STIEG LARSSON | INTERNATIONAL BEST-SELLING CRIME WRITER ‘TRAINED ERITREAN GUERRILLAS’

Stieg in the tale

IT WAS ONLY when comments from friends and colleagues that they were either “doing the Millennium” or “I had to stay up and finish Millennium” got to double figures that I realised something was up and maybe I was missing important stuff. It was a bit like those teenage years when schoolfriends were re-reading Lord Of the Rings and I had barely finished The Hobbit.
The ever-growing window displays of books that in English usually begin with the words “The Girl...” went over my head. My thinking was that these are places usually reserved for celebrity autobiographies, self-help guides or the latest book club over-hyped drivel.
Okay, confession time... Yes, I did overlook these books solely because they began with the words “The Girl”. And I have learnt a valuable lesson.
High street shop windows were not the place to find hard-hitting, left-wing, radical revolutionary texts. And even if there was such a thing, would the masses really buy this stuff? Well there was. And they would. By early 2010, there were 27million copies in print, according to The New York Times. It was 40million, the Guardian said. Published in 41 states, the author’s website declared.
Stieg Larsson is one of the world’s most popular authors, with every aspect of his personal life open to public discussion. Stieg’s heroes take on corruption and wrong doing in every strata of Swedish society, from the streets to the higher echelons and elites.
His heroine, Elisabeth Sanders, is usually described as a ‘multiple body-piercing, tattooed, bisexual computer hacker’. Her companion in the Millennium trilogy is Mikael Blomkvist, a journalist in a magazine called Millennium.
Their adventures are the subject matter of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. In Swedish, the first book is titled Men Who Hate Women.
Larsson had planned to write ten books in the series and there are rumours that there could be a fourth and even fifth text imminent but (and, yes, I was probably the last to know)... Stieg is dead.
His sudden death from heart failure in 2004, caused by climbing seven flights of stairs to the offices of Expo, a foundation co-started by Larsson, has not been without comment either.
Expo was created “with the aim of studying and mapping anti-democratic, right-wing extremist and racist tendencies in society”. Run on a non-profit basis, Expo aims to “safeguard democracy and freedom of speech against racist, right-wing extremist, anti-Semitic and totalitarian tendencies throughout society”. (You can have a look at the site by going to www.expo.se)
Larsson had started writing the books during his holidays and free time away from the day job exposing right-wing extremism and racism in Sweden, which came with many challenges, the death threats and intimidation just being part of it. They also had to fund-raise, write and get their magazine printed as an ongoing business.
His idea was that income from the first three books would create a pension fund for himself and partner Eva Gabrielsson while the money from the remaining seven would be given to charity.
There has been significant media coverage of the fall-out between Gabrielsson and Larsson’s surviving family of his father Erland, and younger brother Joakim. Stieg didn’t leave a will and so Erland and Joakim got everything, even half of the flat that Eva lived in.
What is most interesting is that this is not a dispute about money. The Larssons are not living an extravagant life: no new cars or holiday homes. They have given significant funding to Expo. The issue is about control of Stieg’s legacy, especially as one of the books will now be made into a Hollywood film. Swedish versions have already been made.
But the Larsson legacy is still under scrutiny, beginning with some claims that he didn’t write the books, did Eva help, and ending with conspiracy theories about how he died. The fact that his death coincided with the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when in 1938 Nazi pogroms across Germany and Austria lead to the murders of 91 Jews and tens of thousands taken to concentration camps, is just one propellant for these.
Another chapter has just been added to the Larsson myth. It was known that he had completed national military service, like many other Swedes, and that he had travelled to Eritrea in the 1970s. However, The Guardian newspaper in London has claimed that Larsson “taught Eritrean women to fire grenades”. The women “were part of a Marxist liberation group fighting for the country’s independence from Ethiopia”.
The claim comes in Afterword, a new book by John Henri Holmberg, a friend of the writer. Holmberg writes:
“Stieg was a revolutionary socialist and he believed in a better life and equality for all... The fact there was crushing poverty in Africa appalled him.”
So maybe it is time to borrow a copy and settle down to read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo - but will the fiction match the reality?