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The ''Millennium'' series is a series of best-selling and award-winning Swedish crime novels, created by Stieg Larsson. The two primary characters in the saga are Lisbeth Salander, a woman in her twenties with a photographic memory and poor social skills, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist and publisher of a magazine called ''Millennium''. Larsson planned the series as having ten installments, but due to his sudden death in 2004, only three were completed and published. The first,''The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo'' (''Män som hatar kvinnor'', literally, ''Men Who Hate Women'') in 2005, the second, ''The Girl Who Played with Fire'' (''Flickan som lekte med elden'', literally, ''The Girl Who Played with Fire''), in 2006 and the third, ''The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest'' (''Luftslottet som sprängdes'', literally, ''The Air Castle that was Blown Up'') in 2007. The series was originally printed in Swedish by Norstedts Förlag, with English editions by Quercus in the United Kingdom and Alfred A. Knopf in the United States. The books have since been published by many publishers in fifty countries. As of March 2015, 80 million copies of the three books have been sold worldwide. A fourth book, ''The Girl in the Spider's Web'', commissioned by the publisher Norstedts to continue the series, was published in August 2015. The book is based on Larsson's characters and was written by the Swedish author and crime journalist David Lagercrantz. ==Origins== After his death, many of Larsson's friends said the character of Lisbeth Salander was created out of an incident in which Larsson, then a teenager, witnessed three of his friends gang-raping an acquaintance of his named Lisbeth, and did nothing to stop it. Days later, wracked with guilt, he begged her forgiveness — which she refused. The incident, he said, haunted him for years afterward, and in part moved him to create a character with her name who was also a rape survivor. The veracity of this story has since been questioned, after a colleague from ''Expo'' magazine reported to ''Rolling Stone'' that Larsson had told him that he had heard the story secondhand and retold it as his own. In the only interview he ever did about the series, Larsson stated that he based the character on what he imagined Pippi Longstocking might have been like as an adult.〔 Another source of inspiration was Larsson's niece, Therese. A rebellious teenager, she often wore black clothing and makeup and told him several times that she wanted to get a tattoo of a dragon. The author often emailed Therese while writing the novels to ask her about her life and how she would react in certain situations.〔 Larsson's friend and colleague Kurdo Baksi believes the author was also influenced by two murders in 2001 and 2002: Melissa Nordell, a model killed by her boyfriend, and Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish-Kurdish woman killed by her father.〔 Both women were killed at the hands of men or as victims of honor crime. To Larsson, there was no difference, and the "systematic violence" against women highly affected and inspired him to take action against these crimes through his writing. Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson's longtime partner, wrote that "the trilogy allowed Stieg to denounce everyone he loathed for their cowardice, their irresponsibility, and their opportunism: couch-potato activists, sunny-day warriors, fair-weather skippers who pick and choose their causes; false friends who used him to advance their own careers; unscrupulous company heads and shareholders who wrangle themselves huge bonuses.... Seen in this light, Stieg couldn't have had any better therapy for what ailed his soul than writing his novels."〔Gabrielsson, Eva, Marie-Françoise Colombani, and Linda Coverdale. "There Are Things I Want You to Know" about Stieg Larsson and Me. New York: Seven Stories, 2011.〕 People who knew Larsson, such as Baksi and Anders Hellberg, a colleague of Larsson's in the 1970s and 1980s, were surprised that he wrote the novels. Hellberg went so far as to suspect that Larsson is not the sole author of the series, reasoning that Larsson was simply not a good enough writer. Gabrielsson has been named as the most likely candidate, due to her chosen wording during at least one interview that seemed to imply co-authorship. Although she later claimed she had been misquoted.〔 In 2011 Gabrielsson expressed anger at such accusations and clarified; "The actual writing, the craftsmanship, was Stieg's. But the content is a different matter. There are a lot of my thoughts, ideas and work in there." As an example she said he used her unfinished book about architect Per Olof Hallman to research locations for the Millennium series and that the two of them physically checked places together and discussed where the characters would live. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Millennium series」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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