The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (2 page)

After national service, Stieg began a 30-year stint as the UK magazine
Searchlight
’s Scandinavian correspondent. He had decided to devote his life to fighting fascism along with religious and racial intolerance in the 1980s and 1990s, writing books on honour killings and the extreme Right in Sweden. This was a dangerous time for a writer of Larsson’s stamp, and a car bomb had killed a fellow investigative journalist. But Stieg had a source of strength in his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, an architectural historian who shared his political convictions. Of course, any woman who chooses to live with a man with Larsson’s combative lifestyle has to sport a certain toughness herself, and the couple developed strategies for their safety. If they sat in a restaurant or bar together, they would arrange it so both were looking at opposite entrances. Ironically, however, Larsson’s real nemesis was to come from an unexpected source – one very close to home.

Larsson was an active member of the Kommunistika Arbetareförbundet, the Communist Workers League. During this period he also worked as a photographer. Further burnishing his Trotskyite credentials, he edited the journal
Fjärde Internationalen
. But his life was not all politically-motivated causes; Larsson was known to be a particularly keen admirer of science fiction, and his knowledge and enthusiasm for the genre was prodigious (it went far beyond being simply a fan: the Anglo-Swedish journalist Dan Lucas, who worked with him, told me that Larsson had a forensic grasp of the entire field and he could talk knowledgeably about all of its best writers). This attention to detail, in which knowledge was vacuumed up without apparent effort, was characteristic of his entire approach to his life and work – if Larsson took an interest in a subject he would acquire (almost by symbiosis) a total grasp of every element involved. Utilising his knowledge of the field, he worked, either as editor or co-editor, on various science fiction fanzines, among them
Fijagh
! and
Sfären
. He also held the position of president of his country’s most prestigious science fiction organisation, the Skandinavisk Förening for Science Fiction, popularly known as SFSF. Inheriting his father’s talents for the visual arts, from 1977 to 1999 Larsson held down a job as a graphic designer for an important Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå.

It was inevitable that with his deeply felt political convictions, organisational skills and journalistic savvy, Larsson would at some point bring together these different strands of experience to forge something that he could feel proud of creating. He decided to found the Swedish Expo Foundation – which was inspired by the similarly motivated Searchlight Foundation in Britain – with a brief to ‘counteract the growth of the extreme Right and the white power culture in schools and among young people’. He was, of course, the natural choice as editor for the foundation house magazine,
Expo
, subsequently to become the inspiration for the fictional magazine
Millennium
, which the journalist Mikael Blomkvist works on in Larsson’s trilogy. With a series of lacerating and well researched articles, Larsson took on (in no uncertain terms) Sweden’s far Right and the organisations arguing for racial purity. As he was a particularly vocal and unflinching exponent of his views, it was inevitable that he would soon put himself in the firing line for a series of death threats, and this was to affect his mode of living for the rest of his short life.

Before the creation of the Expo Foundation in 1995, a remarkable and controversial phenomenon held sway in Sweden – a phenomenon that may be said to have been the sand in the oyster that created the pearl of its foundation. Despite the country’s abiding image of tolerance and liberality, the ‘white power’ music scene held sway, and enjoyed a surprisingly large following, particularly among the young. It was a caustic, tendentious fusion of punkinspired rock and crudely white supremacist lyrics – if the noun ‘lyrics’ might be applicable to the words of these uncompromising anthems, the performers barking out their songs with the same aggressive snarl that Johnny Rotten and others had affected in the UK. And Sweden was, amazingly, the world’s most assiduous progenitor of such incendiary material; not even a nascent neo-Nazi movement in Germany could claim to be in this particular musical vanguard.

1995 was a significant year in race relations in Sweden, with seven murders which were related to far-Right extremism. The agenda of such organisations included a targeted provocation of the far Left, and an argument might be made that both groups needed each other as nemeses in order to motivate their followers. Certainly, the Expo Foundation established in that year was designed to counteract the burgeoning influence of the extreme Right which had taken a particular hold in schools and among young people. Apart from Stieg Larsson, the Expo organisers included like-minded journalists, teachers and a variety of motivated young people worried by what they saw as a growing fascist tendency among their peers. Expo, aware of how it might be perceived, attempted to maintain a rigorous distance from links to particular political groups or parties, and its avowed intention was to safeguard ‘democracy and freedom of speech against racist, anti-Semitic and totalitarian tendencies throughout society’.

When the first issue of the
Expo
magazine was published it certainly achieved one of its principal aims: to act as an irritant to the far-Right groups it saw as its bitter opponents. The magazine was quickly established as the focus for an intense hate campaign from neo-Nazi organisations, and everyone connected with the publication was obliged to take extra security measures, as they realised that the personal safety which they had taken for granted was no longer guaranteed. There were destructive attacks on the printing factory at which
Expo
was produced, and by 1996 important national newspapers such as
Aftonbladet
were recording the divisive conflicts within Swedish society.

The magazine was bankrolled by funds accrued via lectures, magazine subscriptions and advertising sales, and survived in a turbulent media market. Some of the first, pioneering group of editorial staff stood down in 1998, many of them exhausted from leading a similar lifestyle to that of Stieg Larsson (that is to say: extensive work on anti-Nazi causes funded by punishing full-time work schedules elsewhere). Three of the original staff remained and decided to give the magazine a crucial overhaul, although the basic crusading ethos remained. The magazine is still in rude health, six years after Stieg Larsson’s death, and is still staffed by journalists who work on a largely voluntary basis (the current editor-in-chief is Daniel Poohl).

