Stieg Larsson, My Friend

by Kurdo Baksi

  Stieg replied to Bergström’s comments in an email to his publisher, Eva Gedin:

  Please tell Lasse Bergström that he’s obviously an intelligent and sensible person of impeccable taste, and that flattery will get him everywhere. Hmm. I don’t know, but I have the impression that you Norstedts people are seriously enthusiastic about my books. O.K., I know they are not bad, and of course I’m delighted to read such flattering judgements; but I hope that, for whatever reason, you are not holding back negative comments. I’m quite capable of coping with criticism. It’s most satisfying to see that Lasse noticed that I changed the genre from one novel to the next. He caught on to exactly what I was trying to do.

  Being the inveterate reader of crime novels that he was, Stieg had decided to develop his characters over a series of books. But that wasn’t all. He also played with the genre by letting the stories unfold in different styles. Flair of that order of course demands a precise knowledge of what you are doing. It wouldn’t surprise me if this clever device is one of the reasons why readers the world over have been fascinated by the Millennium trilogy.

  There is a rumour suggesting that Stieg wrote crime stories as early as the 1990s, but destroyed them. Is it true? Yes and no. The fact is that he did indeed write crime stories in the mid-90s – but they were not what later became The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. It was more a case of him writing in order to relax and have fun. The natural outcome was that he developed as a writer during that period. Alongside writing, the biggest pleasure in his life was doubtless reading. He devoured books, both nonfiction and crime novels. He was something of a literary omnivore. He read pulp literature as well as Dostoevsky, Zola and heavy Greek philosophers. Stieg liked mysteries, which is why he found it hard to lead a life lacking in crime fiction.

  You could call those early stories practice crime novels. He told me they were utterly worthless. I find that hard to believe, even if they were far less accomplished than the books he eventually published. But we will never know the truth.

  On the other hand, the determination with which he destroyed all his earlier attempts shows that he was aware that he had now accomplished something worthwhile. I don’t think success would have come as a complete surprise to him. In any case, he saw enough of the attention his first crime novel attracted before it was published to suspect that something major was about to happen. Not many authors have three books accepted, discover that a “buzz” has developed around them well before the first one is published, and even take part in negotiations for film contracts and foreign rights.

  So far the Millennium trilogy has earned over a million kronor. Stieg Larsson has become a class-A celebrity. People beg me to sign his books in Madrid, Barcelona and Paris – simply because I was one of his friends! The films based on his books are breaking records all over Europe. Reporters travel from as far away as Argentina to Stockholm in order to write about Stieg.

  The question is how he would have reacted to the enormous attention he and his books have attracted.

  I have thousands of examples of how Stieg shied away from publicity, especially the kind that placed him in the spotlight. He always preferred to let somebody else do that, but he was a realistic person in all circumstances. I am convinced he would have agreed to take part in television programmes and given interviews – but only the ones he really wanted to do. Most requests would certainly have been turned down. I’m sure he would have preferred to feature in small underground magazines rather than on the main television channels and in daily newspapers. That’s simply the kind of person he was.

  I don’t think he would have changed much in his way of life as a result of the enormous income his books have produced. He would have continued to smoke his cigarettes, eat badly, sleep hardly at all and write more books. Above all else he would have continued to keep a very sharp eye on intolerant groups and individuals. What else he would have spent his fortune on I can’t say – that would be pure speculation, and I would rather avoid engaging in it.

  Stieg’s success has also changed my life. I am often invited to lecture about him throughout Europe. I am interviewed more or less every day by journalists from all over the world, and am invited to attend Stieg’s film premières on every corner of the Continent. Sometimes I attend these events, but at other times I turn them down. It feels almost as if, in a most bizarre fashion, I have become an ambassador for Stieg. But I do it willingly and must admit that I feel very happy to have him in my orbit in this way. It’s not how I would have wanted things to turn out. I would have preferred to continue sitting in a basement office with my friend, and to carry on producing a journal with a less than adequate budget. But I can’t turn the clock back. Stieg has left my life as a living person. Every time I meet somebody who has become a little happier after having read one of his novels, though, I also become a little happier. In that way he is always present. And it is a presence full of memories that nobody can take away from me.

