"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (8 page)

The Millennium Trilogy
accuses the media of gradually abdicating their responsibilities toward society throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Investigative journalists had turned away from social problems, and financial reporters treated CEOs like rock stars, allowing them to quietly enrich themselves through dummy corporations, hefty bonuses, and cartels. That fluid border between businesses and the print media also led many journalists to become public relations directors for big companies. At the beginning of the trilogy, in
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
, Mikael Blomkvist describes, in his portrait of William Borg, everything Stieg
criticized on that score: Borg had left journalism, “and now he worked in P.R. as a consultant—for a considerably higher salary—at a firm.” Stieg never sold himself for money or to further his career.

STIEG PUT
his entire code of journalistic ethics into
The Millennium Trilogy
. And he showed his respect for the reader. “It doesn’t matter how many advertisers we have,” Mikael tells Henrik Vanger, “if no one wants to buy the magazine.” Stieg adamantly championed what every newspaper and magazine owes its readers: the search for the truth. But since he also thought a publication should not sacrifice everything to its readers, he objected to putting rape victims through more suffering by splashing their private lives all over magazines. In the trilogy, he strongly and sarcastically condemns the ever more offensive tactics of this kind, such as the newspaper headlines calling Lisbeth and her friends a “lesbian Satanist gang.” And when Mikael Blomkvist solves the mystery of Harriet Vanger’s disappearance, he faces a huge problem of conscience. Should he be a good reporter and tell the entire story—at the risk of exposing Harriet to public scrutiny? Or should he keep quiet, thus concealing the truth, despite the financial windfall such a scoop would mean to
Millennium
?

After a long and painful inner struggle, Mikael’s conscience wins out over his ego as a reporter: he will not publish
the story. This passage was of great importance to Stieg, because he sincerely wanted to send a message, but when I first read the text I disagreed with what he’d written. In that first version, when Mikael finds Harriet out in Australia, she exclaims almost in terror, “So now that you know I’m alive—what are you going to do? Are you going to rape me too?” I felt that readers would take those last words too literally and think Harriet was completely paranoid. Since Stieg was convinced I was wrong, we had argument after argument about this. In the end, he never said, “Okay, I’ll change it.” He never said anything. But he took out that sentence.

IN THE
opening of the first book, after being accused of not verifying the evidence he uses for an exposé of the industrialist Hans-Erik Wennerström, Mikael Blomkvist quits his job as the publisher of
Millennium
because he’s afraid that otherwise, readers will lose confidence in the magazine. Later, before he makes public the valid proof that has been gathered by Dag Svensson, he checks all this information with obsessive care. I know that behavior well from having watched Stieg at work, and he really did feel that sources were sacred—which is why Mikael erases from his computer all the files revealing any sources before the police arrive, after Dag and Mia have been murdered. And it makes clearer today why, after Stieg’s death, no one in his personal circle, myself included, wanted to say anything
about the computer he was using. Besides the fourth
Millennium
novel in progress, it contained the names and contact information of his informants on the far right. And on this point, the Swedish constitution is clear: sources must be protected!

THE MILLENNIUM
Trilogy
is a catalogue of all forms of violence and discrimination endured by women.

When he was a teenager in Umeå, Stieg was devastated by a dramatic incident that marked him for life. One weekend, he witnessed the gang rape of a girl at a campground. Some of the rapists were friends of his, and he refused to have anything to do with them afterward. From that moment on, he blamed himself for not having intervened. A while after that horrible episode, he ran into the girl in town and tried to apologize. Refusing to hear him out, she drew back from him with an accusation he never forgot: “Get away from me! You’re one of them!”

Should this experience be seen as the source of his feminism?
It most certainly contributed to it. While he was writing the trilogy, Stieg’s working title for all three books was
The Men Who Hate Women
. This title was retained only for the first volume of the Swedish edition, and even then, only because he strongly insisted on it. And the word “hate” in the title was replaced by “don’t love” in the French edition.

WHEN HE
was young, Stieg had played drums with a pal who’d introduced him to jazz, but it was rock he loved best, especially feminine rock like Shakespears Sister, Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics, and Tina Turner. And Lisbeth just happens to have close ties to the girls in a rock band called Evil Fingers. My own tastes are a little broader, from opera through rock and mainstream to pop. At home, Stieg and I listened to different music, but not all that much of the time, actually.

