[JACKET COPY]
André Jute & Andrew McCoy
Stieg Larsson
Man, Myth & Mistress
who created the Millennium Trilogy of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
Is Lisbeth Salander a feminist — or a comic book avenger? Is her creator Stieg Larsson a feminist — or a prurient, violent hack? What is the Millennium Trilogy really about? Is it literature or vicarious violence and sex? Should Eva Gabrielsson be in charge of the Girl franchise? Should there be a second Salander Trilogy? Who built the Stieg Larsson myth, and is any of it true?
Best selling authors André Jute and Andrew McCoy wittily investigate the evidence — and arrive at the correct politically incorrect answers. They fix the blame for the Larsson scandal on… surprising people. Some Millennium fans will riot, most will be riotously entertained.
‘Jute is great…a private godsend.’
Ruth Rendell, The Times
The apartheid regime in South Africa twice sent assassins after Andrew McCoy, claiming his novel The Insurrectionist was a ‘blueprint for black revolution’ and a ‘handbook for the ANC’.
Like Larsson, André Jute has been a journalist and graphic designer. His novel Reverse Negative led to the exposure of the spy in the Queen’s household, Anthony Blunt. He is an acclaimed expert on the thriller, his Writing a Thriller going into three ever-expanding editions over 25 years.
André Jute &
Andrew McCoy
Stieg Larsson
Man, Myth & Mistress
who created the Millennium Trilogy of
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Girl Who Played with Fire
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest
CoolMain Press
Copyright © André Jute 2010, 2011
Copyright © Andrew McCoy 2010, 2011
The authors have asserted their moral right.
First published by CoolMain Press 2010
This revised edition
published by CoolMain Press 2011
at Smashwords
www.coolmainpress.com
ISBN 978-1-908369-03-1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the written permission of the publisher. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.
CONTENTS
Foreword
The People’s Choice
Larsson the Man
Larsson the Main Man
Made by Eva: Stieg the Feminist
The Millennium Trilogy in Outline
The Chaos of Larsson’s Structure
Mikael Blomkvist: Dissonantly Passive
Viral Didactic
Larsson’s Literary Style — What Style?
Morality, Critics and Feminists
Is Lisbeth Salander a Feminist?
Is there a Single Feminist in a House of 50m People?
Larsson’s Franchise
Why Larsson Thrills
Larsson’s Legacy
Exit Lines
Afterword: A Curious Case of Intimidating Free Speech
Acknowledgements
The Authors/Books/Reviews/Photo
Foreword
When they heard about this book, Norstedts, Larsson’s Swedish publishers, reached for lawyers without waiting to see its content. One has to wonder what Stieg Larsson would have thought of such open intimidation of free speech on his behalf. More about that unsavory episode in the Afterword.
***
As a matter beyond conjecture, if Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy had not arrived with the imprimatur of foreign sales and prizes, the English-language reviews would have been far less laudatory than they were. It is even more certain that, if Larsson had not pursued a recognizable long-term career in left-wing activism, his reception in the halls of high literature would have been highly restrained.
Of course we shall not claim in this full-length literary evaluation that Larsson stands with Dickens, as his faithful fans are apt to do. That would be ridiculous: Larsson just doesn’t write that well. But we shall argue forcefully that he doesn’t need to write that well. He tells a good story as well as any Dickens told, and that is the key. Or, to be shockingly honest, standing in the shoes of readers rather than critics, we can’t be bothered to read Dickens but we read Larsson (largely) with glee. There must be a reason, and, despite the fears of Norstedts that we will take a hatchet to their fat, we’re about to examine all sides of that reason.
Which leads us to the point of, and the need for, yet another book about Stieg Larsson. There are any number of biographies and memoirs about Larsson by his Swedish friends and enemies (and some who’re both); almost all of them are also available in translation, and some may even be reliable, though it is difficult to pick a path through the ego-driven claims and counterclaims. But there is nothing to guide the reader who wants to go deeper into Larsson’s books; perhaps a few moviegoers who still cling to the auteur theory may be satisfied with Freudian projection from brief biographical notes, but what about the vast majority of rational readers? Several years after the eruption of a literary phenomenon there is no straightforward literary evaluation of Larsson’s work.
As a teacher of creative writing I (Jute) long since gave up expostulating in front of unwieldy groups of aspirants and instead instruct through my books for other writers and by working with a handful of protégé. Perhaps out of guilt, every few years the dutiful thought arrives that I should occasionally commit time to a full-length analysis of another writer’s oeuvre, but the lure of my own current project is always too strong. The truth is that by choice I read thrillers, and there are not all that many thriller writers with enough work around a central theme that I find interesting, and those who do offer a corpus both interesting and substantial (Deighton, Condon, McCarry, Reginald Hill, more recently Temple) have generally been treated with the respect they deserve by the literary press; no counterbalance is required.
Enters Stieg Larsson. Despite the appearance to the contrary created by his enormous sales, Larsson is a true outlier. For one thing, given the constrictions of the publishing trade, Larsson shouldn’t have succeeded at all, never mind so spectacularly; the success of his Millennium Trilogy is the true expression and proof of the power of consumer choice. For another, to be brutal, Larsson’s output is limited by his early death, and further books are therefore unlikely to prove us wrong retrospectively in our judgments on his Millennium Trilogy, always a risk with a living author liable to continuous reassessment with retrospective echoes.
