The Swedish author Stieg Larsson could be infuriating, self-destructive even, according to colleagues. It was typically inconsiderate of him to die before his crime novel The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo became an international publishing sensation. His absence will be keenly felt at this week’s extravagant launch of his eagerly awaited third book, which is expected to scale even dizzier heights.
On the other hand, Larsson’s premature death in 2004 at the age of 50 and the conspiracy theories it engendered have been a boon to his Millennium series, helping to push the world sales of the first two books beyond 15m. Was he murdered by neo-Nazis or other far-right groups from whom he had received death threats during his day job as a crusading journalist?
Larsson’s posthumous success has also owed something to an unseemly scramble over his legacy. His failure to leave a valid will has pitted Eva Gabrielsson, his companion of 30 years, in a bitter fight with relatives who have inherited his £11m estate. The possible existence of a fourth, uncompleted, novel adds mystery to the tragic back story.
However, fans and many critics are united in believing that it is the brilliance of Larsson’s gripping tales about the dark side of Sweden that led to him being hailed last year as the world’s second bestselling author, behind the Afghani-American writer Khaled Hosseini (A Thousand Splendid Suns).
Two memorable protagonists are teamed in his Millennium trilogy — Mikael Blomkvist, like Larsson a journalist on an investigative magazine, and Lisbeth Salander, a quirky and dangerous young computer hacker with a history of abuse. Reviewers have described Salander as the most original character in crime fiction since Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley — a mixture of Lara Croft and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
“He was a difficult man, but brilliant and multi-faceted,” said Eva Gedin, of Norstedts, his Swedish publisher. “He could be infuriating and he wasn’t afraid of making enemies. He was a surprisingly quiet, shy person, except in one area. He was boastful about himself only in respect of his amazing work ethic.”
In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Salander joins Blomkvist in solving the disappearance of a tycoon’s niece, the suspected victim of a serial killer consumed by a hatred of women. Larsson’s second book, which topped the hardback fiction charts in Britain, focused on a sex trafficking case.
His latest, the clunkily titled The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, concerns the threat posed by right-wing elements in Sweden’s security service. The book is being published amid the kind of British security usually reserved for a new Harry Potter. Reviewing it in today’s Sunday Times, Joan Smith writes that “it confirms Larsson as one of the great talents of contemporary crime fiction”.
Larsson is above all a good storyteller, maintaining a fast pace while keeping a lot of plotlines spinning. A step ahead of the forensic pathology genre, he writes about computer hacking in an engaging and up-to-the-minute manner. The most striking aspect of his work, according to Smith, is his obsession with women-hating: “The Swedish title of his first book was Men who Hate Women. The three novels taken together are a cry of rage against the sexual abuse of women and girls.”
Sweden’s Ikea once introduced us to flatpack bookcases; now the country is supplying crime writers to fill them with. Before Larsson came along we were seduced by Henning Mankell, creator of the dysfunctional detective Kurt Wallander, portrayed in a BBC television series by Kenneth Branagh. Now names such as Kjell Eriksson, Ake Edwardson and Hakan Nesser are taking up shelf space.
Have our home-grown crime writers become so formulaic and predictable that we are turning to Nordic fare? Smith believes not: “The bestselling crime novels in this country are still PD James, Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin and Philip Kerr. I think there is still resistance to novels published in another language and which have a lot of foreign names in them.”
Larsson was influenced by Anglo-Saxon fiction, with a preference for the works of Elizabeth George, Minette Walters and Sara Paretsky. However, his books were turned down by British publishers until they found favour with Christopher MacLehose, who bought the novels for Quercus, a small London publishing house. He found them irresistible. It was MacLehose who launched the careers of Mankell and Peter Hoeg, the Danish author of Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.
MacLehose lends no credence to rumours that Larsson was murdered: “He smoked over 60 cigarettes a day and was a classic workaholic. To say that he didn’t give his body a chance almost understates the case. And like many driven men, he tended not to listen to the counsel of those around him — he was warned again and again that he should look after himself.”
Larsson, with his round glasses, chubby features and springy thatch of hair, died from a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs to his office because the lift did not work.Piquantly, his brother Joakim had reportedly told him that he should make a legal will. Larsson’s failure to do so lit the fuse of a rancorous family squabble.
He was born into an impoverished family in the village of Skelleftehamn in northern Sweden on August 15, 1954. His father, Erland, had such difficulty in coping that Larsson was raised by his grandparents. Severin Bostrom, his grandfather, had been imprisoned during the second world war for his anti-Nazi views and his fierce democratic ideals helped to shape Larsson’s character.
However, when Larsson was nine years old, his grandfather died and he moved back to live with his parents and Joakim. Given a typewriter for his 12th birthday, he spent most nights writing, keeping his family awake with its staccato sound. At 18 he met Gabrielsson at a rally against the Vietnam war and they moved in together two years later.
By then he had completed military service and travelled through Africa as a backpacker, obliged to work as a dishwasher and sell his clothes to afford a ticket home from Algeria.
Resolved to devote his life to fighting intolerance, he became the Scandinavian correspondent of Searchlight, the anti-fascist and anti-racist magazine. He was a revolutionary socialist who for a spell edited Fjarde Internationalen, the Swedish journal of the Trotskyist Fourth International. In 1995, at the height of neo-Nazi related violence in Sweden, he helped to establish the Expo Foundation, aimed at countering the growth of the extreme right. He also edited Expo magazine, the target of a hate campaign.
Larsson became a man of influence, lecturing on the tactics of far-right groups at Scotland Yard, in London, as well as in France and Germany. He began thinking about writing detective novels in the early 1990s and after making a detailed synopsis for 10 books, he started writing in 1997. Not until 2003, when he had finished the first two and had the third one under way, did he contact publishers.
Years of death threats had persuaded Larsson and Gabrielsson to take special precautions: they avoided appearing together in public and if they met up in a restaurant or bar they would arrange things so that each was looking at the opposite door.
According to Gabrielsson, the fear of her being assassinated was the reason he did not marry her: in Sweden, married couples must make their address public which posed a security risk. It meant that when Larsson died intestate, his estate went to his father and brother, from whom he had been allegedly estranged. “Stieg distanced himself from them, like he did with others who were different from him,” Gabrielsson told The Sunday Times earlier this year.
Erland and Joakim also inherited half of the couple’s Stockholm flat. In 2005 they offered it to her in exchange for Larsson’s laptop computer, which Gabrielsson claimed contained an unfinished sequel to the Millennium trilogy. “My legal adviser called it extortion,” she said. “I refused to hand over the computer.” A website, SupportEva.com, is raising donations for her campaign to change the inheritance law.
The Larssons accused her of ignoring invitations to take part in important decisions concerning his work, contending that she was “blocked in her anger”. They claimed to be “inundated” with requests for permission to make plays and cartoon strips out of Millennium, also citing interest by Quentin Tarantino and Brad Pitt in buying the rights to remake Swedish films of Larsson’s work.
Gabrielsson has dismissed the likelihood of Larsson’s fourth book being published, comparing it to an uncompleted Picasso. But stranger things have happened. The next literary event of the year is a “new” book by a dead author — Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished The Original of Laura.
Swedish sting in the tale, Joan Smith’s review, Books, Culture, page 49
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