We divided up the housekeeping according to our different inclinations: he liked to do housework, I preferred cooking. Since we both hated doing laundry with a passion, we took turns at that.

When I’d met Stieg in 1972, he was already a staunch feminist who preferred the company of women and liked working with them more than with men. What’s more, they generally liked him back: he used to say that when he was a child living with his grandparents, his best friend was—a little girl! He found women more creative and less ambitious,
less conniving than men. Wherever he worked, Stieg treated men and women the same way, held them to the same standards, and didn’t mind one bit taking orders from women. If he encountered macho careerists who tried to block the advancement of “Stieg’s women,” he either obliged them to change their attitude or eliminated them from his private life. In
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
, when Erika Berger becomes editor in chief at
SMP
(
Svenska Morgon-Posten
, what Mikael Blomkvist calls “Sweden’s most turgid old-boy newspaper”), Stieg gives a clear idea of the kind of hazing and dirty tricks a competent woman must face in a man’s world. “An editorial meeting at two o’clock was suddenly moved to one-thirty without her being told, and most of the decisions were already made by the time she arrived.” Headlines Erika chooses are replaced and the articles she rejects wind up on page one.

Stieg’s obvious fondness for women never really bothered me; neither one of us was jealous, as it happened, but to tell the truth, we did keep an eye on each other!

WOMEN COULDN’T
help but play an important role in
The Millennium Trilogy
. Of all different ages and professions, with varying personalities, they have this in common: they are stubborn, like Stieg, and even pigheaded in what they do. Like him, they give as good as they get—and they get their revenge. Stieg saw no excuse for male violence and has Lisbeth say so in no uncertain terms. Martin Vanger
was raped by his father, true, but he had “exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and he raped because he liked doing it.” Later on Lisbeth adds: “I just think that it’s pathetic that creeps always have to have someone else to blame.”

The murders of three women in particular had a direct influence on
The Millennium Trilogy
. In 2003, after the almost simultaneous killings of Melissa Nordell and Fadime Sahindal, Stieg worked with Cecilia Englund at
Expo
on an anthology entitled
Debatten om heders mord: feminism eller rasism
(
The Debate on Honor Killings: Feminism or Racism?
). Nordell was murdered by her boyfriend, and her body was found in the water near the wharf in Björkvik, a small community on the Stockholm County island of Ingarö. Sahindal was shot in the head by her father because she refused to be forced into marriage. In Sweden, Nordell’s death was seen as an ordinary murder, while Sahindal’s was considered an ethnic murder, an honor crime, an incident unrelated to “Swedish culture.” Stieg called the victims “sisters in death” because he saw them as victims of the same patriarchal oppression. The cultural differences evoked to differentiate between the two killings simply fed racist propaganda and fueled endless academic research. Meanwhile, women kept dying at the hands of men.

In the book on honor crimes, Stieg wrote: “The cultural and anthropological models used to explain these tragedies speak to the form of oppression involved but do not explain it. And so in India, women are set on fire; they are murdered in the name of honor in Sicily; they are
beaten up on Saturday night in Sweden.… Yet
culture
does not explain why women all over the world are murdered, mutilated, ‘circumcised,’ mistreated, and forced to submit to ritual behaviors by men. Neither does it explain why men in our patriarchal societies oppress women.” And he adds, “
Systematic violence
against women—because this violence is indeed systematic—would be the description used if such violence were directed against union members, Jews, or handicapped persons.” Stieg was quite gratified when the other eight contributors to the anthology, six of them women, wholeheartedly agreed with him.

The third murder was that of Catrine Da Costa, parts of whose dismembered body were found in two plastic bags. Stieg had read a fascinating book about that crime. The author, Hanna Olsson, contacted me recently after reading Stieg’s essay on honor crimes to tell me that she would have loved to work with him. Every violent act in
The Millennium Trilogy
was inspired by real murders described in police reports. In Sweden, once sentence is pronounced, the files enter the public domain and may be consulted.