Thus we’re writing a literary evaluation of Larsson because we would like to read it and none is available, because it is necessary, because it is worthwhile, and because Larsson’s work uniquely exudes a sense of urgency that makes this commentary personally satisfying. There is, too, a particular if small sense that it is a moral thing to do; not many literary ventures these days have that justification!
That panickers should reach for lawyers on mere rumor of this book is another incentive; an intellectual should count his enemies with pride as the measure of his righteousness, and if he finds none backtrack to when he sold out.
***
Well, that’s the long story. As we shall see, in literature almost no motive is clear and straightforward, and the longer the story the less simple its driving force. So, how about this:
I (Jute) bought a Kindle to read in the bath to save my wrists from heavy reference books and heavier novels. Then I remembered I own the electronic rights to all my books, and decided to publish one or more of them as electronic books on the Kindle. But scanning and copy-editing a long book is a big deal, so I decided on the shortcut of a brand-new monograph written from scratch to test the process. Then I found Larsson so fascinating that the monograph just grew and grew until it assumed the size of a book. Since time was short, I needed help, and anyway an African expert was required to sort out Larsson’s fantasies, which are unquestioningly repeated by his promoters and journalists. Enters Andrew McCoy.
Both origins are true. Both happened at the same time. Literature is like that, very confused in its origination and development.
***
These pages contain more than the literary evaluation promised by the title, which by itself would not amount to more than a long monograph. The interest in literary criticism of the novelist and teacher of writing is often at a tangent to that of your standard literary critic, whose very point — with editorial complaisance — is not about the book she’s reviewing but an attempt to demonstrate how clever she is, and the longer the review, the closer it approaches that most precious of formats, the essay with its punch line in the very last sentence, the truer this becomes. It is for this reason that all my life when I (Jute) perpetrated journalism, I’ve generally avoided literary criticism as an unfair art, instead bringing my critical faculties to bear on the performing arts — not always fairly, unfortunately: criticism is the art of elegant cruelty.
So here we go further than the usual critical overview in that we also analyze the mechanisms by which Larsson achieves his effects. We do this secure in the knowledge that readers of Larsson’s books will find their enjoyment heightened by the insider’s delight in knowing the training tricks by which the author marshals his characters, events, impressions and subtexts, a whole menagerie of oddly interesting animals.
We’ve deliberately made this book as short as we could while still doing a thorough job; it could be three times the length by simply multiplying the examples. It seems to us there’s a fresh audience out there for a critical evaluation of Larsson, and it’s a different audience from the usual audience for literary criticism in that they’re readers, but not professional readers; they’re less likely than your standard literary professional to stand still for iterative ‘in-depth’ bullshit. Larsson’s most committed fans should take a friendly warning: while we’re fans, just like you, this is not an adulatory fanzine but a critical evaluation. Our target reader is the one who read and enjoyed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo or the whole Millennium Trilogy, and who would like to know how novels with so many obvious faults manage at the same time to please so much. We can help you find the answer.
For the same reason, that we hope to attract a lay audience, there are no impenetrable technical words, no irrational French theories loaded with chameleon-meanings, no academic pretensions, no footnotes, no references. Stieg Larsson was a storyteller and his words were good words — and good enough too for discussing his stories, so that’s what we’ll do.
Enjoy!
André Jute
Co Cork, Eire
September-December 2010
The People’s Choice
On 25 October 2010 Jeremy Paxman, the poster child of elitism in Britain, asked two panels on a television quiz show to identify the author of the Millennium Trilogy. The two panels were from heritage universities, St Andrews and St John College, Cambridge, made up of students confidently expected to be the future leaders of the professions and key institutions in their countries, perhaps of their nations. The quiz was University Challenge, one of the defining presentations of the national broadcaster’s intellectually upmarket outlet, BBC2. The questions are normally so difficult that only students from the best universities are expected to be able to answer them; a compendium of three thousand questions from the show is widely thought to be the perfect gift for masochists who relish frustration. But now and again, probably as a sop to the audience, an easy question is thrown in, usually about popular culture. The author of the Millennium Trilogy, after three years of topping bestseller lists around the world, on this Monday night was the easy question.
When the eight privileged students between them failed to name Stieg Larsson, the nation, indeed several nations because BBC2 is widely available by satellite, groaned in despair at their lack of street cred. Their total lack of credibility was confirmed when they failed in the same line of questioning — posthumous hits — to identify the voices of either John Lennon or Roy Orbison. Paxman’s lip, the most expressive weapon in the armory of a master of disdain, turned devastatingly. So much for the connection of the junior intelligentsia to popular culture.
No one else was as uninformed as those poor students. For the three thrillers by Stieg Larsson are a phenomenon of popular culture, with book sales heading for 50 million copies worldwide arguably at the end of the first decade of the millennium the most popular cultural artifacts available in the incredibly varied spectrum of entertainment on offer.
However, among the thoughtful there are expressions of amazement about Larsson’s popularity fueled by a wide variety of observations, some of which we shall discuss where they touch on literary matters rather than arising from snobbery or — let’s face it — the sour jealousy which success so often inspires. One of these reservations is of immediate interest because it overwhelms all others. It is so important that we’ve already touched on it in the Foreword, as a reason for writing this book: ‘given the constrictions of the publishing trade, Larsson shouldn’t have succeeded at all, never mind so spectacularly; the success of his Millennium Trilogy is the true expression and proof of the power of consumer choice.’
