The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson (6 page)

In a rare concordance between the warring factions in the estate squabble, Larsson’s brother Joakim also criticised the
Dagens Nyheter
piece, saying that he was ‘angry’ but ‘not surprised’, adding: ‘It’s just another nonsense article about Stieg that I won’t waste my energy on. Nowadays, my brother is a national icon and there are many claiming to have known him who try to live off his reputation.’

Hellberg has been subsequently deluged with negative responses from passionate Larsson admirers – and Sweden has more than its share of those. The writer Kurdo Baksi, whose book
Stieg Larsson, My Friend
gives his account of a working relationship with the author at
Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå
, was quoted in the contentious piece, but had some caveats about the views attributed to him. However, his aspect of the dispute, as repeated in
The Local
, a Swedish news source, has had a life of its own. Eva Gabrielsson criticised Baksi’s book, which was interpreted as describing Larsson as a ‘mediocre journalist who lacked objectivity’. Kurdo Baksi, it was said, makes the claim that Larsson ‘wrote biased articles and even invented material’.

Gabrielsson was unsparing in her response when speaking to the Swedish television channel SVT: ‘Kurdo is trying to perform a character assassination of Stieg as a journalist. This is pure slander.’ She noted that Larsson only worked with Baksi for a brief time on a magazine and some political pieces in the 1990s – and that Baksi was not that well acquainted with the late writer.

Kurdo Baksi’s remarks to SVT that Larsson was a ‘mediocre’ journalist who lacked objectivity in his work at the news agency also produced a stinging response from Larsson’s former boss at TT, Kenneth Ahlborn, who described the assertions as false, and said that they were essentially ‘an attempt to grab the media spotlight’. He continued: ‘I was Stieg’s boss. We worked in the same room every day. If anyone should speak about his relationship to TT it should be me. The assertion that he could make up biased, objectionable articles is so bizarre. We don’t work like that at TT and Stieg was not like that.’

Against this mounting wave of criticism, Baksi, in his own defence, commented on Hellberg’s piece.

‘I have not been quoted correctly,’ he said. ‘First of all, I never said I was a better writer than Stieg. Maybe I was better than him at handling quick, short journalistic texts, but I am absolutely not a better writer. Anders Hellberg has used our conversation to create a perspective that I just can’t accept.’

However, this defence drew a swift and uncompromising reply from Hellberg, who maintained that there had been no misinterpretation: ‘Sadly,’ he said, ‘I was unable to record the conversation, but I have written down exactly what Kurdo Baksi said. If he doesn’t want to stand by it now, that’s his business.’

Meanwhile, Baksi commented on Larsson’s alleged journalistic shortcomings: ‘I still say Stieg Larsson wasn’t a brilliant journalist, but he was a brilliant author. He showed it both in his non-fiction books and in his novels.’ When I talked to the writer Dan Lucas (who worked with Larsson in Sweden), he also spoke well of Larsson’s journalistic accomplishments.

Sofia Curman of
dn.se
also quoted writer/journalist Anna-Lena Lodenius, author in tandem with Larsson of
Extremhögern
(‘The Extreme Right’). Lodenius points out that she never acted as an editor on any of Larsson’s journalistic pieces. She noted: ‘It’s possible that the dry style of TT wasn’t his thing. But of course he could write.’ Lodenius remarked that she feared it would be painful for her to read the
Millennium
books. ‘When I did read the
Millennium Trilogy
,’ she said, ‘I clearly heard his voice. I recognised his language and I found some of his favourite words in the books, the same words that I always crossed out when we wrote together. Like everyone else he had certain expressions that were characteristic of his writing. There is no doubt that it’s the same Stieg that I used to work with.’

