IN THE Girl Who Played with Fire, Stieg describes what Erika Berger’s husband, Lars Beckman, has been doing for the previous six months. An art historian and a successful author, Beckman has been “working on a book about the artistic decoration of buildings and its influences, and why people felt a sense of well-being in some buildings but not in others. The book had begun to develop into an attack on functionalism.” With those words Stieg has also summarized the theme of my book on Per Olof Hallman, an architect and urbanist who died in 1941. Stockholm was built on fourteen islands connected by bridges, and Hallman planned residential communities there that accentuated the capital’s distinctive greenery, islet rocks, and culturally distinctive houses offering views of the water. Hallman paid particular attention to the human habitat through the integration of green spaces, for example, and playgrounds, or even works of art. For Hallman, the goals of architecture and urbanism were to bring people serenity and joie de vivre, for he felt that the environment in which they lived could either strengthen or stress them.
I had begun writing my book in 1997 but was obliged to set it aside when the Swedish government hired me to join a study on the feasibility of constructing affordable quality housing. In 2002, however, I decided to become a part-time consultant so that I could concentrate on my research, which involved spending a great deal of time studying documents in libraries, archives, and stores specializing in old books. Every evening, when Stieg came home and dumped his backpack in the hall, he would always call out, “Hey there! Anybody home?” Then he would head straight for the settee where I sat working and ask his other eternal questions: “What did you find out today? Is there any coffee?” He’d settle in next to me, asking lots of questions and listening closely to my replies.
Since Stieg didn’t have time to read each new version of my book, I discussed the text with him regularly. On Saturdays I’d take him on lengthy walks through the “Hallman zones” I was writing about. As a research shortcut for the trilogy (and to give a little nod to my work), he’d asked me if he could use the places I was showing him so that his characters could live in neighborhoods that matched their personalities. That’s why Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman—an investigative reporter and a grad student—live in the garden village Enskede, at 8B Björneborgsvägen Street, while Cortez, a reporter for Millennium, is on bohemian Alhelgonagatan, in Helgalunden, a neighborhood on Södermalm. And when the trilogy opens, Lisbeth Salander’s place is on working-class Lundagatan.
However, Stieg wanted Mikael Blomkvist’s apartment to be in the oldest part of Södermalm, not in those Hallman zones. We investigated numerous addresses before finding the right one. Bellmansgatan offered several possibilities, one of which was the Laurinska building, at Nos. 4–6. Since its construction in 1891, many artists had lived in this large red-brick apartment house with its spectacular view over the Riddarfjärden, a bay of Lake Mälaren in central Stockholm, but it was too luxurious for Mikael, who could not have afforded to buy anything there. We next seriously considered what looked to us like the ideal apartment building, with a small view of the bay, but it didn’t have enough exits to support the moment in the trilogy when three different groups can all keep Blomkvist under surveillance at the same time. Stieg was disappointed about that, but I told him it wasn’t important: “We’ll put an imaginary door there”—I pointed to the place—“and give the building a fictitious number. That way, the address will fit the plot.”
Stieg’s face lit up. “Yes, that’s what we’ll do!” But somehow that made-up number disappeared in the published version of the surveillance episode, which takes place in the third volume—and Stieg never had time to review any proofs except those for the first book.
At the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist tells how he renovated his apartment himself and hid the worst patches of wall behind two watercolors by Emanuel Bernstone. I’ve always been very fond of that artist’s oeuvre, and at a time when he was completely unknown I bought one of his works, a picture of a red-tailed bird, with my small inheritance from my grandmother. And I was able to buy the second painting, a seagull, with the money left to me by my mother. Both watercolors are strong yet delicate “portraits” of shorebirds, and they have a great serenity. They still hang in the home I shared with Stieg.
For my book on Hallman, I had a lengthy interview with his daughter, who was ninety-six years old at the time. She told me that her father had often gone sailing with Anders Zorn, one of Sweden’s foremost painters, and Albert Engström, a prominent Swedish cartoonist and humor writer. The three of them used to drink so much beer that the wharf in front of Hallman’s summer home on Skarpö island became littered with empties, and the ferry had trouble unloading its passengers—an anecdote that found its way into the first volume of the trilogy, when Fredrik Vanger and his wife Ulrika go boating with the two artists.
