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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo arrives with a reputation that precedes it by continents and languages, and for the most part it earns that reputation, though not always in the ways its cover quotes might suggest. Stieg Larsson's debut is a peculiar hybrid - part locked-room mystery in the Agatha Christie tradition, part investigative-journalism procedural, part furious tract on institutional misogyny in a country marketed to the world as a model of enlightened social democracy. The fact that it holds these competing registers together at all is impressive. The fact that it does so while also functioning as a 600-page page-turner is something closer to remarkable.

The setup is a slow burn. Disgraced financial journalist Mikael Blomkvist, freshly convicted of libel, is summoned to a remote island by an elderly industrialist who wants him to solve the 40-year-old disappearance of a teenage relative. Running parallel is Lisbeth Salander, the pierced, tattooed, brilliantly antisocial investigator whose name sits in the title. Their eventual convergence is the engine of the book, and it is worth the wait, though readers should be warned that the wait is real. The first 200 pages are dense with Vanger family trees, corporate manoeuvring, and exhaustive domestic detail. The prose is functional rather than beautiful, clipped and at times almost catalogue-like in its accumulation of brand names, meal contents, and IKEA inventories. Some of this is translation, some of it is simply Larsson, who wrote as a journalist rather than a stylist.

And yet the plainness works. There is a clinical, authoritative quality to the writing that makes the outlandish feel plausible. When the mystery finally engages, the effect is genuinely gripping - logical, twisty, thoroughly worked through, the kind of puzzle that rewards the patience it demands. The revelation at its centre is dark even by the standards of Scandinavian crime fiction, and Larsson does not flinch from its implications. Two extended sequences of sexual violence are among the most difficult passages in mainstream thriller writing of the past twenty years. Whether they are essential or exploitative is a question the book forces on every reader, and honest answers go both ways.

Salander is the reason the novel has lasted, and she deserves to. She is a genuinely original creation - competent, vengeful, emotionally opaque, morally coherent on her own strange terms - and she anchors a book that might otherwise sag under the weight of its own ambitions. Blomkvist, by contrast, is less persuasive. His improbable magnetism to every woman in his orbit has drawn quiet eye-rolls from many readers, and the suspicion that he is a lightly fictionalised version of his author is hard to shake.

The ending overstays its welcome by a solid fifty pages, tying up a financial subplot long after the main mystery has closed. Even so, the book lingers. It is uneven, occasionally amateurish, sometimes exhausting, and still one of the most distinctive thrillers of its era. A flawed, furious, unforgettable debut.