Stieg Larsson: The Swede who is still shrouded in mystery
The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Biography of Stieg Larsson by Barry Forshaw
The life of Stieg Larsson, bestselling Swedish author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and its sequels, was as strange as his crime fiction.
Larsson was a lifelong Left-winger and leading authority on the Swedish neo-Nazi Right, as well as an obsessive science-fiction devotee and workaholic, chain-smoking investigative journalist. Then in 2004, having delivered three manuscripts for his Millennium thrillers to his publisher, he suddenly dropped dead at the age of just 50.
His fame — and well over 20 million sales worldwide — has been enjoyed only by his relatives. Except that his long-time partner (but never wife) Eva Gabrielsson, and his father and brother, to whom his estate passed under Swedish law, have since been locked in dispute over both money and the existence of a fourth blockbuster on his laptop.
It should make a compelling tale — but it doesn't here. This bears all the signs of being quickly thrown together: indeed, 150 pages — half the book — are taken up with an exhaustive recounting of the plots of all three novels. This adds little to our knowledge, although admittedly if you read them at the breakneck pace I did you may have forgotten a few minor plotlines.
Indeed, the book doesn't follow a conventional biographic structure at all, starting off with a chapter on Larsson and his investigative journalism before sections on his relatives' dispute, publishers, and the reactions of other crime writers to his work.
It leaves a lot of questions unanswered. It would be fascinating to know when and why Larsson decided to make the jump from fact to fiction. Journalist and novelist Joan Smith makes a perceptive comment here about the wealth of privileged factual detail thrown up by investigative journalism and its effect on herself when in the same position as Larsson: "You begin to say to yourself, 'I know how all this works, but I don't want to be constrained by the facts any more'."
We're also left none the wiser about the origins of the strongly feminist cast of Larsson's work and his history of activism against misogyny.
Lastly, there's little sign that Forshaw knows much about Sweden, in a sense the most surprising and schizophrenic character in Larsson's books. Is the social democratic paradise really as screwed up as he suggests? Can they really drink that much coffee? Another biographer will have to tell us.
