The Girl Who Changed Everything: How Lisbeth Salander Redefined The Female Heroine In Modern Crime Fiction
· Free Press Journal
It was in August 2005 that the world of readers discovered a new heroine, like no other they had encountered before.
Swedish writer Stieg Larsson created Lisbeth Salander in a book titled The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo in its English translation. The product of a traumatic past and horrific abuse, Lisbeth grew up to be both physically and mentally tough.
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She is a genius-level tech wizard and a martial arts expert and prefers a life of detachment and social isolation. Her friends are fellow hackers whom she meets online, and the one person she connects with, for reasons neither can fathom, is a much older journalist, Mikael Blomkvist.
Salander, with her tattoos and piercings, dresses in black androgynous outfits and picks up male and female partners for sexual flings, but love and commitment are not in her no-nonsense temperament.
The book was an international hit, and Lisbeth Salander gathered legions of fans. Larsson wrote two other Salander books, The Girl Who Played with Fire (2006) and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest (2007), before his premature death at the age of just 50 and before his books that came to be known as the ‘Millennium Trilogy’ could be published.
He didn’t live to see the sensational success of his books that brought Scandinavian crime fiction—or Scandi Noir—out of a niche into the mainstream. It paved the way for authors like Jo Nesbø, Camilla Läckberg, and Soren Sveistrup. Lisbeth Salander shattered the image of the female protagonists in thrillers as serious investigators, victims in distress, or supportive assistants. She has been described as “a neurodivergent, heavily tattooed, traumatised, hyper-intelligent female vigilante who operates entirely outside traditional morality and law enforcement.” She became the template for flawed, morally ambiguous, fearless women who crashed the digital domain that used to be ruled by men.
The first book was adapted for film, and more are reportedly in planning. She influenced the creation of fictional characters in works like Jessica Jones, Gone Girl and Killing Eve. Several crime novels and TV series adopted the formula of pairing a serious cop or investigator with an eccentric digital wizard who can crack any firewall—the best known being MW Craven’s Tilly Bradshaw in his Washington Poe series.
Moreover, the English title started the trend of ‘Girl’ novels like The Girl on the Train, The Girl in 6E and The Girl with All the Gifts. It also sparked a wave of thrillers, featuring dark, female antiheroes who take justice into their own hands—books like The Informationist (2011) by Taylor Stevens, in which Vanessa "Michael" Munroe has Salander’s remarkable brain, gender fluidity, and a dark past involving cult abuse; the character of Dianna Madden in AR Torre’s The Girl in 6E (2014) is a reclusive young woman living isolated in a New York apartment and possessing violent sociopathic instincts and cyber mastery, like Salander. Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing (2015) has as the protagonist Lily Kintner, who, like Salander, is unperturbed by societal morality and is a vigilante who targets predators, abusers, and killers.
There were dozens of books with antisocial vigilante hacker heroines, but fans craved more Lisbeth Salander books, so David Lagercrantz was commissioned to write The Girl in the Spider's Web (2015), The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye (2017) and The Girl Who Lived Twice (2019). Then Karin Smirnoff started another trilogy, the first two instalments of which are out—The Girl in the Eagle's Talons (2022) and The Girl with Ice in Her Veins (2024)—and the third should be out soon, since the last book ended with a cliffhanger and the survival of the chief antagonist.
Smirnoff also introduced Lisbeth’s teenage niece Svala Hirak, who has her aunt’s brilliance as well as her independence and tech skills. She has a rare genetic condition that leaves her impervious to pain. In The Girl with Ice in Her Veins (the English paperback of which has just been released), Svala interns at a newspaper and gets involved in environmental activism. She wants to avenge the murder of her mother and is pursued by a white supremacist villain, Marcus Branco, for her ability to decode a drive containing millions in cryptocurrency.
At just the age of 13, Svala experiences the murder of her friend and the killing of her animal herd, as well as rape and betrayal. It is clear that the stage is being set for a next-gen heroine, since Lisbeth is portrayed as tired and fed up with the violent disruptions in her life.
Though Smirnoff describes her as having an “armour-plated exterior, a face almost devoid of expression. A shell that keeps the outside world at a distance in a robotic, barely human way. The contents of that shell can be glimpsed only when a rare crack opens.” She also points to a softening of her rigidly introverted character, romantic confusion, and even the rise of a maternal feeling towards Svala.
Judith Lorber writes in dissentmagazine.org, “Feminists might best describe Salander as a third-waver. She often decides how she will look for shock value—punk clothes, piercings, tattoos, and bizarrely cut and dyed hair. She has bisexual relationships, sex with friends in non-exclusive relationships, and recreational sex. As in third-wave “girlie culture”, she revels in sexual openness, outrageous gender self-presentations, and emotional coolness. But Salander never identifies as a feminist, nor does she use her (criminally acquired) wealth or her computer skills for any institutionalised activism. Third-wave feminists fight against restrictions on procreative choice and against racism, homophobia, and economic inequalities. By contrast, Salander’s personal, physical battle is against violent, sadistic men; her political battles, where she uses her investigative and hacking abilities, are against sex trafficking and international crime.”
What Lizbeth Salander did was alter the perception of what a heroine could be like if she dropped the gender trappings expected of women, mainly that of being attractive to men. And she ended up being attractive to both men and women precisely because of her courage and care-a-damn attitude.
Lorber comments, “You can read the Millennium Trilogy to identify with Salander’s identities and feel satisfaction at her successful physical and virtual revenges against misogynist and violent men. Lisbeth may not engage in feminist politics, but in the sense that she exemplifies bravery and defiance in the face of violence and evil and triumphs in a misogynist, patriarchal world, I think she is a feminist hero.” And her legacy is Svala, who may not have tattoos but has ice in her veins.
Deepa Gahlot is a Mumbai-based columnist, critic and author.