In short, it should never have happened.
No one on the inside expected more than moderate success for Larsson’s trilogy. This is not a conspiracy theory.
This is Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner of 32 years, on their expectations of the Millennium Trilogy on signature of the contract for Men Who Hate Women (as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was then called):‘We thought, if we're lucky it will sell in Scandinavia and Germany.’ These are now described as ‘modest’ dreams; in fact they are far more than most first authors, even thriller writers, can hope for — but there is nothing here about a wild worldwide success. ‘Our plan was that the income from the first book would go to us and that we would use it, depending on its size, to pay off our loans, and to get a summer cottage in the archipelago. The money from the next six or seven we would donate to our causes.’
All right, perhaps a minority magazine editor and an architectural historian wouldn’t have a proper understanding of popular book publishing. Don’t believe a word of it. Instead listen to three of the four experienced publishing professionals who made all the key decisions in the Larsson Affair:
Eva Gedin is Larsson’s editor at the major Swedish publishing house Norstedts, his publisher of record (i.e. first publisher). She decided to publish his books and gave them their final shape. Gedin, above all, is Larsson’s champion. She says, even with hindsight, ‘To introduce a brand-new crime novelist like this, someone who is unknown, our goal was to sell 20,000 copies, but we thought 10,000 would be marvelous.’ She admits, ‘We could never imagine that the books would do so well.’
Mark Smith is CEO of Quercus, whose MacLehose Press imprint acquired the global English language rights to the Millennium Trilogy, then suffered painful second thoughts. He says, ‘That Larsson had passed away was a problem, as publicity is very important in getting a new book off the ground. There are tough themes in the book and many were put off by the title [which then was Men Who Hate Women]. It's also rare that a European success translates into the English-speaking market.’ Referring to the fact that the off-putting title was the one thing Gedin failed to persuade Larsson to change, Smith adds that, ‘If Larsson were alive, we probably would never have snapped up the rights.’ One assumes that Smith speaks for Christopher MacLehose, the editor who is the fourth key decision-maker in the saga, the man who thought up the new, catchier title.
As if that is not enough, here is the hugely experienced Sonny Mehta, publisher and editor-in-chief of Knopf. He acquired American rights in the Millennium Trilogy, after the books were already vastly successful in Europe, for what with hindsight seems ‘a very modest sum.’ Then he worried that he paid too much, that the books might not succeed in the United States! ‘I had nightmares that we would be the only country where the books didn’t work.’
Remember, these remarks are made in the full retrospective knowledge that Larsson’s novels indeed pulled in profits like a runaway train. These experienced and no doubt proud executives are admitting that they don’t know their trade as well as they thought, that they were taken by surprise. The surprising truth is that the best publishers relish being surprised by books that take off because they understand that the condition is one of the happier concomitants of a career in the arts; it’s the formula publishers who put out a constant stream of the same dull book who are never surprised.
Larsson and his Millennium Trilogy thus had multiple counts against them even as the rights to the hugely important English-language markets changed hands.
First of all, Larsson was not only a Swede, but also dead. Publishers claim they take their cut of the book’s income for editorial skill and services and for their marketing expertise. The first part is still true at the better publishing houses: they do offer fine editorial skills and services. The second part is a lie publishers tell to all but the very top one tenth of one per cent of their authors, and always have; publishers don’t promote any but runaway bestsellers by established names, and of those they generally make a bad job by the standards of anyone with wider experience, say in household brands advertising, where the stakes and the skills are both much higher. Generally speaking, promotion is up to the author. If he’s in Sweden, he can’t promote his book in the United Kingdom or the United States or Australia. If he’s dead he can’t promote his book at all.
Secondly, Larsson was a Swede. Swedish novels have for yonks been driven by guilt-riven depressives with zero social skills, very little to identify with for readers looking for entertainment. Yes, you’re right, of course you and we, and fifty million other readers, now know Larsson’s books weren’t like that, but these publishers were faced by the necessity of getting that knowledge out. It isn’t enough to stand on a soapbox, which is generally just the publisher’s netsite and catalogue, and say, ‘My author is different, not like those other depressing Swedes.’ For a start, no one reads those things, and the few who do don’t believe anything a publisher says: in their view a publisher is a person who spends every working hour rubbing shoulders with novelists, professional liars all, and some of that professional lying is bound to rub off.
Thirdly, Larsson’s material was different. His gestalt of Sweden — the image you’re left with after finishing the books — was not the cornfields-and-Ikea socialist paradise (with maggots) of the Swedish writers already translated and popular in a certain slice of the middle class intelligentsia. That sort of quantum shift is more easily accepted from a proven, familiar writer, not from a raw newcomer. Readers do not easily sacrifice their preconceptions, and a truth too far has sunk many a perfectly good book.
Fourthly, Larsson’s material was difficult in several ways. The rape scene by itself is problematic for its violence, there is a scene in an asylum that comes very close to child abuse, and other violent scenes are hardly less troubling. The rape scene (indeed the whole set of novels) was also clearly likely to attract feminist outrage; there is always someone who will label any portrayal of violence, against anyone, not just women, as an encouragement or, even worse, vicarious participation by author and readers.
