Stieg Larsson, My Friend

9

By the time Stieg reached the age of thirty-six, he could begin to call himself an author. Naturally, it never occurred to him to tell anybody else that, but the fact is that for the last fourteen years of his life he was involved in ten different book projects, usually as editor, but sometimes as author. The only non-fiction to appear under his own name is Överleva deadline – Handbok för hotade journalister (Surviving the Deadlines – A Handbook for Threatened Journalists), published in 2000 by the Swedish Journalists’ Union. The recurring theme in all his technical books is racism, and half of those are about the xenophobic Sweden Democrats.

Stieg’s first book was Extremhögern (The Extreme Right), a factual study which has become a classic. He wrote it in the spring of 1991 together with the journalist Anna-Lena Lodenius. It was an extremely ambitious survey, 370 pages in length, of organized racism: nothing like it had ever been published in Sweden before. The book comprises twenty chapters, divided into three parts. Geographically it stretches from Sweden to the U.S., and covers the time from the First World War to the present day.

Cooperation between the two authors was not always smooth. Their attitudes towards their subject matter were too different. Stieg refused to compromise and adopt a neutral approach to neo-Nazis, racists and xenophobes. He kept on using words like madmen, psychopaths, blockheads and idiots. While the writing was in progress, the warrior within him sprang into life once more, and he strode forth looking for trouble. Anna-Lena has told me how difficult it was to work with Stieg. She felt that what these individuals did was more than sufficient to show what kind of people they were, but Stieg wanted to use highly critical or disparaging language to describe intolerant persons and groups. It eventually became impossible for him and Anna-Lena to work together, and after writing the joint foreword to the second edition, their collaboration came to an end.

I have to say that I understand how Stieg could be difficult to work with while writing. Presumably the only way of completing the book was to allow him to use his own vocabulary. Mind you, now – eighteen years later – it strikes me that he and Anna-Lena Lodenius complemented each other perfectly. Stieg had greater insight into the racist movements and an impressively extensive network. There was no doubt about his expertise when it came to racism. The archive he compiled so laboriously was unique. On the other hand, Anna-Lena was in total command of the full range of journalistic skills.

The first part of Extremhögern is devoted to the racist and neo-Nazi movements that expanded in Sweden during the 1980s. Part Two, “The International Scene”, depicts the growth of racism in Italy, Great Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, Denmark and Norway, and of right-wing extremism in the rest of Europe. The third and final part deals with political violence and criminality linked to the Swedish far right.

The book contains several astonishing analyses of the growth of intolerance, especially in Europe. In a number of countries xenophobic parties have regularly been part of coalition governments.

Unfortunately it is difficult to get hold of a copy today. It never came out in paperback, although the two hardback editions combined sold seven thousand copies. I heard recently that The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest sold two hundred thousand copies in Spain on a single day, 18 July, 2009. There is a certain difference, of course.

Eight years passed before Stieg became involved in a new book project, Euro-Nat – Ett Europa för antisemiter, etniska krigare och dårfinkar – Sverigedemokraternas internationella nätverk (Euro-Nat – A Europe for Anti-Semites, Ethnic Warriors and Political Crackpots – The Sweden Democrats’ International Network), published in 1999. It is a slim and modest-looking volume with a black and blue cover depicting a map of Europe split down the middle. It looks a bit like a brochure from the local pharmacy. In it, however, Stieg provides a thorough analysis of all the neo-Nazi parties in Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic and Hungary.

His next book, Överleva deadline, the Handbook for Threatened Journalists, came as soon as the following year. It comprises four sections of sixty pages each and is devoted to those who have “the world’s most dangerous career”. He explains ways in which journalists might be threatened, and what help is available. Threats with political overtones, from criminal gangs, angry readers, psychopaths, madmen and opinionated bigots, are analysed in detail. The final part contains an account of journalists under threat all over the world. My copy has a dedication that I shall always treasure: “17 October, 2000. To an obvious source of inspiration in this context, my friend Kurdo”.

