IN THE Millennium Trilogy some real people appear, so to speak, under their own names, because Stieg wanted to honor them in this way. Other people provided real-life details that inspired Stieg when he created his fictional characters out of this and that. And some readers simply think they recognize real people—even themselves—in characters who are wholly imaginary. A plastic surgeon wrote me, for example, that he was convinced he’d been the model for the doctor who enlarges Lisbeth Salander’s breasts in The Girl Who Played with Fire!
MIKAEL BLOMKVIST is not Stieg Larsson. Like Stieg, he’s constantly drinking coffee, smoking, and working like a fiend, but the resemblance basically stops there. On the other hand, though, Blomkvist does clearly embody the figure of the celebrated all-around journalist Stieg would have liked to be, and this character is a spokesperson for many of Stieg’s opinions and causes. Blomkvist is also, like his creator, an incorrigible and incorruptible fighter for justice.
IS LISBETH Salander a feminine double for Stieg? The two share the same lousy eating habits, at least, given their addiction to frozen pizzas and fast-food sandwiches. A champion hacker, a prodigy of computer and investigative skills, Lisbeth is blessed with a photographic memory that allows her to memorize complex texts, such as a treatise on spherical astronomy, with dazzling speed. I’ve already touched on Stieg’s incredible memory, his iconoclastic culture, and his inexhaustible hunger for reading about the most varied subjects. Some of the elements in the hacker circles in which Lisbeth moves may come, for example, from The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling, but we also had plenty of Superman and Spider-Man comics around the house, featuring superheroes with extraordinary powers for whom Lisbeth could serve as a little sister. As for her mania for caution and secrecy, Stieg was the same way—but so was everyone at Searchlight and Expo, because that wariness came with the territory.
IN THE Girl Who Played with Fire, Lisbeth visits her former guardian Holger Palmgren in a rehabilitation home, where they play a rather complicated game of chess, a variant of one of Lasker’s most famous games. My brother Björn has a large chess library, including several studies of a few classic games by Emanuel Lasker, the famous German mathematician and chess champion. From the moment they met in the 1970s, Stieg and my brother liked to play chess with each other. Stieg usually lost, but since he wasn’t the type to give up, he never refused a rematch. When he left for Africa in 1977, he specified in an unwitnessed will—about which I’ll have more to say later—that if he did not return, he wished my brother to inherit all his science fiction books.
Many people think they “recognize” Lisbeth Salander. Some insist she was a journalist who worked at Expo. As for Stieg’s brother Joakim, he claims she’s based on his own daughter, with whom Stieg allegedly communicated by email. Joakim was careful to mention in an interview that these emails just happen to have disappeared somehow in a hard disk crash.…
If Lisbeth takes after anyone, it’s Pippi Longstocking, our national heroine conjured up by children’s book author Astrid Lindgren. This delightful and formidable little girl has been a champion of equality between the sexes: she doesn’t depend on anyone, can use a revolver, has sailed the seven seas, and not only can she beat Mighty Adolf, the strongest man in the world … she can lift up her pet horse! But the main thing about Pippi is that she has her own ideas about right and wrong—and she lives by them, no matter what the law or adults say. After one of her adventures, she announces, “When I grow up, I’m going to be a pirate.” One evening toward the end of the 1990s, Stieg and some journalists at TT had fun imagining what all the favorite storybook idols of Swedish children might really have grown up to be. Pippi Longstocking? Lisbeth Salander, perhaps. And what about Kalle Blomkvist (or Bill Bergson, as he’s known in English), the young hero of Astrid Lindgren’s trilogy about an ordinary boy who loves to solve mysteries and even real crimes that baffle the police and other adults? Maybe Mikael Blomkvist. The readers of The Millennium Trilogy may decide for themselves. Actually, the only real Lisbeth Salander in Sweden, who is sixty years old and lives off in a remote village, wrote me to say she was fed up with reporters calling her to ask if she knew Stieg Larsson. She signed off by saying, “If you ever get up this way, come have coffee with me, we’ll have a chat and a laugh!”