Fifthly, didactic thrillers just don’t wash in English, whatever they may do in the Continental languages, and Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was avowedly didactic, driven by his outrage at the abuse of women. Again, this is no problem once so many people knew and would say that the trilogy is a jolly good thrill, but the publishers were faced with another initial gulf to overcome.
There’s more, some of it more serious if less dramatic, but this isn’t a publishing marketing seminar, and that select list should be enough to persuade the general reader and fan who doesn’t work in marketing that there were indeed serious problems to overcome for any publisher bringing Stieg Larsson’s trilogy to market.
Against these demerits on a publisher’s balance sheet were a few advantages:
Larsson was dead. He couldn’t complain when the totally uncommercial title was changed (by Christopher MacLehose) from Men Who Hate Women to the much more attractive and, some would say, more accurate The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
The price for the rights, given the success the books already achieved, was not high. Publishers of foreign books in English translation always keep one eye on the prestige the association brings as well as the likely profits, which in most cases are not much and often negative.
There were already international prizes for Larsson, and they’re always useful both for promotion and for prestige.
The advantages didn’t amount to much, but it was something; the vast majority of books, whether created in English or translated into English, start with vastly less to recommend them, even when the story and its telling are both good. It goes without saying that the editors (MacLehose and Mehta are both first and foremost editors) who championed the Millennium Trilogy in English are excellent judges of a storyteller’s capability and power. It should be obvious from the above lists of pros and cons that their doubt wasn’t about the quality of the goods but about selling the books into a resistant market.
So how did we move in fewer than a handful of years from those publishing conundrums to where we stand now, heading for 50 million Millennium Trilogy sales at the end of 2010, and further records beyond? This is one of the most interesting questions we’ll discuss, for at the heart of the answer lies one of the great turning points of popular culture in the relationship between readers and publishers and author or, more particularly, a great lost opportunity, as we shall see.
The answer is slowly and unevenly, and then with increasing speed to intergalactic acceleration. The MacLehose Press print run for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was 8000 copies. Bookseller resistance to the author and the material was, as Mark Smith predicted, so great that the desperate publisher ran around leaving copies of the novel in the backs of taxis and on Tube trains in an effort to get some word of mouth started, just a small spark he hoped to work up into a buzz.
The American edition faced the same problems, except worse because American publishing is more concentrated than the British version and such inbreeding comes at the price of stupidity in conglomerates same as it does in human families, but let’s not belabor the obvious.
What saved these publishers’ investments, and turned Larsson into a worldwide phenomenon, was that the internet reached maturity as everyman’s voice a few years earlier. First there was a trickle of anglophones with European friends being told to look out for this new author when he was translated into English, joining with the word of mouth from copies picked up in taxis and on the Underground.
Then the blogs, particularly powerful in America, joined in.
There is an additional, extraordinary factor, a concatenation of electronics, timing and luck for Larsson. Amazon launched the Kindle, their e-book reader, in 2007 and it slowly built up sales and a market and electronic books to read on it. But the breakthrough came with a price drop for the second edition of the Kindle in 2009 and then a vastly superior third edition of the Kindle at a stunning price in 2010, the latter two events coinciding with the sequential launch of the Millennium Trilogy.
Suddenly there were five million Kindles out there, each in the hands of a reader wielding direct purchasing power entirely independent of what publishers decided to send to bookstores, entirely independent of what bookstores decided to give shelf space to, entirely independent of what their self-appointed betters though they should be reading, deciding for themselves on the large samples from books, including the Millennium Trilogy, that Amazon made available free of charge. They could decide entirely for themselves which e-book they wanted to buy, press one button, and sixty seconds later be reading the book. No waiting. Instant gratification.
One million of them chose to buy the novels in Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.
They didn’t just choose the novels and read them. They chattered on Amazon reviews about how good they found Larsson, on hundreds of forums and notice boards and newsgroups and by personal e-mail and on Facebook and by RSS and blogs and Twitter and God alone knows what else, all of it instantly disseminated around the world, automatically translated and further disseminated, commented on, acted on, neighborhood word-of-mouth suddenly magnified planet wide. The few lucky finders of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in London taxis or on the Tube surged in a handful of months to a million voices.
The vendors of tree books, bookstores, followed the sales, ordered the books, gave them prominent shelf space, and the publishers reprinted.
The rest, as they say, is history.
It was pure word of mouth that did it. If Quercus was not (then) a publisher so small that the CEO could personally take an interest in creating word of mouth by ‘forgetting’ copies of Larsson’s book in taxis and on the Underground trains, if the internet and its blogs were not there, if Amazon had not launched the Kindle and promoted the hell out of it, Larsson would have become just another Swede translated into English to sink without a trace. But the mechanism for word of mouth was there, the publishers managed to get enough copies to it to prime the pump, and the people voted with their money for Stieg Larsson, Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander.
Larsson the man
The ideal in literary criticism is to let the writer’s text speak for itself. That is not always possible for good reasons. But most often the principle is breached because ‘critics’ are lazy journalists, or venal, or so badly educated they don’t know any better; in all these cases ‘criticism’ is generally mere celebrity-speak journalism. It gets worse. There is a school of ‘criticism’, of French origin, which proceeds from the assumption that the biographical interpretation of the author’s life is much more important than the literary text. The ultimate silliness, French of course, is the belief that the critic is in some slitheringly elusive way the principal creator because without him the writer ‘does not come into existence’.
