The Man Who Left Too Soon Read online

  While always polite and friendly, I found Erland Larsson to be guarded around English writers such as myself – understandably so, perhaps, given the growing waves of journalistic disapproval that were beginning to engulf him because of the contentious issue of his late son’s legacy. But as I shared with him an interest in art and illustration, he relaxed after a few minutes and gave frank answers to my questions about his son. While noting with regret that children today spend far more time on computers than they do reading, he speculated that Stieg’s interest in journalism may have been prompted – as it was in so many young people of his generation – by the Vietnam War. But this early politicisation went along with the dedicated work ethic that was to prove so central to his life, and, possibly, so injurious to his health when combined with his excessive lifestyle.

  ‘When Stieg was 12,’ said Erland, ‘I read a novel he had written in a notebook. It was then that we gave him a typewriter – it was for his thirteenth birthday and I remember it was very expensive at the time. It was also very noisy, so we had to make space for him in the cellar. He would write in the cellar and come up for meals, but at least we could sleep at night.’

  According to his father, Stieg’s interest in journalism, and the possibility that he might make a living from it, came at the same time as his growing involvement in Vietnam issues.

  ‘Stieg was young and leaning towards the Left. In Sweden at the time, in every town in Sweden, on every Saturday, young people would be marching shouting “Out of Vietnam!” Stieg was one of those young people, and he started writing about the Vietnam War.

  ‘His grandfather was a communist and I worked with him at a factory, and soon I became a Communist too. In those days you had to be a Communist to survive. It was a dark place, like a Nazi camp. Today the factory is better, but then it was a terrible place. Stieg was never a Communist. His mother became a very well-known Social Democrat – perhaps Stieg became fascinated with politics because we were a political family.’

  In his early teenage years, Stieg seemed to take more of an interest in politics than writing fiction, according to his father. ‘At the beginning, we discussed politics at some length at the dinner table. When Stieg was 14 I found myself losing an argument in a discussion with him. He just had better arguments than his mother or I. The young back then were learning to argue about the Vietnam War. But he wasn’t writing fiction during those days – at least he didn’t discuss such things with his mother and me. It would be years later before we had such conversations.’

  And while, later, he did discuss the Millennium novels with Stieg, he didn’t know if Stieg had such conversations with anyone else. ‘He told me about them, and sent me the manuscript. For the first book, he asked for my opinion and I told him I felt that there was too much violence and sex in the books. But he replied that sex was what sold books! Some time after that he sent me the second manuscript.

  ‘His talent was very evident, but, hey, I saw his talent when he was a boy – that is why we bought him the typewriter. For the next two years he continued writing the books in the Millennium Trilogy, but he was also working to expose the dangers of the Nazis in our midst. He used to come to London often, and even speak to Scotland Yard, as well as speaking on the subject in Germany and Sweden – even discussing these matters with ministers and politicians.’

  Possible origins of the books’ characters Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander have been much discussed in Sweden, and Erland Larsson suggested that one inspiration for Salander may have been Stieg’s niece, Therese, who had been very close to the author and they often visited each other. Therese suffered from anorexia nervosa, and sported a tattoo – so the parallels with Salander are not difficult to discern. Whenever Therese travelled to Stockholm she would visit Stieg and the two used to socialise with via e-mail. This electronic correspondence might have made instructive reading for Salander aficionados, but a recent crash of Therese’s computer regrettably erased all their e-mails.

  Like Salander, Therese ‘certainly knew her way around computers,’ said Erland. ‘She is a little dyslexic, but she manages well in her job and can read, and works hard. But she fights for her existence, if you understand what I mean. Once, in a Swedish newspaper, they ran a story saying “Therese is actually Salander”, but in reality Salander is a mixture of different people.’