Stieg was so enthusiastic about my Hallman book that he kept telling me confidently, “You’ll see, this book is going to change your life.” The irony is that it wasn’t my book that turned my life upside down, but The Millennium Trilogy.
When Lisbeth Salander returns from Grenada at the beginning of the second novel and looks for an apartment, she has plenty of money but still has trouble finding what she wants. Stieg also spent some time looking for that apartment. Actually, I was the one who found it … in my research files. At the time I was working at Skanska, the largest construction company in Sweden, so I was naturally interested in everything that concerned the firm. I gathered information about both its construction activities and its chairman of the board, Percy Barnevik, whose enormous pension payouts, accumulated thanks to all of the top executive positions he’d held during his career, had been made public in the media—a revelation I found worrisome both as a citizen and as a salaried employee. When Barnevik sold his apartment on Fiskargatan, I’d filed away a relevant newspaper article that included a floor plan of the place. That’s how Lisbeth moved into her lovely apartment on Fiskargatan, near Mosebacke, an area with many cultural venues in the upscale Södermalm district.
Actually, so many of Stieg’s characters live and work in Södermalm that this large island, one of the most densely populated districts of the capital, becomes a character in its own right, a part of central Stockholm that is also central to the plot of The Millennium Trilogy. Connected on its northern rim to Gamla Stan (the Old Town) by Slussen, a transportation grid with a lock between the Baltic Sea and Lake Mälaren, “Söder” is also linked by bridges to big Kungsholmen to the northwest, little Reimersholme to the west—in fact to a whole ring of islands large and small. In the seventeenth century, rich people began building summer homes in rural, agricultural Södermalm, and working-class housing was built, such as the red cottages still seen today in the northeast of the island. Urbanization proceeded apace in the twentieth century, but as often happens, the by now largely working-class district eventually became home to students, bohemians, and creative souls of all types, and Södermalm currently offers many cultural (and countercultural) amenities. True to form, gentrification brought a new cachet to Söder—and Lisbeth Salander to her apartment at 9 Fiskargatan, thanks to that article in my files.
My documentation also inspired the Skanska stock-options affair at the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and the pension scandal at ABB, which Mikael Blomkvist and Robert Lindberg discuss when they meet on the wharf on Arholma, the northernmost island in the Stockholm archipelago. It’s after this unfortunate conversation that Blomkvist begins investigating Wennerström and winds up convicted of defamation.
Stieg and I knew all of the cafés that appear in The Millennium Trilogy. We used to meet in some of them after work, as we did at the Kafé Anna in Kungsholmen, where Blomkvist hears on the radio that Wennerström has won his libel case. We liked to visit other cafés on the spur of the moment, like the Giffy and the Java on one of Södermalm’s main streets, Hornsgatan, perhaps after one of our art gallery expeditions on the Hornsgatan “hill.” Expo’s informal headquarters were the Kaffebar right downstairs in the same building, where Blomkvist learns—again, on the radio—that the man who tried to murder Lisbeth has himself been murdered. The Kaffebar still serves a marvelous little sandwich made with cheese from Västerbotten County, where Stieg and I grew up. We’d have one of those with our caffe lattes after a visit to our favorite bookstore, a treasure trove of old volumes and books on feminism, politics, and so forth. Kvarnen (“The Mill”) is a bustling, noisy restaurant where Lisbeth Salander meets her women friends in the hard rock group Evil Fingers. Kvarnen served delicious meatballs that disappeared at one point from the menu, but the restaurant regulars protested until the owner reinstated these favorites.
Finally, among the many places in the trilogy that belonged to Stieg and me, one I particularly cherish is the little cabin at Sandhamn (“Sand Harbor”) where Mikael Blomkvist goes “to read, write, and relax.” Every summer we would rent one of these wooden cottages out in the archipelago. Our dream was to build one just for ourselves, and we wanted it to resemble the one described by Lisbeth Salander: about 325 square feet arranged like a boat’s cabin, with a large window looking out over the water and a big kitchen table where both of us could write.