In his next book project Stieg collaborated with somebody he was very fond of, the journalist Mikael Ekman, who worked on Expo and for the television production company Strix. Together they wrote Sverigedemokraterna – Den nationella rörelsen (Sweden Democrats – The National Movement), which appeared in 2001. In the preface they establish that the aim of the book is to present “the history of the Sweden Democrats, the party’s ideological background and its practical activities”.

I often suggested to Stieg that he ought to write books by himself, but he wouldn’t listen. It was important for him to keep on finding new collaborators. I could never work out why this was: Stieg was easily annoyed and easily hurt, and was always keen on doing everything his own way.

When he was in the middle of work on a book, he almost became a man possessed. He seemed to have time for nothing else, breathed more heavily, was always in a hurry and smoked non-stop. Moreover, matters on which he and his co-author had agreed could change in the twinkling of an eye. He not infrequently got up on his high horse and rewrote a chapter written by a collaborator. I often saw Stieg change other people’s texts, both Expo articles and chapters of books. He meant well, but not everybody approved of him asserting himself in this way. I was told a number of times that he hadn’t informed the original authors of the changes he had made. That is a pity.

He would do this because he was convinced that the most important thing was for a text to be perfect, even if a few noses were put out of joint along the way. He told me several times that when it came to texts on racism or anti-racism, he was not prepared to give ground on anything.

Once again I have that vision of Stieg as a warrior on a warhorse. Every time a new book project was thrown into the balance, I would tell myself that things would turn out well in the end, the collaborators would become friends again once the book was finished and published. I was usually wrong, although Stieg did seem to become less difficult to work with as the years went by.

No doubt there are several answers to the question why Stieg was always looking for somebody to collaborate with instead of writing his books about intolerance on his own. It would not have been more difficult for him to do so, that is not the reason. Perhaps he wanted to signal to the racists that there were several people keeping an eye on them. Or maybe he wanted to help other writers to move into journalism investigating these disturbing social developments. Of course, it could also be that he was less sure of himself than I and others realized. Perhaps he needed others to push the projects along so that they really were completed. Even a lone wolf might be glad of company now and then.

The most likely explanation is that he was indifferent to seeing his name on the cover of a book. He really was totally lacking in any kind of narcissistic or exhibitionist tendencies. When a book was finished he preferred his co-author to be the one in the spotlight. Stieg avoided television chat shows like the plague.

Another reason for his keenness to find collaborators was that if he did so, he would lose less time and energy on any one project and so could soon turn his attention to something new. He also preferred to work with female journalists, because he thought there were not enough women taking part in the public debate about intolerance. Several times he suggested that he and I should write a book together, but I was never interested. I preferred to be his publisher because I had seen how complicated relations often became between him and his collaborators. I was happy not to become involved in confrontations like that.

But there was another reason. He had ghostwritten so many appeals for which I then received a lot of praise and attention. I didn’t have the heart to carry on stealing the limelight from Stieg. I preferred to have him receive the plaudits.

Instead, he turned his attention to another book, Debatten om hedersmord (The Honour Killings Debate), of which he was coeditor. It was published in January 2004. Only a few months later he started work on what would be his last work of non-fiction, an anthology on the Sweden Democrats, Sverigedemokraterna från insidan (The Sweden Democrats from the Inside), edited by Richard Slätt, who was Expo’s assistant editor-in-chief. It was no accident that this book appeared in the summer of 2004. That was the year the Sweden Democrats fielded many candidates in the E.U. elections. The book attracted a great deal of attention in xenophobic magazines and home pages.

The fact is that this was the first book in the Expo family for which Stieg didn’t take the initiative, though he spent a lot of time and enthusiasm extolling it. I think it was important to him that others were displaying an interest in following in his footsteps. Perhaps that was also the feeling that encouraged him to dare to devote more of his energy to his fictional writing. He never hid the fact that he thought it was more fun to create his own characters and invent exciting storylines. All the time I knew Stieg he cherished ambitions to become a writer. The fact that such a lot of people in my circles have always had that dream – which never became reality – meant that I didn’t listen 100 per cent to my friend. He first mentioned the fact that he was writing a novel in the autumn of 1997, and I think that was when he wrote the first chapter of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But I don’t know exactly when he started spending more time on his crime novels. What is clear, however, is that he wrote the best part of them between 2000 and 2003.