  Erland has been, to put it mildly, bemused by the unprecedented international success of the books. He observed, ‘I thought it was wonderful when editors wanted to publish Stieg’s novels. Then I thought it was wonderful seeing the books selling so well. And then I thought it was wonderful that the film people wanted to make them into movies. So now nothing relating to Stieg’s books surprises me…’

  Of course, the Holy Grail for Stieg Larsson admirers is the fabled fourth book: the next stage in the lives of Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander that would make the Millennium Trilogy into a quartet. Does it exist? It’s a topic of conversation that often comes up when admirers of the author and his work get together, and it’s hardly surprising that people would dearly like to believe that the fourth book exists – possibly in a form that needs heavy editing, perhaps, but nevertheless a book which was largely finished before the author’s untimely death. So what is the truth of the matter? Is there a fourth book which some day we will be allowed to see? The answer is at the heart of an acrimonious falling-out between the family and Larsson’s partner, Eva Gabrielsson, and new claims and counter-claims on the issue surface on an almost weekly basis.

  ‘When Stieg died,’ said Erland, ‘they called me from Stockholm and I went to the hospital, heartbroken. Then we went to Stieg’s apartment [which he shared with Eva] and found about 250 pages of the manuscript for the fourth book.’ Asked if there were plans to publish it, Erland replied, ‘No. We have the rights, but there are problems, as Eva has the manuscript and she does not wish to share it. In fact, there are family problems.’ The truth about the fourth book was to be revealed later.

  Joakim, Stieg’s brother, is a complex and intriguing figure; a man who, like his father, has been obliged to learn to live with the immense celebrity of his late sibling, and has risen (with some difficulty, as he admits) to the challenge. As I learned from conversations with him, Joakim is a confirmed Anglophile, keen to demonstrate to British listeners such as myself his very good English – more idiomatic than his father’s, but this is a generational skill. Among a variety of English enthusiasms, Joakim has a particular predilection for the world-conquering popular music produced in the UK in the 1960s, notably Ray Davies, composer and front man of the Kinks. Joakim is a particular admirer of Davies’s song-writing skills, and continues to follow his work to this day, catching concerts in London. Like many Swedes of his generation, his adolescent years were lived to the soundtrack of British rock music – the aforementioned Kinks, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones. The anti-establishment and rebellious stance of these musicians was a key influence on him in terms of his attitude to society, and remains so to this day. When I tried to draw the conversation around to his late brother, Joakim politely addressed the issues he has had to talk about a million times, but he was more interested in talking to me about growing up in the Beatles’ Britain of the 1960s. Joakim told me, with some feeling, that he envied me this: ‘Your country in the 1960s was where things were happening.’

  Like his father, Erland, he is becoming accustomed to dealing with the sometimes smothering (and often deeply negative) attention paid to them because of their relationship with Stieg, but Joakim – as becomes clear to anyone who spends a little time with him – is very much his own man, and there is a quiet determination not to be subsumed by the celebrity of his dead brother. This impulse manifests itself in a quietly sardonic, distancing sense of humour about the whole phenomenon, but Joakim is well aware that this attitude has to be held in check to some degree – and that most of the people who speak to him will expect a certain reverential tone, which he is prepared to adopt, up to a point. But l
ike Stieg, he is rightly concerned with being true to himself and remains an interesting and intriguing personality in his own right, leaving aside the relationship with his late brother.

  Stieg Larsson was 18 when he met Eva Gabrielsson at – unsurprisingly – a rally against the Vietnam War, and the couple soon decided to move in together. Theirs was to be – at times – an almost symbiotic relationship, despite their differing characters. Eva made her mark as an architectural historian, and her more pronounced financial acumen helped when it came to supporting them if Larsson’s crusading journalistic work proved insufficiently remunerative.

  Eva Gabrielsson is a fascinating, complex figure in her own right, leaving aside the long association she had with Stieg. The literary editor of the Independent, Boyd Tonkin, for whom I have covered much Scandinavian fiction, spoke to her for the newspaper in October 2009 and obtained some intriguing insights into both Eva herself and the man with whom she shared her life. Gabrielsson, who lived with Stieg Larsson for more than 30 years, remembered long discussions with Larsson concerning his nascent career as a novelist – and also recalled a conversation with her sister who had returned to Sweden in the mid-1990s, finding the country very changed. ‘She did not recognise the politics, mentality or how society worked,’ Eva told Tonkin. Regarding this disillusionment, Eva continued, ‘Stieg and I had long talks with her about this,’ noting that to them and to many other Swedes, ‘a nation that for so long prized its civic ideals of compassion and community had somehow lost its soul.’

