The Man Who Left Too Soon Read online

  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.’

  The Millennium Trilogy has been a massive success in the UK for the British independent publisher Quercus, founded by the legendary UK publisher Anthony Cheetham and now run by the energetic and savvy Mark Smith. Christopher MacLehose runs his own imprint within the company, and continues to bring the same innovative publishing skills to bear as he did in his days running the Harvill Press. But how does he compare his current publishing incarnation with the glories of his past career?

  ‘Nothing will quite compare with my years at Harvill Press, as that was an imprint that was devoted to the translation of pure literature. But we did publish Peter Høeg, Henning Mankell, Fred Vargas and many others who are also considered as European crime writers. However, there is no one quite like the Quercus team. They are young, work flat out all day and all night. I’ll tell you what it’s like: when I left Chatto & Windus and went to Collins, who were then a tremendously vigorous young publishing house, I described it like free-falling downwards, without a parachute. Working with Quercus is like getting out of the aeroplane and suddenly you are moving very fast, very fast indeed, and there is no parachute.’

  MacLehose has talked about other much-acclaimed crime novels he has published, such as Death in Breslau by Marek Krajewski, and while books such as this will no doubt add lustre to his legacy, there is absolutely no question that the particular jewel in the MacLehose publishing crown will be Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

  In a New Statesman interview, MacLehose made an observation that has remained apposite: ‘The process by which very good books are well translated and published is so arduous that it will wear down those who do it. I don’t think this is sufficiently understood. But fortunately there are young, idealistic, knowledgeable people who continue to throw their lives into it.’

  MacLehose himself may no longer be young, but shows not the slightest dimming of the energy and commitment that he has demonstrated with regard to fiction in translation for so many years. The relatively recent phenomenon of Stieg Larsson and the Millennium Trilogy may be consuming his energies at present, but it is actually only a staging post in a long and fruitful career.

  Stieg Larsson’s publisher in the US, Sonny Mehta – a name spoken of with reverence in the world of books – is a publisher for whom the sobriquet ‘legendary’ might have been coined. He is in charge of the Random House US division Knopf Doubleday, an imprint which publishes both highly respectable serious writing and cash-cow blockbusters. It is his skill for publishing highly commercial and ambitious literary fiction that has made Mehta one of the most celebrated publishers in the world.

  Sonny Mehta (born Ajai Singh Mehta) is the son of an Indian diplomat who was brought up in India and Switzerland before moving to
England to study at Cambridge. His first impulse was to be a writer, but when (as publisher) he created something of a literary sensation, at the London publisher Paladin, with Germaine Greer’s fiery feminist polemic The Female Eunuch, it appeared that he had found his métier. (He had, in fact, studied with Germaine Greer at Cambridge). By the early 1970s Mehta was in charge of the important UK paperback publisher Pan Books, a job he held for over 15 years, and his reputation as one of the most perspicacious of bookmen grew apace. When Random House US chairman Si Newhouse contacted him about the possibility of moving to New York to take over Knopf (senior editor Robert Gottlieb had taken over William Shawn’s job as editor of the New Yorker, creating a gap), Mehta said yes, and made the momentous move to the US.

  By all accounts his early days in the States for Mehta were decidedly tricky, as he struggled to come to terms with a very different publishing scene and (in the evenings) made the most of the city’s distractions (even, according to some sources, risking dismissal). But soon his unparalleled skills as a publisher ensured that he made his mark, and the already prestigious reputation of Knopf has been further burnished under his stewardship. He also transformed the company’s imprint Vintage (which he took charge of in 1989) into a particularly esteemed trade paperback institution.

  While celebrated for such much-lauded literary writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Toni Morrison, Kazuo Ishiguro and V S Naipaul, Mehta’s ventures into the world of high-quality crime and thriller writing have been particularly successful. While, for instance, Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (which frightened off certain UK publishers) was published as a literary novel, its mixture of extreme violence and a canny, modish analysis of the zeitgeist looked forward to Mehta’s major success with Stieg Larsson, who moved in something like similar territory. And Mehta – who also coaxed work out of the famously recalcitrant British author Douglas Adams, locking him into a hotel room until a book was complete – is now particularly noteworthy for facilitating the US association with the phenomenal success of the Millennium Trilogy. Interestingly, the publisher’s own heavy-duty lifestyle (which has led to triple heart bypass surgery) may have given him a particular sympathy for the similarly heavy-smoking Stieg Larsson. Sonny Mehta has, however, outlived his Swedish star author.

  Mehta has remarked that the extraordinary success of the books in the Scandinavian countries was unprecedented, and he points out that the three top spots on the bestseller lists were at one time taken up by all three books of the trilogy. ‘And this has happened,’ he says, ‘in France, Germany and Italy – with America being one of the last in a long queue of people to catch up with the phenomenon.’

  This delay was not necessarily a bad thing, according to Mehta, as it generated a considerable build-up of anticipation for the appearance of the books in America. ‘Readers were aware that something extraordinary was happening abroad,’ he says. Mehta regards any comparisons with Larsson’s Scandinavian contemporaries (such as Henning Mankell) as specious. ‘Larsson,’ he says, ‘is totally different from other Swedish crime writers. He paints on a bigger canvas… I find that the social commentary and the social analysis reminds me of John Grisham. Larsson also shares some of the social preoccupations of Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. But an interesting thing about Larsson… is the fact that he was also a book reviewer; his passion was crime writing, and his trilogy is peppered with references to his peers in the crime writing community. He read crime fiction voraciously. There are references to Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but he also mentions scenes by contemporary authors, both Americans and Brits. He’s like a magpie that way, and that to me is part of the pleasure of reading him. And I think other readers will share this pleasure at the references.’

