Stieg Larsson, My Friend

Every weekday at 1.30 he would turn up at the editorial office of either Expo or Svartvitt. He would bring a litre of milk for coffee, take a seat and talk before returning to his day job at T.T. He was back in the editorial office by 4.00. He told me that he often went to bed at about 5.00 in the morning. The last thing he always did was to switch off his mobile, which he both loved and hated.

We could see that he was pushing himself to the limit. His bloodshot eyes often betrayed his exhaustion. But I also remember the energy he radiated. Our collaboration was going well; we could look ahead with confidence and spent hours analysing the current state of democracy, or the latest move by some person or organization we both hated.

Then the day dawned when Stieg’s book on Euro-Nat arrived from the printer’s. Two weeks later we celebrated the publication of the first issue of the combined Svartvitt and Expo journals in my office. It was a memorable day. A lot of people called it a mad project. Perhaps they were right. But no matter; it was an act of madness that I shall never regret.

I remember clearly Stieg’s pride when we sat in the editorial office with the new issue in our hands. How his voice boomed: “It’s our obligation, damn it, to comment on and analyse and take the pulse of the new Sweden.”

And then, when somebody produced a camera, how he displayed great agility in slipping off to one side and managing to avoid being in the picture. He was happy to take on work and share praise with others. But he made sure he didn’t appear in any photographs if at all possible.

I sometimes wonder if Stieg had the same working habits when he was younger. If he only had one gear: full steam ahead. Or whether the frenzy gathered pace later in his life. I would have loved to have seen him as an eighteen-year-old, doing his project on racism and political extremism. That assignment must have awakened something extraordinary in his frail teenage body. Perhaps that was a starting point for all that he came to stand for in adulthood as a journalist, author and lecturer.

“Kill your darlings,” I used to tell Stieg when he was having trouble restricting himself. I often thought he was rather too fond of his own texts, and also those of others. It made no difference if it was a news article, a leaflet, a preface, a press release, a cultural article, a polemical essay or a chapter in a textbook.

I succeeded in becoming one of the very few people who were allowed to edit his texts ruthlessly. Not without him protesting loudly, of course. Quite early on, I hit upon a trick that seemed to work: cut half the text but allow the first four or five hundred words to stand unchanged, and find an appropriate way of summing up as the last sentence but one.

I don’t suppose I shall ever see again anything like the driving force generated by Stieg when he was writing. I have never come across anybody who could write so easily and quickly the draft of a press release, a polemical article or a petition. And he seemed to be so happy as he did it. He could be hunched over and dog-tired, but when asked to write a press release, his whole body would straighten and his eyes light up.

Once as we were sitting in the Cafe Latte, he talked about his travels to Africa.

“Did you know I suffered from malaria while I was out there?”

“I had no idea.”

He shrugged, and we spoke no more about it. But shortly afterwards we touched on the situation in Algeria.

“I once had a job there as a dishwasher. That was after a failed trip and I’d run out of money.”

“You’ve done quite a lot of travelling.”

“So have you,” he said.

“That’s true, that’s one thing we have in common.”

“‘A woman’s relationship to a man is like the slave’s to the master, the manual labourer to the intellectual, the barbarian to the Hellene. A woman is an undeveloped man.’”

“Eh?”

“Who said that?”

“It must be some Greek philosopher,” I said hesitantly, “in view of the word ‘Hellene’.”

“Aristotle.”

How can one not miss conversations like that?

The period following our first joint issue was fantastic. Not least because we were proud of it, and of how well we had worked together. Then several things happened that shocked us deeply.

It started with the Malexander murders, one of the most discussed crimes of the 1990s in Sweden. In the course of a police chase following a bank robbery on 28 May 1999, two officers were shot dead with their own service revolvers. It seemed more like an out-and-out execution than anything else.

Only a few weeks later we received another horrific piece of news. Stieg and I were in the editorial office when the telephone rang on 28 June. A former member of the Expo staff, Peter Karlsson, his partner, Katarina Larsson, and their eight-year-old son had been victims of a car-bomb attack in the suburb of Nacka on 18 June. They had been rushed to hospital by helicopter, and we heard later that Peter had serious leg injuries. It came like a punch in the solar plexus to both Stieg and me. Threats were a normal part of our everyday life, but this was the nearest they had come to us personally.

Luckily Peter survived. What worried us most was that it ought not to have happened because Peter and his partner both carried alarm devices, but they hadn’t gone off until a second before the explosion.

We could only interpret the assassination attempt on Peter and Katarina as a direct attack on Expo. Both of them had worked for the journal until quite recently. Their expose in Aftonbladet, Expressen and Dagens Nyheter concerning so-called White Power music attracted a lot of attention, and seemingly was the reason for the outrage.

It was merely minutes after we’d heard the news ourselves that we began to receive a deluge of calls from the press. I sat with the receiver pressed to my ear; Stieg sat beside me writing a series of statements on Post-it notes. “Democracy cannot be taken for granted”, “Every day and at every level of society we must fight for democracy, tolerance and respect”. I read out what he had written, and could hear the reporters noting it down.

They asked how often we received death threats ourselves.

“All the time,” I replied.

They wondered if it reminded me of my life in Kurdistan.

“That’s an absurd comparison,” I said as politely as I could.

Then a photographer arrived. He had been assigned to take pictures of the threats directed at Svartvitt and Expo. I produced an entire file full of threatening letters. He picked out examples that he considered to be “real threats” and was particularly interested in those decorated with swastikas.

Stieg, who had hidden himself away behind a computer screen, was grinning broadly and shaking his head. We both knew that news of this sort during the so-called silly season was a goldmine for hard-pressed editors. I would very much have liked to have passed them over to Stieg directly, but all I could do was get him to answer the telephone. He refused point blank to be photographed. As soon as he had a minute to spare, he wrote out new statements on our joint behalf. It was obvious how agitated he was.

“We can’t just sit at home and allow the anti-democrats to take over the streets,” he swore. He explained how far-right groups were associated especially with letter bombs. Moreover, he had heard that two neo-Nazis wanted by the police in Austria had gone to ground in Sweden and were being protected by people in Helsingborg linked with the far-right international organization Blood & Honour.

“There is a risk that they will take the opportunity to give Swedish neo-Nazis tips on how to make letter bombs,” he said, lighting another cigarette.

Everybody in the editorial office was worried. How bad was the situation in reality? Was the attack on Peter an isolated event, or was it the first in a series? The mood was not improved when Stieg related in detail how a Danish neo-Nazi from the Blood & Honour network in Malmo had posted three letter bombs addressed to targets in England. We all knew that a Nazi sympathizer had been arrested the previous year at Stockholm-Arlanda Airport in possession of explosives.

Never before had we been in such complete agreement that we needed to mobilize as much opposition as