via the below link:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703858404576214481282836602.html?mod=WSJ_Books_LS_Books_5