the Millennium trilogy legacy

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander

Time
May 24, 2010
By Lev Grossman

The Legacy of the Dragon Tattoo

On Nov. 9, 2004, Stieg Larsson arrived at the Stockholm offices of Expo, the antifascist magazine he founded. The elevator was broken, so he had to climb seven flights of stairs instead. When he reached the top he collapsed. He was having a massive heart attack. He died before he reached the hospital.

It was a sudden, shocking death — but not a completely surprising one. Larsson was only 50, but he was a 20-Marlboro-Lights-a-day smoker with a legendary junk-food habit, and his family had a history of heart problems. The truly surprising part is what happened next.

Larsson had spent most of his life documenting the activities of fascist groups in Sweden, but at the time of his death he'd also written three unpublished crime novels, now known as the Millennium trilogy: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. They went on to become best sellers, and then international best sellers, and then a global phenomenon that has generated a fortune in royalties.

But whose fortune? With Hornet's Nest set to be released in the U.S. on May 25, Larsson's legacy remains the focus of a protracted legal dispute between his family and his companion of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson. It's become a public soap opera in Sweden, with all the elements of a literary thriller: a star-crossed romance, a missing will, a house divided and a mysterious manuscript. It's the sort of story Larsson might have written — except for the ending, which is likely to be something out of Tolstoy, maybe, or Chekhov: sadder and less satisfying.

The Boy Who Died Too Soon

Larsson was born in 1954. His father and mother were shopworkers in Umea, a small city in northern Sweden. In 1972, when he was 18, Larsson went to a demonstration against the Vietnam War, where he met Gabrielsson, a fellow protester, also 18. Two years later they moved in together, and in 1977 they left Umea for Stockholm. Larsson signed on as a reporter with a news agency, and Gabrielsson began studying the history of architecture. They were still together 32 years later when he died.

But they never married. Larsson proposed in 1983, but shortly after their engagement he was hired as the Swedish correspondent for Searchlight, a British antiracist, antifascist magazine. From that point on he was forced to keep a low profile. Fascism is a live issue in Sweden, and fascist groups have been known to attack reporters who investigate them. But informational transparency is a point of national pride there too, and married couples must make their addresses public. To stay under the radar, the couple put off their wedding indefinitely.

His résumé notwithstanding, Larsson wasn't a humorless, steel-jawed crusader. By all accounts he was a man of large and joyful appetites who loved to drink and smoke and, above all, to talk. "He wasn't at all driven," says Graeme Atkinson, Searchlight's European editor, who knew Larsson for 20 years. "He was easygoing. His curiosity about things was just so immense."

In 2002, Larsson and Gabrielsson took a vacation on an island in the Stockholm archipelago. "Stieg had nothing to do," Gabrielsson told the Los Angeles Times in late 2009. "That's when he picked up a short story he had written about an old man selling flowers who gets murdered. And that became the first chapter of Millennium."

Over the next two years he wrote 2,000 pages, with Gabrielsson kibitzing and editing. Ultimately he hoped to run the series to 10 novels in all. A Swedish publisher offered him a three-book deal. Larsson delivered the manuscripts in a plastic shopping bag. Six months later, he was dead.

Life Imitates Art

The first hint of trouble arrived in early 2005, in the form of a big brown envelope from the Swedish government. It informed Gabrielsson that Larsson's entire estate, including half of their apartment and the rights to his books, had gone to Larsson's father Erland and younger brother Joakim. She had inherited nothing.

The government's position was simple. Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, and Sweden has no common-law marriage. Larsson had asked his publisher to help him draw up a will, but it was never executed. When Gabrielsson asked the Larssons for the rights to Stieg's novels, they declined — although they did offer her a share in them. Gabrielsson refused to discuss it: it was all or nothing. Standoff.

The irony here, or one of the ironies, is that embattled, disenfranchised women are Larsson's fictional specialty. His books have two heroes. One is Mikael Blomkvist, a Larssonesque journalist, middle-aged and unmarried, like Tintin grown up and gone to seed. The other hero, and the series' salvation, is Lisbeth Salander, a young computer genius whose abusive childhood has left her a misanthropic nihilist.