Kurdo Baksi had a final salvo about the dual authorship dispute that evokes the Shakespeare/Francis Bacon theory: ‘Shakespeare’s works were written nearly 400 years ago, and the discussion as to who the real author was is still there. Many say [sic] it was his wife. But in Stieg’s case, he was the actual writer. His very special style, which is apparent in everything he ever wrote, is clearly there in all of the
Millennium
books. My only point regarding his style was that it was better suited for novels than for news articles.’

In the
Expressen
pieces, Eva Gabrielsson noted that her interaction with her partner in the writing of the
Millennium
sequence was a matter of ‘proofreading and discussions’.

CHAPTER 4

PUBLISHING LARSSON

‘H
e was a difficult man, but brilliant and multifaceted,’ according to his Swedish publisher, Eva Gedin of Norstedts. ‘Many Swedes were aware of his bravery in tackling extremist organisations,’ she told me. ‘He could be infuriating – and he certainly wasn’t afraid of making enemies. But most of his enemies were well chosen; as for his friends and associates, frustration with him might result from the fact that he was clearly asking his body to do more than it could cope with.’

Gedin speaks with a mixture of admiration and regret regarding the late author. ‘He came to my attention via the recommendation of another journalist, who rang me up and said, “You may know about Stieg as an antifascist journalist – but did you know he is also an amazing novelist? You have to read this book!” And so we discovered
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
.

‘When I read it, I told him – on the spot – that we wanted to sign him to a three-book contract. His response was a quiet one; generally speaking, he was a surprisingly quiet, shy person – except in one area. He was boastful about himself only in respect of his amazing work ethic. You were always told – in great detail – how he’d copy-edited his magazine, fired off myriad letters, written several chapters, and generally crammed a week of activity into 24 hours. One could always forgive him all this, as he wasn’t really self-aggrandising.’

In a radio interview for PRI’s
The World
, Eva Gedin gave some interesting responses concerning the life and death of Stieg Larsson. She talked about first encountering the unpublished manuscripts: ‘We were very excited because we needed a new crime writer, and we could see that we had something really good in our hands.’ Remarking on the steadily growing, viral word of mouth on the books, she noted that, ‘You could sort of hear people talking about Stieg’s book almost everywhere we went – when we went to buy groceries, you could hear people saying “Hey, have you read this new writer Stieg Larsson?”’ Acknowledging that the success of the books was in great part due to the groundbreaking character of Lisbeth Salander, Gedin anatomised the success of this innovative creation: ‘She’s a superhero, something you haven’t seen in crime fiction. She’s such an extraordinary person. Smart… and revengeful.’

Larsson had in fact told Eva Gedin that he had conceived Salander (as mentioned earlier) as a grown-up version of the classic Swedish children’s heroine Pippi Longstocking.

So was Larsson – to those who knew him – a heroic figure? ‘He was the best kind of hero,’ according to Gedin. ‘He simply got on with the job, and never seemed to be after any kind of personal glory. Perhaps some might call taking on some sinister organisations foolhardy but I – and many others – had only admiration for him. Of course, it was obvious that something had to give in terms of his health. Which is not to say that he was self-destructive. Outwardly, even before the success of
Dragon Tattoo
, he was a man of influence and importance; he charmed the ex-minister of immigration, Mona Sahlin – a woman many considered to be a possible future prime minister of Sweden. And, of course, he lectured on the tactics of far-Right groups in France, Germany – and at Scotland Yard.’

His Swedish and English publishers are agreed that one myth should be squashed: the notion that Larsson barely lived to see the success of his books, albeit not the sales success. ‘He knew he was a success as a writer,’ says Gedin. ‘It was pleasing to those around him to see him quietly savouring the fact that he had made such a success of the second career.’

But, I asked Gedin, what about the other oft-repeated part of the legend concerning Larsson: that his death was somehow suspicious? That the failure of his health was due to some sinister chemical assistance, like the poisoning of the former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Litvinenko, in London? On this, Eva Gedin is emphatic. ‘Absolutely not! It might help Stieg’s legend if it were true that he was the victim of some kind of poisoning, but frankly there was this almost casually self-destructive element: the massive self-imposed workload, the heavy smoking and so forth. But the fact that his death was not a homicide doesn’t make him any less of a hero. That is exactly what he was.’

