AuthorTemplate

Backstory-1000
Character Development-53
Scene-260
Exposition-5851
Foreshadowing-90
Symbolism-46


Back Story-Mikael Blomkvist at the age of 23 had just began his first journalist job. He was fortunate to discover the hiding place of 4 bank robbers. This publicity launched him into his career faster than most.
Mikael printed an expose on Hans-Erik Wennerstrom and his so called arms deal. He was called to report his sources and then was denounced in court. The story starts with his leaving the court after being found guilty of slander. He will have to pay a fine and spend some time in jail

Character Development- The judgement was a trifle, relatively speaking. A lightweight crime. Not armed robbery, murder, or rape after all. From a financial point of view, however, it was serious - Millennium was not a flagship of the media world with unlimited resources, the magazine barely broke even - but the judgement did not spell catastrophe. The problem was that Blomkvist was one of Millennium's part owners, and at the same time, idiotically enough, he was both a writer and the magazine's publisher. The damages of 150,000 kronor he would pay himself, although that would just about wipe out his savings. The magazine would take care of the court costs. With prudent budgeting it would work out.


Scene Setting-
As he sat there in the boat, Blomkvist filled his glass with Reimersholms brandy and leaned back, trying to remember what little he knew about Wennerstrom. Born up in Norrland, where in the seventies he set up an investment company. He made money and moved to Stockholm, and there his career took off in the eighties. He created Wennerstrom-gruppen, the Wennerstrom Group, when they set up offices in London and New York and the company started to get mentioned in the same articles as Beijer. He traded stock and options and liked to make quick deals, and he emerged in the celebrity press as one of Sweden's numerous billionaires with a city home on Strandvagen, a fabulous summer villa on the island of Varmdo, and an eighty-two-foot motor yacht that he bought from a bankrupt former tennis star. He was a bean counter, naturally, but the eighties was the decade of the bean counters and property speculators, and Wennerstrom had not made a significantly big splash. On the contrary, he had remained something of a man in the shadows among his peers. He lacked Jan Stenbeck's flamboyance and did not spread himself all over the tabloids like Percy Barnevik. He said goodbye to real estate and instead made massive investments in the former Eastern Bloc.

Exposition- "Minos opened in the autumn of 1992. There were at most fifteen employees, the majority of them old women. Their pay was around one hundred fifty kronor a month. At first there were no machines, so the workforce spent their time cleaning up the place. In early October three cardboard box machines arrived from Portugal. They were old and completely obsolete. The scrap value couldn't have been more than a few thousand kronor. The machines did work, but they kept breaking down. Naturally there were no spare parts, so Minos suffered endless stoppages."
      Look at it this way: Wennerstrom got sixty million kronor. He paid back six mil, but only after three years. The real cost of Minos didn't come to more than two million. The interest alone on sixty million for three years, that's quite a bit. Depending on how he invested the money, he might have doubled the AIA money, or maybe grown it ten times over. Then we're no longer talking about cat shit. Skal, by the way."
"This is starting to sound like a story," Blomkvist said. "What did they make at Minos?"
"I ran the numbers. The total rent must have been around 15,000 kronor for two years. Wages may have amounted to 150,000 SEK at most - and I'm being generous here. Cost of machines and cost of freight... a van to deliver the egg cartons... I'm guessing 250,000. Add fees for permits, a little travelling back and forth - apparently one person from Sweden did visit the site a few times. It looks as though the whole operation ran for under two million. One day in the summer of 1993 the foreman came down to the factory and said it was shut down, and a while later a Hungarian lorry appeared and carried off the machinery. Bye-bye, Minos."

All right, every speculator had cash-flow problems. Look at it this way: Wennerstrom got sixty million kronor. He paid back six mil, but only after three years. The real cost of Minos didn't come to more than two million. The interest alone on sixty million for three years, that's quite a bit. Depending on how he invested the money, he might have doubled the AIA money, or maybe grown it ten times over. Then we're no longer talking about cat shit. Skal, by the way."


Foreshadowing- But that he might lose the apartment was nothing beside the fact that professionally he had received a real smack in the nose. It would take a long time to repair the damage - if indeed it could ever be repaired.
What hurt most was the humiliation. He had held all the trumps and yet he had lost to a semi-gangster in an Armani suit. A despicable stock-market speculator. A yuppie with a celebrity lawyer who sneered his way through the whole trial.
“How in God's name had things gone so wrong?”

Symbolism- Blomkvist had not thought much of the proposal, but he came around when promised a few days of relaxation in the archipelago with good food and pleasant company. These promises came to naught, and the expedition turned into more of a disaster than he could have imagined.