Stieg wanted to be a best-selling author. This desire was not just based on the fact that he wanted to earn money – he wanted to earn money in order to realize his dreams of continuing to publish Expo, and possibly founding an institution that would keep a constant eye on intolerant organizations. With the aid of sound financial backing, Stieg wanted to change the world. He would use the money he earned from his books to help other people. He had no interest in leading a life of luxury – he had no intention of exchanging his black rucksack for a briefcase!

It also suited his belligerent instincts to tackle big, complicated plots. He always said he found it relaxing to write prose. In the middle of the night he would sit in his office writing while everybody else was in bed. There, in the middle of the night, is where Stieg Larsson the crime novelist was created.

Stieg Larsson wrote specialized non-fiction books for thirteen years, all of which were well informed and played a major role in contemporary political debate among other things. In addition – not many people know this – Stieg had been mad on science fiction since his teens. No doubt the telescope he was presented with as a twelve-year-old contributed to his enthusiasm. It is possible to trace his fondness for the genre by following links to various Swedish libraries. In his twenties, he and Rune Forsgren were the editors of the S.F. magazine Fijagh, a stencilled publication produced in five issues between 1974 and 1976. Shortly afterwards he became involved in Fanac – Science fiction nyhetstidningen (Fanac – The Science Fiction Newspaper), which he coedited with Eva from 1978 to 1979. For some time in the 1980s he was chairman of the Scandinavian Association for Science Fiction.

If Stieg Larsson were still alive today he would be an international celebrity. Not for his non-fiction books, but for his crime novels. He would have been pestered day after day with questions like “When did you write the books?”, “How much of your own life, your character and your political commitment is in the books?”, “Who were the real-life models for Lisbeth Salander and Mikael Blomkvist?”

I can’t answer these questions as Stieg would have done. Obviously. But despite my lack of knowledge I might be able to cast a bit of light on some of them. I have no doubt that my friend would have been pleased with my honest attempt to fill in the gaps.

The first question that everybody asked when it became clear that he had written three crime novels, one after the other, intended to be published at one-year intervals, was, “When the hell did he make time to write them?” Everybody who knew Stieg was aware of how hard he worked. Those who weren’t were impressed even so, because the effort required to produce a finished book is so immense – how much more effort must have been involved to produce three doorstep-thick novels like the Millennium trilogy in such a short time?

Stieg himself acknowledged that he wrote quickly. “I write as a way of relaxing,” he would say every time he spoke about his novel-writing. In the summer of 2003 he started talking more about his work on the crime novels, but he never mentioned the fact that he had already sent the manuscripts to a publishing house. I first heard about that shortly before Christmas 2003, when he let slip in passing that he had sent the text of three novels to the publisher Piratförlag. The main reason he had chosen them was because the company was partly owned by Liza Marklund, who had made her name as a successful crime writer and then shown active support for Stieg in the debate on the oppression of women in 2002. It was a very long time before the publisher got round to responding to Stieg, however, and when they finally did so it was with a curt refusal. Stieg’s faith in Liza Marklund was undermined further when he invited her to write a chapter on the oppression of women for Debatten om hedersmord. She didn’t even reply to his invitation.

Stieg’s friend Robert Aschberg, who apart from being an established journalist was also Expo’s publisher, had read his books. He recommended them to Norstedts, whose editors, having read the first two novels at one sitting, promptly issued contracts for all three.

While this was happening, Stieg was turning up regularly at the office as usual. We collaborated on several articles. He didn’t have much to say about the books.

To be perfectly honest, his reticence made me wonder about their quality. I underestimated him.

Many readers of Stieg’s books wonder how much of himself is in the character of Mikael Blomkvist. There are some obvious similarities, of course. They are both journalists and work on magazines critical of contemporary society – even if I imagine that Stieg would have liked to be as good an investigative journalist as his main character.

