Back To Hedestad

See:

The Cleverest Kind Of Time Travel Story

Catching Up

Literary References To Time Machines 

Detection By Time Travel

 

I highlight these four previous posts because I have again reread:

 

"The key to the mystery was what it was that Harriet had seen in Hedestad. He would never find that out unless he could invent a time machine and stand behind her, looking over her shoulder."

-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), CHAPTER 16, p. 277.

 

In "Detection By Time Travel," I discussed how two very different time travelers, Poul Anderson's Manse Everard and Jack Havig, would investigate this mystery. But Larsson's passage raises interesting time travel questions in any case.

 

Blomkvist studies a photograph in which Harriet's friends happily watch a parade as it passes in front of them whereas Harriet instead frowns to one side at someone or something else. At what? If Blomkvist had a time machine, would he be able to stand behind Harriet and look over her shoulder? But the photograph shows that was not standing behind her! So how might he nevertheless insert himself into past events, as in the first post linked above?

 

He might:

 

crouch down behind Harriet and stand up straight immediately after the photograph has been taken;

 

disguise himself as one of the people standing behind her;

 

stand further back, out of sight of the camera, but able to see above the heads of the crowd.

 

Larsson's ingenious answer involves not a time machine but another camera. One of the photographs of the parade shows a woman behind Harriet taking a picture and Blomkvist tracks down that woman.