  When talking to me about the translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mexico-based Steven Murray (aka Reg Keeland) said that he found it the most fun and engrossing translation task he had ever faced. ‘I could tell as I worked on the books that they would be hits,’ he said, ‘but no one could imagine how big… What strikes me most about Stieg Larsson is the way he kept his prose moving, even when in the midst of arcane digressions on any topic under the Swedish sun. Part of it is creating characters that seem like real people, with all their talents, contradictions and faults.’

  Steven Murray dates his days as a translator of Scandinavian crime fiction to when he ran a small press called Fjord Press, which started in the Bay Area then moved to Seattle. ‘We published a lot of Danish classics, which in those days sold better than contemporary titles,’ he says. ‘My interest in Scandinavian fiction began when I studied at Stanford, and then went to a campus in Germany near Stuttgart. I met a group of people from Scandinavia, and moved around with them – I was impressed with the fact that they could speak whatever language was appropriate for wherever they were. I remember thinking “That’s pretty good!” I knew American students were speaking German, but I decided to raise my game.’

  I asked Murray how he felt about the fact that signed editions of Stieg Larsson books now have an extra cachet in the collectors’ market if they are signed by Murray as translator; his reply to this was modest: ‘Oh, I think that’s just because the author is dead, and he’s not around to sign it. I’m the only one around to sign it – but Christopher MacLehose, his UK publisher, has a connection too – he could sign them!’

  But people are more conscious of translators these days, surely? Most literary editors when reviewing foreign fiction rendered into English now expect the reviewer to comment on the translation. ‘Actually, we don’t always get a mention – quite often, even these days, we are ignored. But translators like me have been working on that very issue for at least 25 years, and perhaps our status has risen somewhat. We do usually get a royalty, even though it’s minuscule.

  ‘William Weaver’s translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose achieved some recognition in its day as an exemplary translation, and in the 1960s attention was definitely paid to the art of the translator, but perhaps only among those interested in world literature. It may be different in the UK, but frankly most Americans are not sympathetic to translated fiction – in fact, they are a little afraid of it. This might also be based on the fact that (it has to be admitted) there have been bad translations in the past. But the standard really has risen, without doubt. For instance, most people doing translations of crime fiction these days are top-notch.’

  Murray told me that he first encountered Stieg Larsson and the Millennium Trilogy when the publisher Norstedts contacted him. ‘I was told this would be a rush job – an important one – and that there would be three books. Little did I know how long those three books would be – and how much of a challenge it would be to do really good work on them in a really short time. They said to me, “We have this excellent writer, who unfortunately has passed away, and we need the books doing very quickly.” This was, I think, in 2005, shortly after Larsson had died. The translation was also needed for purposes of possible films with the company Yellow Bird, which is why they said to me, “How quickly can you do this?” I would normally quote six months for a volume (as I have to leave room for other things). But I buckled down and managed to do each volume in three months, which really was quite a struggle, take it from me. I didn’t exactly give up sleep, but I certainly did give up vacations. It was a very intense working period. But I’m a night owl anyway so I’m happy to go on working in the wee small hours when most people are sound asleep.’

  Of course, Steven Murray’s current celebrity has really been achieved since his secret identity was discovered; most readers understandably thought that somebody called ‘Reg Keeland’ – the name that appears in the books – had translated Stieg Larsson’s novels, but now the secret is out as to who that pseudonymous translator is.

  ‘Yes, now that people know who I am, I find myself being asked to do far more events and talks – and even interviews such as this one. But I didn’t entirely make a secret of my dual writing n
ames. I did, in fact, leave clues on my blogs. In the end, I was outed by the London Times – I guess the copies they had received for review had my real name on.’

  I asked Murray if, when he was first translating the books, he had any notion that he was working on what was to become a publishing phenomenon. ‘Oh yes, that was perfectly clear to me, which was why I insisted that if the books were sold to an English language publisher, I would have to have a separate contract and royalties. Although I have to admit that I really had no idea quite how big the books would be in terms of sales. It seems that barely a week passes without a sales record being broken somewhere. And there are the films – the Swedish ones that have already been made, with Hollywood, inevitably, calling.

  ‘Talking about films of the books, I remember discussing with my wife in the early days the possibility of movie adaptations (even before the Swedish films were made); we would indulge in fantasy casting for the American versions – who would be cast as Lisbeth Salander, for instance. I have to say that I was very happy with the casting of Lisbeth in the Swedish version – the actress Noomi Rapace is really spot-on.

  ‘I was less happy, though, with the actor playing Blomkvist – he was a little too old and worn-out looking. And it was certainly hard to see why he was such a babe magnet, which Blomkvist certainly is in the books!’

  Murray is also known for his translations of other respected authors. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to meet several of the authors that I’ve translated in the past – such as another important Swede, Henning Mankell, for whom I translated Sidetracked, among other books. I met him twice at the Göteborg Book Fair – and although one isn’t necessarily looking for praise, it’s always nice to hear that an author is happy with what you’ve done. That, of course, is a satisfaction I will never get from Stieg Larsson, and I have to confess that it’s a source of regret for me.