Free The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson by Barry Forshaw

works at Expo has to leave their personal political baggage outside the door.
    Before the quotes from the author, Larsson’s status as the creator of a variety of pieces on the theme of democracy and far-Right movements is established, including Extremhögern , with Anna-Lena Lodenius, and Sverigedemokraterna: den nationella rörelsen (‘Swedish Democrats: The National Movement’) with Mikael Ekman, along with his massive enthusiasm for science fiction. But the most revealing material begins with a direct quotation from Larsson, telling how he started writing in 2001. At first, he says, it was just a pleasurable hobby, writing a text based on the vintage series Tvillingdetektiverna (‘Twin Detectives’), the sequence of children’s books from the 1950s with his former boss Kenneth Ahlbon at TT. It was a fun pursuit for the two colleagues – they calculated that by the time of writing, the fictional heroes would have been 45 and they were about to undertake their last mystery.
    Tvillingdetektiverna was a lengthy series of novels for children inaugurated in 1944 which lasted right up to 1974. Nearly 50 books were published, all featuring the youthful Klas and Göran Bergendahl, identical twins. All the titles incorporated the word ‘ mysteriet ’ (mystery), e.g. Tunnelbane-mysteriet (‘The Tube Mystery’) or Miljon-mysteriet (‘The Million Mystery’) or Tåg-mysteriet (‘The Train Mystery’). The author’s name, Sivar Ahlrud, was a pseudonym for two writers, Ivar Ahlstedt and Sid Roland Rommerud.
    This extrapolation into the present, according to Larsson (talking to Lasse Winkler in Svensk Bokhandel in October 2004) started him thinking about Pippi Longstocking. How would she behave today? What sort of an adult had she become? How would one define her – as a sociopath, a child-woman? Larsson construed that Pippi might have an alternative view of society and transmogrified her into Lisbeth Salander, making her about 25, a girl completely alienated from society. She doesn’t know anyone; she has no ability to socialise.
    When planning the trilogy, Larsson decided that he needed a counterbalance to the Lisbeth character, and that was to be Mikael ‘Kalle’ Blomkvist, a 43-year-old journalist who works on his own magazine, Millennium . The action was to revolve around the editorial offices of the magazine and around Lisbeth, who doesn’t have a very active life. Larsson decided that the narrative should involve a variety of people, of all types. He opted to work with three distinct groups of characters. One group focused on Millennium , which has six employees. The secondary characters would not appear just to swell a scene: they would act and influence the plot; Larsson did not want a closed universe. Then there would be a group centred on Milton Security, a firm run by a Croatian. Finally, inevitably, there would be the police, characters who act independently. The author’s game plan was that in the third novel of the planned sequence, all the pieces of the puzzle fall into place so the reader could understand what has happened. But he wanted the books to be about ‘something else’ as well. Usually, in crime novels, the reader is not shown the consequences of what has happened in the preceding novel in a sequence. His plan was that this would not be the case – there would be a synchronicity and intertextuality.
    The creation of crime fiction was something of a nocturnal activity for the author; few were party to this secret pleasure in Larsson’s life. He stated his aim clearly: more than being tendentious or aspiring to be classic literature, he considered that the primary function of a detective story narrative was to entertain the reader (though he acknowledged that – having transfixed the reader – Larsson might be able to freight in his own concerns about serious issues).
    In November 2004, after Larsson’s precipitate death and the dispatch of his final manuscript, his colleague Kurdo Baksi,