Apart from the magazine itself, a legacy of which Larsson would have been proud, there is the
Expo
archive, the largest individual source of information on the extreme Right in the whole of Scandinavia.
Expo
liaises with the Norwegian magazine
Monitor
and
Searchlight
in the UK, both ploughing similar furrows in long-running battles with extremist groups. However, the influence of the publication extends considerably further, with correspondents and contacts in Russia, Poland and the United States (The Centre for New Community, CNC, is a particularly influential organisation). Larsson and his similarly motivated colleagues have left a legacy that has survived against all the odds.

In 2000 Larsson wrote an article for
Searchlight
called ‘Radical Conservatives Shift to Anti-Semitism’, a swingeing attack on a new Swedish magazine called
Salt
. The piece began in typically combative Larsson style: ‘Sooner or later, Sweden was bound to get its own posh, full-colour, upmarket, bi-monthly, almost intelligent [a particularly cutting dig!], radical-conservative magazine. First published last October as a “conservative ideas magazine”,
Salt
is already looking forward to its sixth edition.’ Larsson anatomises a magazine which is clearly anathema to him, noting this was to be (according to its published credo) ‘no conservative magazine emulating wishy-washy, leftist liberal ideas, but a vehicle to critically target the ideology of power, meaning feminists, gays, multicultural ideas, and so on’.

He noted that the new magazine had utilised a variety of high-profile, respectable conservative writers, including the influential and combative British right-wing philosopher Roger Scruton – not someone Larsson would have enjoyed a companionable discussion with – but also pointed out that most of Sweden’s intellectual set had ignored the magazine, except (as he put it) a tiny section of the ultraconservative Right, who gloated that ‘Sweden had finally got a voice to shriek at feminism and other allegedly evil forces of modern society’.

As in so much of Larsson’s political writing, this broadside against ideologies that he so detested clearly reflects the mindset of the author of the
Millennium Trilogy
. He noted, for instance, that
Salt
had – in his view – given space to people whose sentiments could be regarded as anti-Semitic. Larsson’s was, of course, no carefully argued, understated attack on right-wing shibboleths – such an approach, quite simply, was not Stieg Larsson’s style. Anger and contempt were his motivating force – as they became for his tattoo-sporting heroine. He ended in typically robust fashion: ‘
Salt
… will undoubtedly find an appropriate readership among the cultural elitists who would dearly love to rehabilitate the anti-Semitism of the “good old days”.’

Needless to say, this was no isolated example of the scorn that Larsson could summon up for his opponents. In 2004, in a piece entitled ‘Sweden – National Democrats break up’, Larsson claimed, in the process of identifying what he saw as a full-blown split in the organisation, that elements of the National Democrats were, in his perception, racist. With some relish, he wrote that the party, which had begun in 2001 as a ‘unified nationalist movement’, lasted a mere three years before falling prey to the squabbles of Sweden’s fractious nationalist fringe. Larsson’s main thesis was that a party which had a skinhead image (‘harbouring uniformed and violent loonies’) would not be able to win the populist vote needed to make serious electoral inroads. It needed to attract (as he characterised them) ‘the pseudo-respectable, suit-and-tie racists’ – an observation that has an application beyond the boundaries of Sweden. The late writer would now be highly exercised by the unprecedented gains of the far Right in the 2010 elections.

When Larsson died in 2004, Graeme Atkinson of
Searchlight
, in a piece entitled ‘A dedicated anti-fascist and good friend: Stieg Larsson 1954 – 2004’, extolled the virtues of his late colleague. Atkinson described the writer’s poor upbringing in the forests of northern Sweden, his (somewhat surprising) enthusiastically undertaken military service and wide travels in Africa, where he witnessed bloody civil war in Eritrea at first hand. (Regarding the latter, some unexpected facts were to emerge in 2010 concerning the extent of Larsson’s involvement with the actual nitty-gritty of combat training – to be addressed later in this book.)

For Atkinson, Larsson’s most commendable achievement was how he had put his talents at the disposal of the antifascist movement as a writer and illustrator, but most notably as a researcher whose knowledge of the Swedish and international far Right could only be described as encyclopaedic.

Larsson’s sense of humour is remarked upon in this obituary – how Stieg (‘an incarnation of internationalism’) never allowed the seriousness of his work to cause him to lose his ability to smile or to bury the sense of humour that fired his endless collection of hilarious stories and anecdotes. This was a theme that appeared again and again when I spoke to those who knew him – and a welcome corrective to the image of the writer as a grim-faced, humourless activist, a picture that some people cherish. Atkinson mentions Larsson’s modesty, but also points out that the writer made big financial and health sacrifices for the antifascist cause, to which ‘he gave everything and asked almost nothing in return. For him it was results which led to a better world that made making sacrifices worthwhile.’

Interestingly, Atkinson’s tribute suggests that Stieg’s advice to those he left behind might well have been that of his famous fellow radical Swede, Joe Hill – ‘Don’t mourn, organise!’ – though with the added down-to-earth injunction ‘but have some fun doing so!’

Atkinson observed that barely a day passes without his thinking about Stieg Larsson. It is his belief that the writer’s pronounced concern for issues relating to racism and extremism may be traced back to his childhood, growing up with his grandparents in Skelleftea. Atkinson noted that from his conversations with Stieg, the latter’s grandfather Severin Boström, with whom the boy had a very close relationship, was a key influence on his thinking. In the 1930s, Severin had been a vocal critic of the rise of Nazism in Germany and its progenitor, Adolf Hitler; Atkinson also comments that Stieg’s passionate desire for the betterment of society was also a product of this close relationship with his grandfather. Intriguingly, Atkinson has also said that he was not aware that Stieg had a brother, and that there was no mention of a sibling, which appears to tie in with the estrangement from his family noted elsewhere.