Apart from that I don’t think there are many similarities. I think Stieg had much more in common with Lisbeth Salander, not least their lack of confidence in so-called authorities. And they both had a reluctance to talk about the past. Both of them preferred not to discuss their childhoods. Moreover, they seem to have had similarly bad eating habits. But it has to be said that Mikael Blomkvist didn’t appear to be all that interested in cooking either.

In this book I have been quite critical of Stieg as a journalist and reporter. But his weaknesses in that respect were more than made up for by his phenomenal ability to do research. In a way one could say that Lisbeth is Stieg as a researcher, albeit supercharged. She is cleverer and faster than he was – but after all, everything is easier in fiction than in real life.

It is hardly surprising that Stieg made Lisbeth a chain-smoker. It is not difficult to work out where that vice came from. The same applies to her as a drinker of awful coffee.

The Stockholm locations are pretty much accurate – the fact that “Millennium Walks” through the Söder district have been a big hit confirms this.

So it is possible to find reflections of Stieg’s everyday life in the novels. In a masterly way he depicted the things about which he was an authority. I think that what makes his books unique is the way in which he portrayed the violent exploitation of women and the forces at work behind that. Readers are aware that these stories are being told by somebody who knew what he was talking about.

Needless to say, there were others who served as models for characters in the books apart from himself. A lot of authors write about how their characters are amalgamations of friends and acquaintances. That is no doubt true in Stieg’s case as well. I would go so far as to say that a few of the Expo staff are clearly recognizable in the books. And of course, it is only reasonable that a large number of the characters and the inspiration behind the books come from the history and environment of Expo. To give a few examples: one of Expo’s first members of staff was a well-known, highly competent researcher and computer wizard; a very important person in the history of Expo was Jenny, who most probably inspired Lisbeth Salander’s appearance, clothes and tattoos; and Mikael Blomkvist’s endless philandering is very reminiscent of somebody – who happened also to be called Michael – who worked on Expo in the early days.

The fact that I am named and feature in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest was due to the fact that I was a friend who happened to have been born in Kurdistan. Stieg the internationalist had a warm regard for and interest in the world’s forty million stateless Kurds. As soon as he had an opportunity to do so, he called attention to Saddam Hussein’s oppression of the Kurds. Many Kurds had great respect for Stieg, thanks to his participation in their long struggle for human rights in Iran, Turkey and Syria.

The important role played by Grenada in The Girl Who Played with Fire has to do with Stieg’s long-standing and active interest in the little island in the West Indies. It is hardly a coincidence that Lisbeth Salander happens to go there on holiday. In real life Stieg visited the Marxist lawyer and prime minister Maurice Bishop several times. Stieg was also an important member of the Grenada Committee and was associated with its journal in Stockholm. Only a month or so before he died, he and I had dinner at the home of one of his friends from that country. Stieg was delighted to find that nearly all the committee were present.

“Bishop was the Caribbean Che Guevara. He was a friend of mine,” Stieg once told me over a glass of whisky. Stieg didn’t like it if anybody criticized Bishop, the friend of Cuba and in my view less than perfect – Bishop never allowed a general election and made his mistress Jacqueline Creft a government minister. Both Stieg and I were aware of a bitter fact with regard to Bishop’s fate: it was the prime minister’s own party that overthrew him and placed him under house arrest a few days before the U.S. invaded Grenada in 1983. Gigantic demonstrations with the slogan “Freedom for Bishop” took place spontaneously in the streets. The revolutionary Bishop, father of three, did not live to see his fortieth birthday. When he was murdered shortly after the invasion, Stieg lent his telephone directory for the capital city, Saint George, to the foreign news desk at T.T., so that they could contact people who could make authoritative statements.

Another question one might ask is why Stieg waited so long before submitting his manuscripts. Why did he complete three whole books before sending them to a publisher? I think the answer is simpler than one might think. Several threads were running parallel inside his head; some of them ended in one book, but others continued through a second one or even all three. He never regarded the novels as separate books but as part of a series. In order to keep control over that enormous amount of material, he probably needed to work on several manuscripts at the same time.

