Thursday 2 August 2018

Stockholm, London And Luna





See London And Luna.

Stieg Larsson's Mikael Blomkvist:

walked briskly from the Academic bookshop to the side entrance of the N.K. department store;

went straight through the bustling store and out its main entrance;

turned off both his mobiles (?);

walked through the Galleria to Gustav Adolfs Torg;

passed parliament;

entered Gamla Stan;

took a zigzag route through narrow streets to his destination.

Thus, Blomkvist mimics the antics of John le Carre's Alec Leamas in London and Poul Anderson's David Falkayn on Luna. As I said in "London And Luna," Frederick Forsyth somewhere shows us how a trained team could easily follow all three. However, the clandestine "Section" spying on Blomkvist is very small and would not be able to deploy a surveillance team around the center of Stockholm.

I reread Larsson later in the evening, when I have finished blogging, and of course find parallels. Today we are in the best of literary company: Larsson, le Carre, Anderson and Forsyth.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And Blomkvist turned off both of his cell phones so he could not be tracked using them. Albeit, I agree that a team of trained professionals could have tracked him and David Falkayn.

When it comes to cloak and dagger novels, I still hope you will look up sometime William F. Buckley's spy novels SAVING THE QUEEN and STAINED GLASS, which I consider among the best of his books, both fiction and non fiction.

Sean