THE WOMEN in history who interested Stieg were those who defied all stereotypes of “the weaker sex,” and he mentions some of them on the first page of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest: the Amazons, and the women who disguised themselves as soldiers to fight in the American Civil War, and women who led their people to battle like Boudicca (aka Boadicea), the queen of the Iceni tribe who led a revolt against the Romans in England. On one of the many trips we made to London (especially during the eight years my sister Britt lived there), Stieg took me to Westminster Bridge to show me the statue of Boudicca, one of his favorite heroines.
Erika Berger, the editor in chief of Millennium, was entirely made up. That the position is held by a woman is neither an accident nor a literary artifice; in fact I’d have been astonished if Stieg had done otherwise. Erika Berger is competent and assumes full responsibility for both her colleagues and the finances of the magazine. Her private life is rather unconventional, in that she has a husband and a lover, and she acts on her desires, which does cause her some problems.
For some aspects of Anita Vanger, Stieg drew on my sister Britt. While he was writing the first book, he asked her if, “as” Anita, she would like to live in Guildford, southwest of London, where she lived after she first moved to England from Sweden, but Britt preferred to go north instead, to “a terrace house in the attractive suburb of St. Albans.” Throughout her London years, Britt always lived in apartments heated by gas radiators set into fireplaces, an arrangement Stieg and I knew well. Whenever we arrived at my sister’s place, we’d rush to turn on the heat, relieved to see the temperature rise beyond the 60 degrees Fahrenheit Britt had finally gotten used to!
Sometimes, like Martina Karlgren or Franck Ellis in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, a character in the trilogy mentions scientific or professional journals such as Nature or The New England Journal of Medicine, which Britt read in conjunction with her work in medical research. She often told us about articles she’d found particularly interesting, so Stieg was quite familiar with such publications.
Giving some of his characters real people’s names, and even their professions or personalities, was for Stieg a mark of affection and admiration. We didn’t know the boxer Paolo Roberto personally, but in Sweden he’s a celebrity. Although he was a young delinquent in the 1980s, he then became a professional boxer and in 1987 played the lead in a film loosely dramatizing his early life: Staffan Hildebrand’s Stockholmsnatt (Stockholm Night or The King of Kungsan), an important cult film in Sweden. Today Paolo Roberto has a cooking show on television—and his Italian aunts don’t hesitate to grab a spoon out of his hands when he isn’t stirring tomato sauce the right way! Stieg was especially impressed by Roberto’s frankness, and his unpredictability. He can be totally macho one minute and then suddenly begin championing equality between the sexes. During the 2002 elections, he almost got into Parliament, but came in second. On the other hand, he did make it into The Millennium Trilogy.
THE PSYCHIATRIST Svante Branden, who helps Lisbeth Salander defend herself against Dr. Peter Teleborian in the third volume, is one of our old friends. I’ve already mentioned that I sublet his student room when I arrived in Stockholm in 1977, before Stieg had found his job with the postal service and come to join me. Like us, Svante Branden has always been against all forms of discrimination and abuse. As a psychiatrist, he’s particularly skilled at perceiving people’s real motives behind whatever smoke screen of excuses they may make. Stieg wanted to pay homage to him by casting him as an “ordinary hero” in daily life. After Stieg’s death, however, and the behavior of his father and brother regarding the moral, intellectual, and material legacy of my partner (about which I’ll have more to say later), Svante no longer felt honored to be in the trilogy. And he wrote to the Larssons to tell them why.
As a specialist in legal psychiatry, I firmly wish my name to be associated with justice and morality. That Stieg should want to borrow my name for his book was an honor for me. But after his death, you, Joakim, are profiting from Stieg’s work and you are using my name without my authorization. Although your strange—to say the least—statements to the press about Stieg and Eva are no doubt protected by law, they smack of a morality fit for a profiteer and a corrupt accountant. For this reason I require that you remove my name from Stieg’s book immediately and that you pay me damages for having profited from my name and professional standing.
Given that Stieg wished to see my name in his book, my demands are modest: a lump sum of 32 kronor. In addition, I will ask for 1 krona* per year until you come to some agreement with Eva. As of today, the sum owed comes to 36 kronor. You may transfer the money to my account at Handelsbanken.