He was also extremely careful about his characters. He came to be very fond of them. Displaying exceptional discipline, he would develop the plot in various sections of several books at the same time, rather than finishing one book before starting the next one. Having finished a chapter of the first book in the series, he would immediately write a chapter in book two, and when that was finished he would do the same in book three. That is what he said he did, and I have no reason to doubt that is what happened. When Stieg was writing his books he was totally absorbed in what he was doing. He was renowned for his memory and for his ability to juggle several balls at the same time. The novels were a way for him to develop this technique to the utmost, keeping all the books inside his head.

How many books would Stieg have written if he had lived longer? I once heard him say quite specifically in a smoke-filled room at the Expo offices, “I have ten books in my head.”

Somebody else has claimed that Stieg was planning five books. But that is what I heard him say. Stieg had ten books in his head, all of them more or less complete. I am convinced that is precisely what the situation was.

One might also ask where he got all his plots from. Just as several of the characters were based on people in his immediate circle, it is likely that something similar applied to the plots. I suspect that few people have read as many articles and police reports as Stieg had. Tens of years of material were piled up high at home and in his office. The fact is that he read almost all of it very carefully.

During the time he was collecting this material, an average of thirty-six women a year were killed in Sweden by men who knew them well. If you are looking for a focus in Stieg’s writing, I would suggest it is the woman’s point of view. More or less everything he wrote depicts women being attacked for various reasons; women who are raped, women who are ill-treated and murdered because they challenge the patriarchy. It is this senseless violence that Stieg wanted to do something about and that he refused to accept.

One of the most pressing reasons why Stieg wrote the Millennium trilogy is undoubtedly something that happened in the late summer of 1969. The location was a camping site in Umeå. I have always avoided writing about what took place that day, but it is unavoidable in this context. It affected Stieg so deeply that it became a sombre leitmotif running through all three of his novels.

On that summer’s day, fifteen-year-old Stieg watched three friends rape a girl the same age as himself. Her screams were heart-rending, but he didn’t intervene. His loyalty to his friends was too strong. He was too young, too insecure. It was inevitable that he would realize afterwards that he could have acted and possibly prevented the rape.

Haunted by feelings of guilt, he contacted the girl a few days later. She lived not far from him and he knew her personally. When he begged her to forgive him for his cowardice and passivity, she told him bitterly that she could not accept his explanations. “I shall never forgive you,” she said, through gritted teeth.

That was one of the worst memories Stieg told me about. It was obvious, looking at him, that the girl’s voice still echoed in his ears, even after he had written three novels about vulnerable, violated and raped women. Presumably it was not his intention to be forgiven after writing the books, but when you read them it is possible to detect the driving force behind them.

As a result, the women in his novels have minds of their own and go their own ways. They fight! They resist! Just as he wished all women would do in the real world.

Stieg always distanced himself from people who used their positions of power to force weaker people to obey them. That is another underlying and key theme in all his writing: the fight for freedom.

There were two events that shocked Stieg deeply, as well as inspiring his writing. I think it helps with an understanding of Stieg’s books, not least The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, if you know the background.

In the mid-1980s Stieg got to know a European anti-racist with an invaluable knowledge of right-wing extremism in Europe. A few years later Stieg heard that this same man had beaten up his partner repeatedly. Stieg the feminist was faced with a difficult choice. Should he break off all contact with the man, despite the fact that he had begged forgiveness for what he had done? The question Stieg was forced to try to answer was whether it was possible to condemn the ill-treatment of women and yet continue to associate with a man who had abused a woman.

Stieg dropped the man. One of Stieg’s own weaknesses was that he found it difficult to be reconciled, to forgive and forget with regard to people with whom he had had conflicts.

“Up north, where I come from,” he used to say, “you never forgive anybody for anything.”

I sometimes understood his refusal to relent, but most often not. If several years have passed since an incident took place, and the person in question has apologized, why can’t you forgive and move on? But Stieg could never forgive anybody who failed to give him unconditional friendship, or those who exploited his own unconditional friendship. He wanted to be treated like he treated his friends. As we all know, that seldom happens.

