Stieg Larsson, My Friend

I know that he thought about this because he had premonitions that the Millennium trilogy would be a success. However, for me – and for many others – the biggest question is not how he would have handled his success, but how on earth he managed to produce these books in more or less total secrecy, despite being so busy all the time.

I sometimes ask myself just how much Stieg worked. I generally answer, “I can’t say when he worked – but I can tell you when he didn’t work. When he was asleep.” I should perhaps mention that when he was not at the office, he was glued to his computer or had his mobile clamped to his ear – two indefatigable “collaborators” of Stieg’s.

When the time came for the first double edition of Svartvitt and Expo, Stieg had an unusually number of irons in the fire. He was fully occupied with contacting the parents of children who had been exposed to racist violence and with trying to find homes for women who had fled sects or families where they had been living under duress. He was also working intensively to arrange residence permits for homosexuals from Muslim backgrounds. He was helping others to finish books when they got stuck and couldn’t make progress. He was lecturing regularly to Swedish PEN, the Helsinki Committee and Scotland Yard. In addition to all that was the non-stop fund-raising for victims of racism.

Moreover, Stieg had started digging into an old legal case that later came to be called the Joy Rahman affair and that led to Rahman being released from prison in 2002 and awarded substantial damages. Rahman, employed as a home help, had been sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for strangling a 72-year-old woman she had been working for in southern Stockholm. Stieg was convinced that Rahman was innocent, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had rejected her appeal. He thought that as a journalist I ought to be able to establish Rahman’s innocence simply by reading all the legal documents carefully. He had dumped over a thousand pages of proceedings on my desk. I read all of them, but was not convinced that Rahman had been falsely accused. Stieg disputed my conclusion.

“You’re not going to win the major journalism prize,” he said.

But I couldn’t bring myself to query the legal process. There were too many details that seemed not to fit and far too many uncertainties. In 2007 the same Joy Rahman was imprisoned for the murder of a man in Bangladesh. I wonder what Stieg would have made of that.

Despite Stieg’s enormous workload, he always met his deadlines. He never failed to complete a text by the time it was needed. Mind you, whether the article was what had been agreed in the first place was another matter.

Time was beginning to run out for our first combined issue. It was to contain no more than eight Expo pages: a single-column leader, four news reports, a commentary and a review. Stieg’s article was still outstanding, and was essential if everything was to fit together with the Svartvitt material. That is what we had agreed, and it was important that nothing went wrong. We had too many critics just waiting to pounce if we made a mess of things. And we were in desperate need of new subscribers. In no circumstances must we publish late and give the impression of being unprofessional.

When Stieg turned up at the editorial office just inside the deadline with his article, I quickly realized that it was not what we had agreed on. It was in fact a book, forty pages long, entitled Euro-Nat – A Europe for Anti- Semites, Ethnic Warriors and Political Crackpots – The Sweden Democrats’ International Network.

“It’s urgent,” he said. “Can you publish it?”

“I’ll read it by tomorrow.”

“No, you must read it now, right away.”

“But I have to make sure we don’t find ourselves with all sorts of legal problems. We can’t afford that.”

“You don’t need to worry. The only people I’ve named fully are elected officials. All the others are referred to only by their first names. You’re not risking anything. Can you give me an ISBN number from your Svartvitt list?”

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and got up to fetch the list. It did occur to me that the book would be an excellent introduction to the partnership between Svartvitt and Expo.

In other words, I found myself becoming the publisher of a book I had never read. This was a reflection of how much confidence I had in Stieg. If he said that the book was important and there were no potential legal problems, I trusted him. The first thing I saw on my desk after his death was a copy of the jacket blurb for that book. It reminded me of the meeting I have just described. Stieg had written the text himself:

In the 1998 elections the Sweden Democrats polled twenty thousand votes and won eight local council seats. That meant they were the third-largest party with no representation in the national parliament, and now they are setting their sights on the 1999 E.U. elections. They hope to hoover up votes from New Democracy, which has collapsed, and from other protest parties. The keyword in the Sweden Democrats’ campaign is “respectability”. This spruced-up facade is in stark contrast with the party’s history, and its membership of the international movements Nord-Nat and Euro-Nat.

There was undeniably something electric about Stieg’s presence. If you managed to interpret the signals he sent out correctly, your whole environment was lit up. But if you misunderstood his intentions, he could burn everything that got in his way – including himself. So he was both a dream and a nightmare to work with. He was not merely seriously involved, but rather obsessed with the struggle to overcome intolerance. And he always acted spontaneously. When one least expected it, he was apt to come out with long quotations in order to illustrate his arguments. A lot of people called him un-Swedish, but I have never been able to accept that. It simply doesn’t fit comfortably with his view of the world.

Every time I think about our meetings, it strikes me that some people might think that our contact was always linked with the work we did together. I have never seen it like that. It was about as far away from a working relationship as it’s possible to get. It would be truer to say that our work was a part of our friendship.

On 30 November, 1998, T.T. issued a newsflash. The anti-racist journal Expo had been resurrected, thanks to a merger with the magazine Svartvitt.

I was quoted: “Expo has been outstandingly good at investigating racism, but they have never grasped how to make money. That is where I can help them.”

According to the newsflash, the new version of Expo hoped to sell four thousand copies to start with and eventually nine thousand. Stieg was the main protagonist at the press conference held at the Swedish W.E.A. that same day. He was wearing his now legendary grey jacket and shirt with a dark blue tie. But the resulting news item didn’t even mention his name: although he did most of the talking at the press conference, I was the one who was quoted. There again, I was the one at whom several people laughed when they heard the number of copies Expo hoped to sell. Nobody thought it was possible to achieve that ambition.

It was not only because of his shyness that Stieg maintained such a modest profile. His relationship with T.T. had reached a new low and he felt stymied. Because of his permanent post there, he was not free to be interviewed as an expert on matters involving racism or neo-Nazism. Nor was he allowed to write on these subjects. He was always being approached for articles that would have been right up his street. Sometimes he paid no attention to what his superiors said and wrote them. But that only made his position even more awkward.

You can’t serve two masters, Stieg!

You simply can’t do this.

You can’t publish a journal about right-wing extremism in your spare time and also produce credible articles on the same questions for a news agency.

You have to choose one or the other!

Over and over again he came up against the same arguments, and I could see how it was getting him down.

It soon became clear that Stieg was working day and night. We used to say that he worked from 9.00 till 5.00 – 9.00 in the morning till 5.00 the next morning. There seemed to be no limit to what he needed to do: write articles; do research; coordinate editorial activities; buy coffee, loo rolls, bookcases, computers and toners for the printer… I didn’t envy him, but I ought to have supported him more. My only consolation is that I know his pride would have prevented him from accepting more help than I gave him.