"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me (10 page)

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.

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.