On the other hand, I am convinced that what his friend had done inspired Stieg to put even more energy into his campaign against the oppression of women. In addition, the incident increased his understanding of how complex the whole matter is.

Some years later Stieg was affected by a similar problem, but this time it happened in his own backyard. The best researcher and computer wizard in Sweden had been working at Expo for some time. He mesmerized everybody, both on staff and further afield, with his talents, his capacity for work and his social competence. Stieg was most impressed by his enormous talent. Unfortunately their friendship didn’t last very long. It soon transpired that the young man had been reported to the police for assault. The news exploded like a bomb in the Expo editorial office. Shortly afterwards it became front-page news in the national media.

Worst of all for Stieg was being let down. This was a young man whose relationship with him had been something out of the ordinary. Somebody in the editorial office termed it a father-son relationship. So once again Stieg found himself in a situation where everything he stood for had been challenged by somebody close to him. What should he do? Forgive the younger man?

At the same time as Stieg was fighting this private battle, Expo was being pestered non-stop for comments and explanations. And of course the whole business became a long-running story in neo-Nazi, racist and xenophobic publications. In the end Stieg and Expo decided they had no choice but to sever all contact with the young researcher.

It is no exaggeration to say that this incident developed into a trauma for Stieg. He could never understand how he could have misjudged one of his closest colleagues so fundamentally. Never before had his strict principle been challenged in such a flagrant way – the motto that dictated everything else in his life: Respect everybody, regardless of their skin colour, gender, language, religion, ethnic background or sexual orientation. Always. In all circumstances. Unconditionally.

I am quite certain that this researcher is linked with Lisbeth Salander’s abilities. How do I know? The answer is obvious if one goes back several years. The researcher was forced to leave Expo in 1997. As I already mentioned, that was the year when Stieg wrote his first chapter about Lisbeth Salander. Stieg dealt with his sorrow and disappointment by creating a character similar to the researcher. I think my friend wanted to salve his own wounds by doing something that is not all that unusual: allowing a person to cause damage in the imagination rather than in the real world. One summer’s day in 2009 I bumped into the researcher from Expo. I shall never forget the first thing he said: “Stieg got his revenge in his own way. I am Lisbeth Salander as far as her computer expertise is concerned. And we are both slender and don’t weigh enough! But I shall always love Stieg. It’s an honour to be a model for Salander.”

Quite early on in his time at T.T. Stieg was made the new agency’s crime-fiction specialist. This wasn’t especially surprising. He had read practically everything that had been written in that genre for the past two hundred years. But he didn’t write much about it for T.T. Their archive contains three of his articles on the subject of crime novels for summer reading, two on crime novels to read at Christmas and two other similar pieces. Most of these recommend recently published books.

The list of titles makes it easy to see where Stieg got his inspiration. Names that keep cropping up include Erskine Childers, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, James Ellroy, John Buchan, John le Carré, Tom Clancy, Frederick Forsyth, Peter Høeg and Mark Frost. What is most obvious is that he preferred several female crime writers. His favourites were Minette Walters, Patricia Cornwell, Liza Cody, Sue Grafton, Val McDermid, Dorothy Sayers and Sara Paretsky.

He also interviewed two authors. The first was the sciencefiction writer Harlan Ellison, whose output included scripts for Alfred Hitchcock films, Batman, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek. Ellison and Stieg certainly had things in common. They both lived under constant threat of being murdered and they both became successful crime writers.

But it is the other interview which is most interesting. In September 1992, Stieg either met or conducted a telephone interview with the crime writer Elizabeth George. It is clear that she was a major source of inspiration for him; among other things he called her the queen of crime writing. It is not difficult to imagine that Stieg’s relationship with the genre would have been very different without books like A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, A Suitable Vengeance and Well-Schooled in Murder.

Stieg told me how pleased he was once his work with Norstedts got under way. One reader’s report was written by Lasse Bergström, now retired but formerly in charge of publishing. Bergström described the first volume as an orthodox crime novel with a self-contained mystery, the second as a police thriller and the third as a political thriller.