Of the outside influences for which one can make a good case for inclusion in literary criticism, historical milieu is always the most obvious and most necessary. Next most common is, perhaps surprisingly, the correction of myths created by the miscreants in the first paragraph, plus their beneficiaries among the marketers — and publishers are marketers, exactly like soap-sellers. Of course those with a financial stake will not accept ‘correction’ but instead will rage against what they will claim is iconoclasm. Merely on seeing the cover, without even asking to read the contents of this book, Norstedts, Larsson’s Swedish publishers, told us they were approaching lawyers for comment, which from our perspective looks like the first cousin to intimidation of free speech. Perhaps we should say attempted intimidation. We’ve been intimidated by experts with all the force of sovereign governments behind them. We’re here and they aren’t. But Norstedts’ attitude broadcasts their belief that Larsson — and their profits — have a godlike right to be above analysis, never mind criticism.
The character Mikael Blomkvist in the Millennium Trilogy is deliberately very closely identified with his creator, Stieg Larsson, and, despite what you might hear about Salander driving the novels, structurally Blomkvist is the initiator, the driver of the ‘plot’; Salander is merely a more striking and marketable character than the dull fornicator Blomkvist. We therefore need at least a brief biography of ascertainable facts about Larsson, and a discussion of Larsson’s own mythmaking and sincerity, before we can even start on the accretions of myth overlaid like pancake make-up by Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner of 32 years, who is fighting to control the rights to his books (which were inherited by his father and brother), various ‘friends’ of the late Stieg Larsson cashing in on his fame, publishers generating publicity any way they can into shrinking space for book promotion, and gullible journalists hungry for ‘the personal touch’.
***
These are the important verifiable facts about Larsson’s life.
Karl Stig-Erland Larsson was born on 15 August 1954 in Sweden at Skelleftehamn outside Skellefteå, in the northern county of Västerbotten, on the Gulf of Bothnia. His parents moved to Stockholm to find work, his father Erland as a window dresser, his mother Vivianne in a dress shop, so Stig was raised by his grandparents. Severin Boström, his grandfather, was a Communist incarcerated during World War Two for his strong anti-Nazi views. (Erland Larsson today says diplomatically that no one in the family can confirm that Severin was imprisoned in the notorious work camp Storsien…) When Larsson was nine, his grandfather died and he went to stay with his parents in Stockholm. Later they returned to Västerbotten, to the town of Umeå.
Erland, who for a while worked beside his father in a dark and dangerous factory, too became a Communist for a while ‘to survive’, and Stig’s mother Evianne would later become well-known as a Social Democrat; they were a political family.
Both parents were readers of crime fiction and they tried to inculcate the reading habit into their two sons, Stig and his younger brother Joakim. ‘Stieg’s mother and I were anxious that our children should read,’ says Erland Larsson. ‘You have company with books.’ Young Stig read Tolkien. He was interested in astronomy. At 12 Stig wrote a novel in a notebook. For his thirteenth birthday he was given a typewriter with which he kept the family awake, writing into the night; a cellar was rented for him to write in from which he emerged to ‘eat and talk politics’, first winning a political argument with his father when he was fourteen.
By 1972 young Stig was a published writer, the publisher of sci-fi fanzine of which he concocted the first issue with Rune Forsgren. There would be about 30 further issues, and Larsson would also be active as a board member of the sci-fi society, ending up in 1980 as chairman of Sweden’s largest science fiction fan club, Skandinavisk Förening för Science Fiction (SFSF).
Meanwhile, in parallel: From leftwing politics followed an anti-Vietnam War stance; demonstrating against the war was what Swedish teenagers did on Saturday nights. This led to Stig’s career in journalism, as he started writing about the Vietnam War, and to the love of his life, Eva Gabrielsson, whom he met at a rally against the Vietnam War in 1972. Two years later they moved in together and would be a couple for most of the next three decades.
In 1975/76 Larsson did his compulsory military service, receiving basic military training with the infantry regiment at Umeå.
He worked as a political activist for the Communist Workers League (Kommunistiska Arbetareförbundet) and as a photographer. He was editor of Fjärde Internationalen (Fourth International), the Swedish Trotskyists’ journal. and published articles in the weekly Internationalen.
Larsson changed the spelling of his first name to Stieg to avoid confusion as a photographer with his friend Stig Larsson, also a photographer; Stig and Stieg are pronounced the same. (Stieg claims that they flipped a coin to decide who should change his name; Stig disputes it…) We grasp here a sense of young men aware that they stood before a limitless future in which they expected to achieve something notable. Ironically Stig the photographer would go on to find fame as an author before Stieg the already published writer and graphic designer.
In 1977 Larsson traveled to Africa. We look below into the mythologizing of a backpacking holiday. A will, unwitnessed and therefore invalid under Swedish law, he drew before departing left everything to the Umeå branch of the Communist Workers League (now the Socialist Party).
On his return to Stockholm and to Gabrielsson, Larsson worked in the post office until he found a job as a graphic designer at the largest Swedish news agency, Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå (TT), and stayed there until 1999, rising to be pictures editor.