  ‘The developments in the 1990s,’ Eva went on, ‘revealed greed, bonus systems, golden parachutes and corruption beyond imagination… all in all, a total disrespect for the traditional Swedish values of honesty, equality and the common good. This was shocking, especially since nobody turned out to be responsible or held accountable… you could say that the veil of naivety about a dream-castle country fell with a bang, not with a whimper.’

  At the time of Tonkin’s interview, Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish film of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was drawing large audiences throughout Europe, but the news media were still transfixed by the acrimonious disagreements over Larsson’s estate and the passionate campaign being waged in Sweden to obtain for Gabrielsson the rights which many felt she was entitled to.

  Tonkin noted that leaving aside the sheer readability of the Millennium Trilogy, in the books, Larsson and Lisbeth Salander had channelled ‘An underground stream of fury and hurt among readers, in Sweden and far beyond. It seems to have much to do with grief over a shared loss of innocence, and the withering of belief in a fair society. Individually, Salander emerges as a victim of multiple abuse, betrayed by psychiatry and social “care”’. ‘Collectively,’ according to Tonkin, ‘Sweden comes across as a nation undermined from the top by a cabal of thugs and spies whose responsibility for her ordeal gradually unfolds.’

  Eva Gabrielsson countered that readers of the novels recognise their own anger and frustration about everyday injustices and corruptions. ‘This is also a frustration with the lameness of politicians… the books clearly state that individual people do matter and may not be abused, lied to, misled or deceived for money, power or anyone’s prestige.’

  On the author’s disgust at male violence and at ‘the official indifference that allows misogynistic cruelty free rein,’ Tonkin noted that, ‘Blomkvist has a kind of mission statement: this story is not primarily about spies and secret government agencies; it’s about violence against women and the men who enable it. Typically, Larsson interrupts the galloping plot to show how a good woman cop spontaneously takes revenge on an un-prosecuted wife-beater when “something snapped in her”; with Salander active and dangerous (even when confined to a hospital bed with only a customised PDA for company), we get to hear that snap a lot.’

  Regarding the gender-based abuse that so exercised Larsson, Gabrielsson told Tonkin that: ‘In his mind it was a question which was constantly ignored, everywhere, and a systematic flaw in all our societies… Stieg had a deep mistrust of social workers and psychologists, given their power in times of need and weakness.’ She continued that Stieg was, ‘Especially furious with a certain small group of expert witnesses in Swedish paedophile cases, who for some reason too often landed on the side of the bad guys, calling the abused girl or boy disturbed and not trustworthy.’

  Tonkin ended his discussion with Larsson’s partner with a melancholy regret that we will not encounter Lisbeth again. ‘So, like some legendary woman warrior, Salander disappears into her twilight of the tattooed, hi-tech gods. The novels as a whole mix this near-mythical dimension with a hothouse domestic atmosphere among tight-knit cliques. Larsson has made the literary moods of saga and soap opera converge – with suspense as the adhesive. And behind the quick-fire action, those great chords of moral and political witness continue to resonate.’

  In a 2010 interview for the Observer newspaper, Eva Gabrielsson spoke frankly to Rachel Cooke about her life with Stieg Larsson – and also made clear what she felt the dispute with Stieg’s family over his estate had cost her. Remembering their days of relative impoverishment as journalists, Gabrielsson talked about the modest ambitions that she and Larsson had for the first book. They had principally envisioned sales in Scandinavia and Germany, with any possible profits helping them to pay off loans and purchase a summer hideaway in the archipelago. And demonstrating a commitment to the social issues that had been so important to the couple, she talked about plans to donate profits of any future books in the sequence to their chosen causes.