Stieg replied to Bergström’s comments in an email to his publisher, Eva Gedin:

Please tell Lasse Bergström that he’s obviously an intelligent and sensible person of impeccable taste, and that flattery will get him everywhere. Hmm. I don’t know, but I have the impression that you Norstedts people are seriously enthusiastic about my books. O.K., I know they are not bad, and of course I’m delighted to read such flattering judgements; but I hope that, for whatever reason, you are not holding back negative comments. I’m quite capable of coping with criticism. It’s most satisfying to see that Lasse noticed that I changed the genre from one novel to the next. He caught on to exactly what I was trying to do.

Being the inveterate reader of crime novels that he was, Stieg had decided to develop his characters over a series of books. But that wasn’t all. He also played with the genre by letting the stories unfold in different styles. Flair of that order of course demands a precise knowledge of what you are doing. It wouldn’t surprise me if this clever device is one of the reasons why readers the world over have been fascinated by the Millennium trilogy.

There is a rumour suggesting that Stieg wrote crime stories as early as the 1990s, but destroyed them. Is it true? Yes and no. The fact is that he did indeed write crime stories in the mid-90s – but they were not what later became The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. It was more a case of him writing in order to relax and have fun. The natural outcome was that he developed as a writer during that period. Alongside writing, the biggest pleasure in his life was doubtless reading. He devoured books, both nonfiction and crime novels. He was something of a literary omnivore. He read pulp literature as well as Dostoevsky, Zola and heavy Greek philosophers. Stieg liked mysteries, which is why he found it hard to lead a life lacking in crime fiction.

You could call those early stories practice crime novels. He told me they were utterly worthless. I find that hard to believe, even if they were far less accomplished than the books he eventually published. But we will never know the truth.

On the other hand, the determination with which he destroyed all his earlier attempts shows that he was aware that he had now accomplished something worthwhile. I don’t think success would have come as a complete surprise to him. In any case, he saw enough of the attention his first crime novel attracted before it was published to suspect that something major was about to happen. Not many authors have three books accepted, discover that a “buzz” has developed around them well before the first one is published, and even take part in negotiations for film contracts and foreign rights.

So far the Millennium trilogy has earned over a million kronor. Stieg Larsson has become a class-A celebrity. People beg me to sign his books in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris – simply because I was one of his friends! The films based on his books are breaking records all over Europe. Reporters travel from as far away as Argentina to Stockholm in order to write about Stieg.

The question is how he would have reacted to the enormous attention he and his books have attracted.

I have thousands of examples of how Stieg shied away from publicity, especially the kind that placed him in the spotlight. He always preferred to let somebody else do that, but he was a realistic person in all circumstances. I am convinced he would have agreed to take part in television programmes and given interviews – but only the ones he really wanted to do. Most requests would certainly have been turned down. I’m sure he would have preferred to feature in small underground magazines rather than on the main television channels and in daily newspapers. That’s simply the kind of person he was.

I don’t think he would have changed much in his way of life as a result of the enormous income his books have produced. He would have continued to smoke his cigarettes, eat badly, sleep hardly at all and write more books. Above all else he would have continued to keep a very sharp eye on intolerant groups and individuals. What else he would have spent his fortune on I can’t say – that would be pure speculation, and I would rather avoid engaging in it.

Stieg’s success has also changed my life. I am often invited to lecture about him throughout Europe. I am interviewed more or less every day by journalists from all over the world, and am invited to attend Stieg’s film premières on every corner of the Continent. Sometimes I attend these events, but at other times I turn them down. It feels almost as if, in a most bizarre fashion, I have become an ambassador for Stieg. But I do it willingly and must admit that I feel very happy to have him in my orbit in this way. It’s not how I would have wanted things to turn out. I would have preferred to continue sitting in a basement office with my friend, and to carry on producing a journal with a less than adequate budget. But I can’t turn the clock back. Stieg has left my life as a living person. Every time I meet somebody who has become a little happier after having read one of his novels, though, I also become a little happier. In that way he is always present. And it is a presence full of memories that nobody can take away from me.