From the early 1980s Larsson was a correspondent of Searchlight, the British anti-fascist magazine, and this led him in 1995 after the murder of eight people by Swedish neo-Nazis to establish the Swedish Expo Foundation, on the model of the British Searchlight Foundation, ‘to counteract the growth of the extreme right and the white power-culture in schools and among young people.’ The Foundation publishes a magazine also called Expo, which like many of its type never in Larsson’s lifetime achieved financial stability. From 1999 Larsson was its editor-in-chief.
Larsson published several non-fiction books, starting with Extremhögern (Right-wing extremism) in 1991. His co-author, Anna-Lena Lodenius, said after Larsson attained fame as novelist that even at this time he talked about writing a series of crime novels. His other non-fiction books are Sverigedemokraterna: Den Nationella Rörelsen (Swedish Democrats: The Nationalist Movement) with Mikael Ekman and Överleva Deadline: Handbok för Mordhotade Journalister (usually translated as Surviving the Deadlines: A Handbook for Threatened Journalists though the meaning is really ‘under threat of death’) for the National Union of Journalists.
Larsson’s activism, articles and books attracted the attention of the media and he became a talking head on television, which in turn attracted the attention of far-right, racist and neo-Nazi groups to him: death threats were issued, and Larsson’s name and the address of Gabrielsson’s apartment, which he shared, was found when the police arrested a neo-Nazi suspected of a political murder.
Larsson started writing the Millennium Trilogy (he never called it that!) on a sailing holiday with Gabrielsson in 2002 and continued writing for relaxation after work. He didn’t approach a publisher until shortly before his death and, after being rejected by another publisher, contracted with Norstedts, the largest Scandinavian publisher, which also has a substantial in-house agency for selling the foreign rights of Norstedts authors.
Larsson died of a heart attack on 9 November 2004, ironically the anniversary of the Kristallnacht, the 1938 general pogrom of Jews in Germany. He was not killed by any enemies he had made, except if their names were 60 hand-rolled cigarettes a day, lakes of coffee, and irregular meals of junk food.
He was not married, he left no children and no valid will. Under Swedish law his estate went to his father Erland and brother Joakim, the only survivors of his family, rather than to Eva Gabrielsson, his partner for most of his last 32 years. She through public pressure and the courts tried to gain control over the literary rights to the Millennium Trilogy, with literary by-effects we shall meet at several points.
Larsson left three complete novels and part of a fourth novel, plus (perhaps) an unknown amount of ‘notes’ which may be outlines for more novels. The first of Larsson’s novels was published in Sweden in 2005 as Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women), with the title changed on publication in English to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. It won the prestigious Glass Key as the best Nordic crime novel of 2005. Larsson’s second novel, Flickan som lekte med elden (The Girl Who Played with Fire), won the Best Swedish Crime Novel Award of 2006. Larsson’s third novel, Luftslottet som sprängdes (The Air Castle That was Blown Up), changed on publication in English to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest, was published in Sweden in 2007. The Millennium Trilogy has been widely translated and has received prestigious awards in translation, including in English. Sales of the books are heading for 50 million copies. Swedish films of the three novels produced by Yellow Bird started going on release in 2009; big budget Hollywood remakes are in progress. As posthumous success stories go, right now only Jesus is bigger.
These are the only important facts about Larsson that are verifiable. Check how short this chapter is, even with the lengthy introduction it comes to only three-quarters the length of most other chapters. Everything else is unverified, and usually unverifiable, mythmaking by Larsson himself, by those with something to gain (publishers, Gabrielsson) and by the naïve shills among the journalists. It is to the Larsson Myths that we turn next.
Larsson the Main Man
My books wouldn’t have sold half as well if people didn’t think I’d done all those things.
— Gilderoy Lockhart
— from J. K. Rowling’s
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Eva Gabrielsson, partner to Stieg Larsson for 32 years, is outraged at the ‘mythology’ being built up around him. 'There is the Stieg that I know, and then the Millennium Stieg who developed after the books were published. Painful myths are being made up about him by people who knew him very little.’
One would sympathize with her more readily were it not that the main mythologizers are—Stieg Larsson and Eva Gabrielsson! The rest are just cashing in on a made mythology. We don’t have space even for all the obvious examples so a few of the more glaring ones will have to suffice. Here’s one where the myth was started by Larsson himself, and is now being perpetrated by one of his friends and his publishers, for profit, unchallenged by ‘investigative’ journalists, indeed gleefully abetted by the media.
We learn in Afterword, a book sold by MacLehose Press as part of a boxed Millennium Trilogy set, that Larsson told his friend John Henri Holmberg that he visited Eritrea ‘to train a company of female guerillas in the use of grenade launchers’. A whole ‘company of female guerillas’ is an amazing entity as the Eritrean guerillas were largely Muslim, the Christians having been effectively bribed by Haile Selassie and his successor government. As for the organization of a ‘company’ of any gender with grenade launchers, an African insurrection isn’t the Swedish Army about its exercises, with orderly lines in front of the armory sergeant standing by the quartermaster truck. No one supplied those guerillas with crateloads of grenade launchers, and enough grenades to practice with; they took whatever grenade launchers they could find from Ethiopian soldiers, used them immediately against other Ethiopian soldiers until they ran out of ammunition, then dropped them; Africa is dotted with battlefields of such expensive litter among the bones. These are surely obvious matters to any journalist bright enough to switch on the BBC World Service, if not to celebrity gossip pushers. What can journalists be thinking of, unthinkingly reiterating this ludicrous claim?
