IN 1979, Stieg left the postal service and joined TT (Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå), the big Swedish news agency, our equivalent of the Associated Press. He stayed there for twenty years. Starting out in the editorial department, he manned the phone as a kind of editorial secretary, receiving news items and articles from the reporters in all of the news services and correcting the copy before it went off to various papers. Then he became an illustrator in the TT Images and Features department, where he could also write about many subjects that interested him: Darwin, Robin Hood, World War II—you name it. Not to mention crime novels, which were also one of his specialties. In particular those written by women, whose style he found in general much better than that of most men. A typical autodidact, Stieg had a vast fount of eclectic knowledge at his fingertips, and our home was always cluttered with books on all sorts of subjects: science fiction, politics, espionage, counterespionage, military strategy, feminism, computer science, and so on. To get them as cheaply as possible, we bought them in the original version, usually in English. Most of his colleagues saw Stieg as a pleasant person, intelligent, but difficult to get a handle on, especially since he tended to keep his private life to himself. Around the mid-1980s, when militants on the extreme right began robbing banks to finance their activities, breaking into military installations to steal weapons, and killing people for racist or political reasons, the Legal Affairs and News in Brief department within the agency began consulting Stieg. More often than not, he would know the past political affiliations of the suspects, their accomplices, and even the milieus they frequented! Working his way through a mass of often contradictory data, Stieg would swiftly figure out what was really going on. In 1999, for example, at the time of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people and wounded 680, Stieg understood from the beginning—unlike all the media—that the culprit was most likely an American militia member inspired by the far-right rhetoric of William Pierce’s Turner Diaries.
From the 1990s on, TT topped the list of the news media best informed about such subjects. The number one expert in this domain was right there at TT, and yet, even with the support of the other journalists, Stieg was never transferred to a job at any of the regular desks. Reason given: “Stieg Larsson cannot write.” What do the millions of readers of The Millennium Trilogy think about that?
IN THE mid-1990s, the media struggled through a severe economic crisis. Ad pages fell sharply, lots of journalists were laid off, and various newspapers folded. Although TT did not escape this storm battering the print press, the small Images and Features department kept doing well, selling photos and articles—in fact, against all expectations, it even made a profit. In spite of this, when the agency began downsizing across the board to increase efficiency, Stieg’s entire department was eliminated. This was the opportune moment to move Stieg to the Legal Affairs and News in Brief section, because he had recently proved, once again, that it was the right place for him.
In the aftermath of a bank robbery in 1999, two police officers had been killed execution-style in Malexander, a village a hundred miles from Stockholm. The circumstances surrounding these murders alerted Stieg to a connection with the extreme right, which later proved correct, but the manager in charge of staff layoffs refused to transfer Stieg, falling back on the same old argument: “Stieg Larsson cannot write!” Stieg and I talked and argued a great deal about what he should do. I thought it was high time for him to devote more than weekends and evenings late into the night to his passion for investigative journalism. True, we hadn’t any savings and earned only enough to pay our basic expenses, and I couldn’t remember buying any clothes that weren’t on sale or shopping anywhere but in a discount store. Still, even though it was financially risky, the moment had come for him to strike out on his own.
In the end, realizing that he would never get ahead at TT, Stieg chose to take the severance package and was let go in 1999.
SO HE walked away from twenty years of work at TT and never went back. Later on, when he had appointments with journalists still at the agency, he met them in a café. Stieg never forgot or forgave what he and other perfectly competent journalists had gone through during the almost completely irrational dismemberment of Sweden’s greatest news agency.
From that moment on, he devoted himself entirely to the Swedish Expo Foundation, which he had cofounded earlier, in 1995, and to its quarterly magazine, Expo.