  10

  Successes and setbacks

  A memory. Stieg in the bar at Södra Teatern one very pleasant June evening in 2003. He orders a double whisky, a group of revellers breaks into song, people are crowded together in the cramped space, the place is buzzing with carefree voices, meaningful looks are exchanged. The terrace door is open, letting a modicum of cool air into the smoke-filled bar. Stieg lights a cigarette and inhales deeply, then takes a swig of whisky. His constant companion, the black rucksack, is slung over his left shoulder.

  I am surprised to note that he seems to have abandoned his classical “neutral” hairstyle. His hair has been cut shorter than usual. And he has acquired sideburns. The new haircut suits him. Makes him look younger. Which is more than one can say for his baggy white T-shirt. Presumably it is a present given to him as a souvenir of a lecture he delivered to some idealistic organization or other somewhere in Sweden. And his jumper has a big red stain.

  Stieg is in an exceptionally good mood and waves a greeting to several people who pass by. Standing on his right is a bearded man by the name of Anders, known to everybody as Anders the Trotskyist. He has a baby in his arms. I know Anders. He is one of the organizers of this multicultural evening.

  I’m standing in the doorway to the terrace when I catch sight of Stieg. Just as he takes out his pack of cigarettes and a lighter I tap him on the shoulder. He seems pleased to see me.

  “This is a fun evening,” he says. “Did you know that Anders and I have known each other ever since the Vietnam demonstrations?”

  I shake my head, but am not especially surprised. He orders a glass of red wine and stands there looking at the lovely little baby.

  “Here we have a future warrior,” he says.

  “You always look so young, Stieg,” says Anders.

  The woman crime novelist is also here this evening. Stieg turns round and catches sight of her. Her first book was published a month or two previously. Even I know how much Stieg helped her to produce her final text.

  Her face lights up the moment she sees him.

  Mourning involves being haunted by images that take possession of you when you least expect it. It is often impossible to understand why you remember things in such detail, almost as if you were in the same place at the time they happened. You see everything so clearly, inhale the smells and hear the voices.

  How you manage to fit together these fragments of memory is probably the basis for mourning. It’s a healing process. Why do I recall that evening at the theatre in Söder in such minute detail? I don’t know.

  Perhaps because I bumped into that woman crime novelist only the other day. I didn’t like the fact that her body language often showed that she thought she was a better writer than Stieg. But I no longer hold that against her. After his death she wrote in her blog about how much he had meant to her. She even explained how he had gone through her manuscripts chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence, and helped her.

 
It was round about the time of that multicultural evening at Södra Teatern that I made a crucial decision. I had grown thoroughly sick and tired of everything associated with producing magazines. I had devoted all my energy to doing just that for seventeen long years. Now I had run out of energy, and I made up my mind to close down my beloved Svartvitt.

  I had plans to continue my cooperation with Expo, but to be honest I was not at all sure how that would work out. My health had deteriorated steadily during the previous year, and it sometimes felt as if I had spent more time in hospital than in my office.

  My doctors said I was displaying all the symptoms of burnout. Nobody can explain exactly what that term means. In my case it was a bit more straightforward than usual: I had absolutely no private life whatsoever.

  When I told Stieg about my decision, he was sorry to hear it at first. He tried to talk me out of it, but gave up when he realized that I simply didn’t have the strength any more. In a way I suppose we both felt that the areas we had been covering in Svartvitt had started to feature in the mainstream media. But we were in complete agreement about continuing our cooperation within Expo. I said that my hope was to work on Expo as publisher and as a polemical journalist.

  “We are not twenty-year-olds any more,” I said. “Both you and I must start thinking about our health.”

  He nodded, but that was a subject in which he had no interest at all. Unlike me he was alert and always busy with several projects at the same time. The fact is that apart from my closing down Black and White, 2003 was a comparatively quiet year. There were no real threats, no headline-grabbing manoeuvres aimed at us, no complicated books to publish, nothing of that kind.