  Interestingly, Gabrielsson appears to have had a relatively fatalistic view of the couple’s future (perhaps the result of their cautious lifestyles avoiding possibly violent enemies), but her various misgivings involved Gabrielsson herself rather than her partner – although both were in the habit of phoning each other at every possible opportunity to reassure the other about their safe arrival at destinations.

  But, of course, the dual hammer blows of fate that were to leave their mark on Gabrielsson were the premature death of her partner and the subsequent brouhaha over the estate. Regarding Larsson’s death, Gabrielsson attempted (rather optimistically) to scotch one particular rumour – that Larsson was a workaholic – and noted that if he’d kept the regime of punishing workloads and minimal sleep so widely reported, she would probably have noticed this – although, tellingly, she does not discuss the famous chain-smoking, commonly felt to be a key factor in his early demise. Gabrielsson tells Rachel Cooke that her principal concern in terms of her partner’s legacy was the treatment of his work; would translations do justice to his prose? Would any possible future film adaptations compromise the work and smooth out the rough edges? (The latter misgiving, in fact, so far confounded.) These, of course, are issues that Gabrielsson deals with in the book she has written about her relationship with the late author.

  The book is in two parts: the first addresses the incendiary issues concerning the bitter battle between Gabrielsson and Larsson’s surviving relatives – she is keen, she says, to correct the way in which she has been portrayed, notably as ‘an impossible person with psychological problems’. The second part of the book is the one that she has laboured over longest; it is a study of loss – the loss of someone with whom you have spent a good proportion of your life. Gabrielsson wanted to discuss the strategy she has utilised to get through the ‘hell’ of this kind of experience – by, it seems, embracing the primal nature of such experiences, however lacerating they can be. Movingly, she talks about the agony of getting over Larsson’s death, and suggests that the perception of Swedish women as always capable does not tell the whole truth. A nurturing network of friends offered a lifeline – as well as supplying, she wryly notes, a great deal of food and drink. This support, she says, was invaluable, and carried her through a fraught period. Gabrielsson’s book is more even-handed than one might expect, making her points and arguing her corner (she is dignified in defending herself against criticism of her behaviour
in the dispute over the estate) but although she is not attempting to demonise her late partner’s relatives, her anger is palpable.

  The description that Eva Gabrielsson gives of her meeting with Erland, Larsson’s father, immediately after her partner’s death has a novelistic richness – although, of course, we are being given one side of the story (and by an articulate writer at that, rather than the less sophisticated, non-bookish Erland Larsson). Gabrielsson describes how she felt that Erland’s behaviour was ‘odd’, and appeared to her to be inappropriate; he was, she says, apparently formulating the words for the pending obituary and talking about how he had been ‘boasting to everyone that his son had a crime novel coming out, that he’d promised a local newspaper an interview with him…’. Gabrielsson’s sister had noticed Eva’s distressed reaction to this, and took Erland Larsson out for a walk.

  On this day, in what may now be seen as a very significant action, Eva Gabrielsson gave her sister Stieg Larsson’s backpack, which contained his diary and his laptop – she was keen that they should be taken to the offices of Expo, so that some of his colleagues might work on his material. She was concerned, she points out, about the survival of the magazine – and she notes that a degree of chaos followed his death. The repercussions of this day’s events – principally because of the contents of the laptop in the backpack – have continued long after the author’s death.

  Initially, it appears that Gabrielsson had no idea just how contentious the battle over the author’s estate would be. She alone attended the legal meeting at which it was affirmed that Stieg had left behind no testament (in order, as is now widely known, to protect his partner from possible attacks), and that Larsson’s father and brother would inherit the estate. As events moved towards their current impasse, Gabrielsson was not primarily concerned with financial matters. Erland Larsson had told her, Gabrielsson informed Rachel Cooke, that he, Erland, would not be inheriting anything. In her distress, Gabrielsson was, in fact, trying to find a therapist – in vain, as all available therapists were working with the Swedes who had suffered following the Asian tsunami.