STIEG LARSSON BUZZING ALONG

I am approaching the final chapters of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets' Nest and reading slower and slower as I really don't want to part company with Lisbeth Salander.

I am going through an experience that is similar to those childhood summer holidays where at the start the days seem to go on for ever, but as the end approaches every day rushes past quickly, and before you know it your precious holiday is over.

Reg Keeland, Larsson's excellent translator from the original Swedish, was right when he told me the books get better and better. Hornets' Nest fairly buzzes along in comparison with the fairly pedestrian first book in the trilogy, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

Stieg Larsson's death was tragic, made more so by the unfortunate family dispute that has followed, and the loss of a writer who was going to produce a lot more thought provoking crime fiction if he had lived.

Many years ago I read five of the ten books in the great Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo 'Story of a Crime' series. Later I spent weeks searching for the missing books in the series eventually finding two more in a bookshop in Totnes, and only when the Harper Perennial series was published recently did I get the complete series on my bookshelf.

But I still have not read two of the books Murder at the Savoy, and The Abominable Man, because I want to delight in the anticipatory pleasure of reading them for a little bit longer.

Does anyone else do this, or am I alone in this idiosyncrasy?