Larsson's writing has a slightly robotic affectlessness — conveyed in part by his, or his translator's, apparent lack of interest in contractions — but Salander burns through the Nordic languor with her electric rage, her incandescent cleverness, her principled refusal of all emotional ties and her determination to think the worst of everybody. Much of the pleasure of reading Larsson lies in getting righteously angry on Salander's behalf.

Joakim and Erland Larsson hasten to point out that Gabrielsson wasn't cut off completely, but under the circumstances their generosity doesn't play particularly sympathetically. "When Stieg died, he had a little bit of money" — about $20,000, says Joakim. "We gave Eva that money. If you take away the books, Eva got more money when Stieg died than if they were married."

It isn't much when you look at the outlandish scale of the books' success. They've sold 3.5 million copies in Sweden alone, all the more impressive when you consider that Sweden has only about 9 million people. They were the three top-selling novels in Germany last year. They've outsold Harry Potter in France. The first two have sold 4 million copies in the U.S. The Swedish film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was the most successful release in Europe last year, and a Hollywood remake is in the works, with the role of Blomkvist reportedly offered to Brad Pitt. The Larssons say Stieg's estate is worth $15 million, although that is a very low estimate based on the many millions of books sold, not to mention the movie rights.

It's not all about money. Each side has accused the other of being incompetent in managing Larsson's legacy, and the extent of Gabrielsson's contributions to the books has also been debated. But the most hotly contested point is the nature of Larsson's relationship with his family. Gabrielsson's tale is that of a man all but estranged from his brother and father, who as soon as he was dead swooped down to loot the corpse. "I had no idea they had it in them to behave like this when money and power came along," Gabrielsson told the Daily Mail in January. "Stieg really disliked his father ... They blew the last 50 years and they still don't get it." But the Larssons tell a very different story. "I loved him very much," says Joakim. "He was a sort of hero for me. My father would speak to him once or twice a week on the phone."

Gabrielsson has little legal ammunition in this fight. Her only points of leverage are public opinion — a fan has set up a website, SupportEva.com to raise money for her — and Larsson's old laptop, which is still in her possession. On its hard drive are 200 pages of an unfinished fourth Millennium novel, which the Larssons, and most of the rest of the literate world, would love to get their hands on. In a bizarre negotiating gambit, the Larssons offered to trade her their half of the apartment for the manuscript. Gabrielsson declined. (See the top 10 news stories of 2009.)

The Larssons have made concessions. Two years ago they caved on the apartment, where Gabrielsson still lives, and last November they offered her $2.6 million to settle the matter once and for all. "I don't have a dispute with her," Joakim says. "She does with us. We want her to have a good life. If we can help her with that, then we will do it."

Gabrielsson declined again, but the conversation isn't over. "We've met a few times and discussed some issues," says Sara Pers-Krause, Gabrielsson's lawyer. "We will probably go on doing that as long as we think it's worthwhile."

Fans hungry for the missing Millennium novels have seized on the legal drama surrounding them as a substitute. But it's a poor one: if Larsson were writing the story, Gabrielsson would emerge from the fray in a satisfying blaze of vindication, re-enfranchised by some yet undreamt-of legal wrinkle or computer hackery. But the reality will probably be slower and messier, and it's unlikely to leave anybody completely satisfied. It's a strange afterlife for a man who never cared much about money. "If he saw his pictures around the world's airports and underground stations," says Atkinson, "he would have given his characteristic response: a rather wry and slightly mischievous smile." —Reported by Carla Power / London

Personal comment: I found the Millennium Trilogy an awesomely compelling read! I couldn’t wait for Hornet’s Nest to be published in the U.S. so I bought a copy from Amazon.UK before Christmas. I’m hoping to see the Swedish films of the stories. I’m not sure Hollywood will be able to capture the Scandinavian flavor of the books. Mikael Blomkvist is the male hero but the other hero, Lisbeth Salander, a near anorexic introverted computer genius and computer hacker is for me the character that makes the books come alive. As for the real world, I hope Larsson’s companion of 30+ years, Eva Gabrielsson, who helped him write the books gets her fair share of the profits from the books and films.