Stieg Larsson, My Friend

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 Umea. 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.