I’ll try to leave author intent out of it — though your reading sounds about right. I didn’t know until afterward that Larsson himself was a sort of crusading editor type.

Had the book’s moral lesson been something other than “violence against women is evil,” I might have had an easier time with a two-dimensional protagonist in Mikael. After all, it’s a genre novel and he’s basically a genre convention. But I did have a problem with that. I was especially bummed out that Lisbeth fell in love with him for what seems like no particular reason at the end — then again I haven’t read the sequels. Her ‘redemption” of throwing away an Elvis poster was kind of weak.

Mikael lacked, unfortunately, the self-destructive qualities that you want in your detective character whether that’s Sherlock Holmes’ drug addiction or Philip Marlowe’s drinking problems. Oh well.

I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too far into it, but it felt like Larsson was kind of getting his teenage rocks off through Mikael’s conquests.