It sounds rather as if the young Larsson entertained romantic notions from his Marxist reading of resurrecting at least in myth the 1st Petrograd Women’s Battalion, the so-called Women’s Battalion of Death, who figured large in Soviet revisionist historiography about the October Revolution. (The truth is that from their key position on the first floor of the Winter Palace overlooking Millionnaya Street, on the glorious day they refused to support Trotsky, sending him a message that, ‘We signed up to fight Germans at the Front, not our brother Russians at home,’ — it appears they, early feminists, were miffed at having to share their cushy billet with Cossacks of the 14th Don Regiment!)
In 2006 Erland Larsson told Norra Västerbotten that the young Stig washed dishes and sold his clothes to afford a ticket home from Algeria. From the young man’s father that has the ring of truth; we can imagine the parents agonizing over each postcard home. Algeria is a long way from Eritrea across several of the most dangerous countries in the world; Libya being impassibly defended, he would have had to cross the deep interior of Algeria itself, extremely dangerous away from the Frenchified coastal strip, Niger, Chad and the Sudan. In all those places in those years, and today, a lone white man is a target for simply being there, and that’s in peacetime; North Africa didn’t feature big in the CIA’s 1977 Peace Almanac. But there appears not to be a single journalist with his brain in gear to ask how Larsson, a soft kid from Sweden, traveled from the Mediterranean coast of Algeria to Eritrea with his backpack — and made it alive! Since Larsson was later so interested in the sex trade, it is amazing if he was ever on that road that he didn’t see the Arab slave traders who openly run slaves across it—then and still—from West Africa to the markets in the East; surely he would have said something about so signal an experience? No one seems to have asked how Larsson entered Eritrea, a country under martial law, or survived there, sticking out like a sore thumb in a place where a Swede would automatically be taken for a mercenary and tortured to death without a trial. Or how the ELPF, once Larsson performed his function of training that mythical ‘women’s company’, managed to spare the manpower and the transport (guerilla fighting in Eritrea is mostly carried out on foot) to see him safely back to Algeria. The Guardian, a left-leaning British paper, claims to have confirmation of this Eritrean adventure from a British anti-fascist magazine Larsson wrote for:
Graeme Atkinson, the European editor of Searchlight magazine, yesterday confirmed Larsson had traveled to Eritrea to help in the independence movement. ‘Stieg was a revolutionary socialist and he believed in a better life, and equality for all,’ he said. ‘The fact there was crushing poverty in Africa appalled him.’
So where is the proof we are promised? Who did Atkinson hear it from? Larsson himself? Show us an independent eyewitness who doesn’t waffle platitudes! As it stands this is another failure of investigative journalism, precisely the sort of journalistic complicity in commercial icon-building that we are earnestly assured Larsson railed against, and that his alter ego Blomkvist condemns in the Millennium Trilogy; in the example above Atkinson, instead of being forced to tell us the truth, which is that he doesn’t know, is permitted to get away with a discursive, irrelevant answer built entirely out of politically correct generic clichés, which is then unblushingly presented as affirmative proof.
The Guardian article, incidentally, is illustrated with a photo of a teenage black girl holding an AK 47 over her shoulder, clearly described as ‘a female Eritrean guerilla’. The background is a freshly- and well-painted suburban door and wall, and varnished wood slats, middleclass garden corner fitting out. Apparently no one told the Guardian that Eritrea is one of the poorest countries in the world, or that guerilla fighting is a grubby business. Everything the ‘guerilla’ wears is beautifully clean. Only a Guardian reader will believe in an African guerilla who looks like an advertisement for soap powder. The model herself has skin-lightening cream on her face. In the middle of a civil war, under martial law, with the ports and the border closed, who would have imported and sold skin lightening cosmetics in Eritrea? The authors (Jute and McCoy) spent decades in Africa and never saw a guerilla like this Sloane Square wet dream. One would think that for the illustration to an article about the now-famous picture editor of a major news agency, the Guardian’s picture editor would have gone the extra mile to find a less obviously fake photograph. It is as if the Guardian tells its readers, Look, we know the story is very likely fraudulent, but you limmo libs have never shown the slightest gumption for the truth before, so here’s an unbelievable piccie to go with it, just to rub in the offense.
There’s another anomaly about Larsson’s Eritrean ‘adventure’ that any diligent researcher would have uncovered. It is common in parts of Africa where monogamy is scorned as ‘single grazing’ to describe a genital drip as a ‘small cold in the kidneys’ or in more sophistical circles as a ‘kidney infection’. But Holmberg blandly assures us that Larsson had a good reason for not dying young on the guns of Soviet-equipped Ethiopian soldiers, to wit that ‘he also contracted a kidney inflammation and was forced to leave the country.’ Don’t you just love that ‘also’? Makes one wonder if those presumably Muslim girls (‘women’ my foot; those irredentists used impressed child soldiers, as elsewhere in Africa) Larsson taught explosively to dismember their fellow men were over the Swedish age of consent… So now we have a sick Swedish mercenary who, after his usefulness is ended, in the middle of the civil war in Eritrea has to be moved out of a country under martial law, over a mountainous border, through the civil war in Sudan with its bands of roving government-backed killers, past two flash wars on the Sudan-Chad and Chad-Niger borders sparked by the civil war in between, across Niger where a paranoid new dictatorship was still suppressing opposition, all of it along thousands of miles of unimaginably poor roads patrolled by brigands, then through the dangerous depth of Algeria to the coast — so that he can wash dishes and sell his clothes for a ticket home. We’re confused; please explain to us why the Eritrean guerillas didn’t just kill him; what was the life of a Swedish mercenary against their cause?
