Stieg Larsson, My Friend

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 fran insidan (The Sweden Democrats from the Inside), edited by Richard Slatt, 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 Piratforlag. 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 Soder 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