Before becoming Editorial Director at Chatto & Windus, Larsson’s UK publisher Christopher MacLehose – who publishes the
Millennium
books through his own imprint within the Quercus publishing company – was Literary Editor of the
Scotsman
. He also held down the position of Editor-in-Chief at the publisher William Collins, but his most significant role, and the one in which he produced some of the great literary glories of an illustrious career, was as publisher at Harvill Press. (For the last seven years of his time with the company, the imprint became part of the powerful conglomerate Random House.) Under MacLehose’s authoritative stewardship, Harvill became synonymous with the very best writing from other shores than those of the UK, customarily translated with the greatest skill and sensitivity. Important modern writers published by MacLehose included George Perec, W G Sebald and José Saramago, but particularly innovative were his crime fiction acquisitions, notably Henning Mankell, Fred Vargas and Arnaldur Indridason. These authors represented some of the most intelligent and innovative writing in the field and beautifully complemented such literary giants in the Harvill list as Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Peter Matthieson.

While maintaining a consistent standard of literary excellence, MacLehose never forgot that the Harvill imprint was founded in the 1940s by Manya Harari and Marjorie Villiers with a view to inaugurating a healthy cultural exchange between the countries of Europe after the Second World War.

The publishing passion which MacLehose demonstrated will not surprise those who have met him: the single-mindedness with which he fights for the authors he believes in has fewer precedents in the publishing world than one might wish, on either side of the Atlantic, and has inspired both gratitude and loyalty from the authors for whom MacLehose has gone in to bat. Concerning Harvill’s continuing success, he said: ‘We left HarperCollins with a substantial part of our backlist intact. So the fuel was there to keep the motor running, as it were. There was also a broad acceptance among young booksellers – and among the public that bought books – that Harvill stood for something: first-class works in whatever language in the world translated into English.’ Speaking to him over the years (which involves looking upwards – he is dauntingly tall), MacLehose has always given me the impression that he provides the best possible advocacy for the authors who have been lucky enough to be published by him.

In an interview for the internet crime fiction website
The Rap Sheet
, the journalist Ali Karim asked MacLehose how he had discovered Larsson’s work. ‘The English translation of the
Millennium Trilogy
came from Norstedts, the Swedish publisher,’ MacLehose explained, ‘via a very experienced American translator who was asked [by Norstedts] to translate all three books for a film company, which he did in the remarkable time of 11 months.

‘It needed a certain amount of editorial work, inevitably. And as the translator Steven Murray [working under the pseudonym of Reg Keeland] was now involved in another project, he didn’t have time to do this. It should be said that the trilogy came to me many months after the translator had finished it. Why? Because it needed a great deal of editorial work, but also because there was this feeling “what can you do commercially with a writer who has died?” This I felt was ludicrous – as was: “Come on, what can we do with this? We haven’t got an author!” It is a tragedy in one sense that Stieg Larsson did not see his work published in English, nor see
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
reach number four in the
New York Times
bestseller lists. This is an astonishing achievement for a translated novel. Incidentally, Knopf, who published it in the US, did so brilliantly. I’m frankly grateful it came to us in the form that it did, needing a certain degree of editorial work; otherwise, it would have been bought by somebody else.’

Asked about the Swedish film adaptations, MacLehose drew for comparison on the success of the film adaptations of the work of Ian Fleming. ‘Salander will leave James Bond in her wake. Salander is just so interesting, and she is much more intellectually stimulating than James Bond ever was. She is a woman of so many facets and aspects: the physical, emotional, the history of mental illness, where she stands in Swedish society. And then there are her computer skills, her professional skills as an analyst. She is, of course, not a complete human being, because of her emotional wreckage, but she is utterly fascinating.’