It’s manure-quality bullshit. Publishers are growing a money tree in it. Newspapers, and not only the doormats of the trendy left like the Guardian, are gleefully assisting them. Publishing, the ninth largest industry in the world and the most international of trades, is apparently immune from the strictures on other for-profit corporations and multinationals. One of the most striking features of the Larsson Phenomenon is how the larger hypocrisies must grow smaller hypocrisies to account for the inconsistencies.
***
Here’s another political fantasy. Larsson writes to Eva Gedin, his editor at the Swedish publisher Norstedts, to justify the long, painfully irrelevant digression set in Grenada in the second volume of the Millennium Trilogy, the Girl who Played with Fire:
I have been thinking a bit about the introduction and the tornado that devastated Grenada. We have resurrected the Grenada Committee here in Sweden as a result of the hurricane, so I will be able to consult the Consul. I was involved in the revolution in Grenada in the 1980s, and was a good friend of the murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. But that’s another story.
Bishop, leader of the Marxist New Jewel Movement, became Prime Minister of the People’s Revolutionary Government by deposing the democratically elected Sir Eric Gairy in a paramilitary coup in 1979. A Cuban ally and an arms client of the Soviet Union who suspended the constitution and ruled by decree, Bishop was deposed by an even more pro-Soviet military coup and shot in October 1983.
Gedin, whom we shall repeatedly observe failing to ask the hard questions editors are supposed to ask even of the most charming of authors, should have counted on her fingers and asked if 1979 wasn’t the year Larsson worked at the Swedish Post Office until he joined the TT news agency. Where did he find the time to join a revolution halfway around the world? How did he even find out about the coup d’etat in time to reach Grenada and take part in it? One has to wonder whether Gedin, who at least notionally earns her living from the meaning of words, reflected on the difference between a ‘revolution’, which is what Larsson claims, and a coup d’etat, which is what actually happened. That sort of coup d’etat happens when a jeep and a truck full of soldiers drive up to Government House and tell the premier he’s under arrest. It isn’t planned too far in advance, and certainly it isn’t signaled halfway around the world to Sweden. Why should Bishop want some 25 year-old kid from the Swedish post office hanging around, even one presumed to be favorably inclined? Why should he hold up his revolution until the 25 year-old kid from the Swedish post office can book air passage to come posture heroically? Above all, where are the articles telling us of Larsson’s heroic deeds in the revolution even in the Trotskyist journals Larsson controlled, never mind distributed by TT, where he would shortly start work? Surely a young journalist, especially one who controls a magazine, who takes part in a revolution publishes an account of it?
It’s clearly more manure-grade crap, but Gedin lets it pass as a rationale for putting a novella-length Grenada tourist promotion digression into one of Larsson’s novels, MacLehose would later publish this pretty obvious lie without comment in Afterword, and hundreds of journalists, without asking a single question, would salivate over it as adding color to a celebrity.
The journalists who shamed themselves included some who really should know better: Do the editors of the East Africa Forum, subtitled ‘News from the Horn of Africa’, truly not know how difficult it was to reach Eritrea in 1977, or what conditions there were like, or the unlikelihood of a formal ‘company’ of lady grenade launchers? They should find out, fast, or call their ‘forum’ something less inaccurate and risible. At the very least Larsson’s unreliability on Eritrea should give those who put themselves forward as experts on ‘the Horn of Africa’ pause for thought when Larsson claims participation in another revolution on the other side of the world. Instead, the East Africa Forum without any qualification reprints this Grenada silliness from the leftwing Tribune Magazine, together with the Eritrean claims. Another ‘authority’ bites the dust in its hurry to jump on the Larsson bandwagon.
***
We’ve already seen that the other Stig Larsson, the photographer and first-famous author, denies Stieg Larsson’s account of flipping a coin to decide which one would change his name. For a storyteller, a novelist, that can be dismissed as minor embroidery of a good tale, an over-colored detail. But inflating the threat his grandfather Severin Boström posed to the authorities by upgrading his incarceration to the notorious work-camp Storsien — which Erland Larsson, who was alive during that time, diplomatically says no one in the family can confirm — is simply a lie whether from a novelist or a journalist. There is also a problem with the account of Larsson being given ‘commando training’ by the Swedish Army. We don’t know of a single armed force anywhere in the world which would give specialist instruction in guerilla fighting — for that is what commandos do — to a known ‘card-carrying Trotskyite’ agitator like Larsson who, according to Holmgren, was ‘smuggling the underground Trotskyite magazine Röd Soldat into the barracks.’ And, even if the Swedish military were stupid enough to train up street fighters chosen from those who openly threatened to destabilize the society the military were sworn to protect, there is no point in giving such training to conscripts like Larsson; commando-training is expensive in money and time, and in peacetime therefore reserved for the elite of professional soldiers.