THE MILLENNIUM Trilogy is a catalogue of all forms of violence and discrimination endured by women.
When he was a teenager in Umeå, Stieg was devastated by a dramatic incident that marked him for life. One weekend, he witnessed the gang rape of a girl at a campground. Some of the rapists were friends of his, and he refused to have anything to do with them afterward. From that moment on, he blamed himself for not having intervened. A while after that horrible episode, he ran into the girl in town and tried to apologize. Refusing to hear him out, she drew back from him with an accusation he never forgot: “Get away from me! You’re one of them!”
Should this experience be seen as the source of his feminism? It most certainly contributed to it. While he was writing the trilogy, Stieg’s working title for all three books was The Men Who Hate Women. This title was retained only for the first volume of the Swedish edition, and even then, only because he strongly insisted on it. And the word “hate” in the title was replaced by “don’t love” in the French edition.
WHEN HE was young, Stieg had played drums with a pal who’d introduced him to jazz, but it was rock he loved best, especially feminine rock like Shakespears Sister, Annie Lennox in the Eurythmics, and Tina Turner. And Lisbeth just happens to have close ties to the girls in a rock band called Evil Fingers. My own tastes are a little broader, from opera through rock and mainstream to pop. At home, Stieg and I listened to different music, but not all that much of the time, actually.
We divided up the housekeeping according to our different inclinations: he liked to do housework, I preferred cooking. Since we both hated doing laundry with a passion, we took turns at that.
When I’d met Stieg in 1972, he was already a staunch feminist who preferred the company of women and liked working with them more than with men. What’s more, they generally liked him back: he used to say that when he was a child living with his grandparents, his best friend was—a little girl! He found women more creative and less ambitious, less conniving than men. Wherever he worked, Stieg treated men and women the same way, held them to the same standards, and didn’t mind one bit taking orders from women. If he encountered macho careerists who tried to block the advancement of “Stieg’s women,” he either obliged them to change their attitude or eliminated them from his private life. In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, when Erika Berger becomes editor in chief at SMP (Svenska Morgon-Posten, what Mikael Blomkvist calls “Sweden’s most turgid old-boy newspaper”), Stieg gives a clear idea of the kind of hazing and dirty tricks a competent woman must face in a man’s world. “An editorial meeting at two o’clock was suddenly moved to one-thirty without her being told, and most of the decisions were already made by the time she arrived.” Headlines Erika chooses are replaced and the articles she rejects wind up on page one.
Stieg’s obvious fondness for women never really bothered me; neither one of us was jealous, as it happened, but to tell the truth, we did keep an eye on each other!
WOMEN COULDN’T help but play an important role in The Millennium Trilogy. Of all different ages and professions, with varying personalities, they have this in common: they are stubborn, like Stieg, and even pigheaded in what they do. Like him, they give as good as they get—and they get their revenge. Stieg saw no excuse for male violence and has Lisbeth say so in no uncertain terms. Martin Vanger was raped by his father, true, but he had “exactly the same opportunity as anyone else to strike back. He killed and he raped because he liked doing it.” Later on Lisbeth adds: “I just think that it’s pathetic that creeps always have to have someone else to blame.”
The murders of three women in particular had a direct influence on The Millennium Trilogy. In 2003, after the almost simultaneous killings of Melissa Nordell and Fadime Sahindal, Stieg worked with Cecilia Englund at Expo on an anthology entitled Debatten om heders mord: feminism eller rasism (The Debate on Honor Killings: Feminism or Racism?). Nordell was murdered by her boyfriend, and her body was found in the water near the wharf in Björkvik, a small community on the Stockholm County island of Ingarö. Sahindal was shot in the head by her father because she refused to be forced into marriage. In Sweden, Nordell’s death was seen as an ordinary murder, while Sahindal’s was considered an ethnic murder, an honor crime, an incident unrelated to “Swedish culture.” Stieg called the victims “sisters in death” because he saw them as victims of the same patriarchal oppression. The cultural differences evoked to differentiate between the two killings simply fed racist propaganda and fueled endless academic research. Meanwhile, women kept dying at the hands of men.
In the book on honor crimes, Stieg wrote: “The cultural and anthropological models used to explain these tragedies speak to the form of oppression involved but do not explain it. And so in India, women are set on fire; they are murdered in the name of honor in Sicily; they are beaten up on Saturday night in Sweden.… Yet culture does not explain why women all over the world are murdered, mutilated, ‘circumcised,’ mistreated, and forced to submit to ritual behaviors by men. Neither does it explain why men in our patriarchal societies oppress women.” And he adds, “Systematic violence against women—because this violence is indeed systematic—would be the description used if such violence were directed against union members, Jews, or handicapped persons.” Stieg was quite gratified when the other eight contributors to the anthology, six of them women, wholeheartedly agreed with him.
The third murder was that of Catrine Da Costa, parts of whose dismembered body were found in two plastic bags. Stieg had read a fascinating book about that crime. The author, Hanna Olsson, contacted me recently after reading Stieg’s essay on honor crimes to tell me that she would have loved to work with him. Every violent act in The Millennium Trilogy was inspired by real murders described in police reports. In Sweden, once sentence is pronounced, the files enter the public domain and may be consulted.
What more beautiful homage could Stieg pay to women than to make them heroines in a feminist crime novel? And to show them as he saw them: brave, free, strong enough to change their world and refuse to be victims. As for the murderers, Stieg’s indictment of them in the trilogy is encoded in verses from the Bible.