The Larssons sent their answer directly to the editors of Uppdrag Granskning (Mission: Investigation), a serious television program on investigative journalism, who published it on their website. Svante then allowed the editors to publish his own letter on the website of Swedish National Television. In the Larssons’ letter, Stieg’s brother proposed sarcastically that Svante might be of some psychiatric help to me—and offered to donate all damages asked to charity.…
IN STIEG’S manuscript, Anders Jakobsson is the doctor who admits Lisbeth Salander to the emergency room of Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg at the beginning of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. He operates, removes the bullet lodged in her brain, and saves her life. All through her hospitalization, which lasts for dozens and dozens of pages, he helps her. He talks to her, listens to her, sneaks her Palm Tungsten T3 personal digital assistant to her, and so forth. Anders had been a friend to Stieg and me ever since the Umeå years of the 1970s. In 2006, at Eastertime—after Stieg had died and his father and brother had begun to stop considering me Stieg’s legitimate widow—Anders ran into Erland in a small supermarket in Umeå and did not conceal his opinion about the matter. After that incident, the Larssons had Norstedts Förlag, the publishers of the trilogy, change “Anders Jakobsson” to “Anders Jonasson” in the third book of the trilogy! This story was confirmed by Norstedts and the Larssons on camera in an interview for “The Millennium Millions,” a program broadcast on Uppdrag Granskning in the spring of 2008. Anders Jakobsson then sent a letter to one of the journalists, which is posted on the Swedish National Television website.
Dear Fredrik Quistbergh,
Norstedts has now confirmed that Stieg Larsson’s manuscript was altered before publication.
To mix real people in with fictitious characters was an important literary concept in Stieg Larsson’s novels. With the help of Norstedts, Erland and Joakim Larsson have interfered with Stieg Larsson’s original manuscript by changing the names of certain people in the third book.
This is a serious violation of Stieg Larsson’s work and his intentions. The motive for this intervention can be clearly seen in the interview Erland Larsson gave to Uppdrag Granskning: “Petty or vindictive, call it what you like, but that’s what we decided.”
For more than thirty years, Stieg Larsson lived with his companion Eva Gabrielsson in a relationship that was in all ways like marriage. Erland and Joakim Larsson have now seized permanent control of Stieg Larsson’s estate as well as the intellectual and moral rights to his work. The law is serving a deeply immoral cause. It is flagrantly obvious to all of the friends of Stieg Larsson that such behavior is immoral. Erland Larsson’s indignation at my remarks on this point clearly show that this is a touchy subject for him—which is without doubt proof that Erland Larsson is perfectly aware that it is morally deplorable to deprive Eva Gabrielsson of the estate of her companion, Stieg. I met Stieg when we were in high school back in Umeå. We were very close for more than thirty years. So I can affirm that Stieg would never have allowed anyone to distort his books or deprive his companion Eva of her inheritance. In fact, if he were alive, Stieg would have done all he could to stop this. And he would have stopped at nothing.
Sincerely yours,
Anders Jakobsson
Another everyday heroine in our personal pantheon who shows up in The Millennium Trilogy is the woman who saved a man named Joy Rahman. In The Girl Who Played with Fire, when Mikael and police inspector Jan Bublanski argue about whether Lisbeth is really implicated in the murders of Dag Svensson and Mia Bergman, Blomkvist brings up a miscarriage of justice that is quite well-known in Sweden, the case of Joy Rahman. This man was condemned and imprisoned for the murder of an elderly lady and would still be behind bars if a teacher at his children’s school had not devoted several years to an assiduous investigation of his case. Stieg and I knew this teacher and understood her anger, and as we followed her struggle, we were appalled by the flaws she uncovered in the Swedish justice system. Our admiration grew for this stubborn woman who simply would not give up: she managed to have new forensic tests conducted, and with the help of a good lawyer, a psychiatrist, the prison chaplain, and a journalist, she gathered enough proof to obtain a new trial for Rahman, who was found innocent and set free after eight years in prison. In 2003, she and the journalist were awarded the Democracy Prize by Örebro University in Sweden. This schoolteacher well deserves her place in The Millennium Trilogy.
* 15 cents