STIEG DID not sit down one day at his computer and announce, “I’m going to write a crime novel!” In a way, he never even formally began to write one at all, because he never drew up an outline for the first book, or the next two, still less for the seven he intended should follow.
Stieg wrote sequences that were often unrelated to the others. Then he would “stitch” them together, following the thread of the story and his inclination.
In 2002, during a week’s island vacation, I could see he was a bit bored. I was working on my book about the Swedish architect Per Olof Hallman (1869–1941, a professional town planner), but Stieg was at loose ends, going around in circles.
So I asked him, “Haven’t you got some writing to work on?”
“No, but I was just thinking about that piece I wrote in 1997, the one about the old man who receives a flower in the mail every year at Christmas. Remember?”
“Of course!”
“I’ve been wondering for a long time what that was really all about.”
Stieg got right to it and we spent the rest of the week working outdoors on our computers, with the sea before our eyes and grass beneath our feet. Happy.
So my book and the trilogy took shape at the same time.
Contrary to what most people think, Stieg wasn’t a computer whiz, and he even used a typewriter for most of his writing life. We switched to computers only in the early 1990s, after I’d worked for a business that used them. Even at Expo, we had to call in a team of experts to protect our computers from hacking, because none of us was up to the job. And Stieg wasn’t a math nut, either, in spite of Lisbeth Salander’s fascination when she discovers Fermat’s Last Theorem in The Girl Who Played with Fire, a fascination Stieg describes over several pages here and there in the trilogy until Lisbeth loses interest in that mystery in the third volume. Actually, Stieg was always terrible at math, which almost cost him his baccalaureate exam, but the theorem typified the kind of knowledge we both loved: a heterogeneous, eccentric store of learning that wasn’t necessarily useful in life, yet delighted us. Sometimes reading a single sentence on an unfamiliar subject would inspire us to delve deeply into its mysteries. Stieg was like a sponge, absorbing everything, and without ever taking notes! For example, to come up with the clothes his characters wore, which were always described in great detail, he never consulted any catalogues or peered into any shopwindows. All he did was study fashion in the street. And he loved that. Stieg had a very personal way of dressing. Unlike most people in his milieu, who generally favored sporty casual dress for every occasion, he wore tweed jackets, elegant but inexpensive, and he adapted his style to the people and situations he encountered. He had class, without ever coming across as a dandy or a snob.
In two years, he wrote two thousand pages of the trilogy. Whether it was for Searchlight, TT, Expo, or the trilogy, he always tackled his writing with the same energy. During the first year he worked evenings and weekends, going to bed late but no more so than usual. This sometimes made life hard for me, but our saving grace was that we laughed a lot. He’d take a break, go smoke a cigarette out on the balcony, then get back to work with renewed concentration. During that last year, he was also writing during the day and in the Expo office instead of dealing with his magazine work. That was the year he worked so hard he slept barely five or six hours a night. Whenever I would reread the texts that came toward the end of the trilogy, I’d notice that he’d written them at around three or four in the morning. I believe The Millennium Trilogy had become a refuge for him.
Stieg was an artist, so he did not always have his feet planted firmly on the ground. At home, I was there, “the artist’s wife,” to take care of daily life, but at Expo things were a royal mess. Stieg was a good editor in chief for the magazine but a poor director for the foundation. Not only was he disorganized and completely on his own, but there was never enough money, either. He had no idea how to control or keep track of ongoing projects and was constantly exhausted from having to solve problems in haste and under pressure. After his death, I found a letter addressed to the foundation’s sponsors asking them once again for financial aid; dated November 7, it had never been sent. Stieg died on November 9. In the end, all the gratitude and praise heaped on Expo for its wonderful work were just words. Stieg had to fight to find a way to make it to the end of every month, and the worst part of it was—he was losing heart. He’d left TT, his severance pay was gone, and his hopes for Expo were foundering. Everything he’d believed in was going up in smoke. So he wrote and wrote. It was like therapy. He was describing Sweden the way it was and the way he saw his country: the scandals, the oppression of women, the friends he cherished and wished to honor, Grenada—that island so dear to us.… He thought out every little detail because he kept everything in his prodigious memory … and in his computer.
Without Stieg’s battles and crusades, The Millennium Trilogy would never have seen the light of day. His struggle is the heart, brain, and brawn of that saga.