SINGULAR BEGINNINGS Pippi first appeared in 1945, living all alone except for a horse (on the porch) and a monkey (usually on her shoulder). Her mother is dead. Pippi eats pancakes, drinks lots of coffee — sometimes while up in a tree — and goes to school when she feels so moved. Though courageous and loyal, probably not a role model. In the first Larsson book, Lisbeth’s mother is in a nursing home, her father has disappeared and she’s on her own. She eats Billy’s Pan Pizza, drinks a lot of coffee — sometimes while hacking computers — was bullied at school and never finished. Also courageous and loyal, but definitely not a role model.

Image Pippi Longstocking Credit... Pressens Bild/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

ODD LOOKS Neither should be judged at first glance. This is how Pippi appeared to her young neighbors: “Her hair, the color of a carrot, was braided in two tight braids that stuck straight out.” Her dress was “rather unusual.” In part this was because “on her long thin legs she wore a pair of long stockings, one brown and the other black.” Lisbeth is tattooed and nose-ringed, with inky hair. Though in her mid-20s, she is a “doll-like” woman, with “delicate limbs, small hands and hardly any hips,” looking as if she “had just emerged from a weeklong orgy with a gang of hard rockers.”

AWESOME SKILLS Pippi “was so very strong that in the whole wide world there was not a single police officer as strong as she. Why, she could lift a whole horse if she wanted to! And she wanted to.” Lisbeth is pretty strong herself. In one of her defining confrontations, she is pitted against two creepy bikers. “The situation was ridiculous. There stood a skinny girl who could fit into his breast pocket getting cheeky with two fully grown men.” Lisbeth employs some Mace and a pistol, and then “the toe of her boot shot up with full force and was transformed into kinetic energy in his crotch with a pressure of about 1,700 pounds per square inch.”

Pippi owns a gun and a sword but usually administers her justice by throwing interlopers up in the air, or pulling a threatening bull by the tail or grabbing a menacing shark with both hands and lifting it out of the water — leaving it “surprised and ill at ease.” Policemen who ask her to be “a good girl” get grabbed by their belts and “carried down the garden path, out through the gate, and onto the street.”

Mr. Larsson, a journalist, died in 2004, before his first Millennium book made it to the bookstores. But in delivering his manuscript to his publisher, he said: “My point of departure was what Pippi Longstocking would be like as an adult. Would she be called a sociopath because she looked upon society in a different way and has no social competence?”