  Naturally, we ought to have realized that it was the calm before the storm.

  The following year, 2004, things happened in rapid succession. It started positively for Stieg. He was on the way to enjoying the fruits of all those sleepless nights and hard work. In the space of four months he put the finishing touches to five books, more books than he had produced during the previous forty-nine years of his life. An astonishing achievement.

  As early as 22 January Debatten om hedersmord appeared. In April Stieg signed the contract with Norstedts for the publication of the three books that would become the Millennium trilogy. The very next month he worked on two central chapters of Sverigedemokraterna från insidan. He gave a lot of talks to schools and also travelled to Brussels for a conference. A paper in connection with an exhibition in Malmö took up much of his energy in the autumn. The fact is that our last conversation was about that paper, which I reckoned he should have delegated to somebody else.

  In addition, it seemed that his successes were making him more extrovert than he had ever been before. He took on more and more, and went out to meet people more regularly. He became a familiar face at Café Fix, Café Anna, Café Copacabana, Café Mellqvist and Il Caffè. Although he had always felt more at home in small groups, he started to move in bigger circles and became one of the in-crowd. He was a frequent guest at the socalled multicultural events on the terrace at Södra Teatern, and stayed on until surprisingly late.

  Needless to say, a lot of people continued to ask for his help and advice. A teacher in Sollentuna wanted to launch a new curriculum subject, “Tolerance and Respect”. Students asked him to read and comment on their essays about neo-Nazism or racism. Social workers responding to attacks on women needed help in various ways. And another would-be crime novelist required assistance with a manuscript.

  I frequently asked myself what was going on. What had happened to Stieg’s non-stop work into the early hours? The new Stieg was barely recognizable. He had always used to slip away at the earliest opportunity in order to glue himself to his computer in peace and quiet.

  I suppose it was because he had received the message he wanted to hear most of all just then. He had received confirmation that all those exhausting hours spent at the computer with his enormously long novels had been worthwhile. He had not misjudged the quality of his work. It really was good. Perhaps around this time he even began to think that his books were more than just good. Perhaps they were very special indeed.

  This was probably the first time in his adult life when he could relax and felt that he could allow himself some late nights of pleasure. He could take time off.

  I hope that was in fact the case. I really do think it was.

  Sometimes I find myself smiling at the probability that the baggy T-shirts I so disliked were a part of this process. By shedding his jacket and tie perhaps he was building up his image as a writer. A sort of circle had closed. The slipshod working-class lad had progressed to reserved austerity and had now returned to being slipshod.

  What finally convinced me that he had changed was when he suddenly started agreeing to be interviewed, and to think giving lectures was boring. To my great delight, he agreed to take part on 24 July in a live chat show on Swedish television. The last time he had appeared on live T.V. had been 24 April, 1991.

  When I look back at 2004, I realize that an awful lot happened. On 27 June, Stieg rang sounding breathless. He was very insistent that I should place an article in one of the dailies about the secretary of a political party with neo-Nazi leanings. The man in question had assaulted his partner on several occasions.

  I recall him saying “on several occasions” over and over again, stressing the phrase every time. Shortly afterwards he emailed me the text as an attachment. I cut about half of it, then sent it out. The following day it was published in Expressen.

  I had only just seen it when Stieg rang me on his mobile.

  “Well done. The radio people have just been on the phone,” he said, also mentioning that, as usual, he didn’t expect to be paid for the article.

  Nevertheless, I recall feeling rather worried after that phone call. I thought he had started sounding stressed again, under pressure. I wondered if it might be linked to a review of Debatten om hedersmord. A leader writer on Dagens Nyheter had written a piece about it that was dismissive, to say the least. The whole article was malicious in tone, and the reviewer attacked Stieg, questioning his motives. She referred to “oddities in an odd book”. She was very negative about the choice of the nine experts, who, in her view, churned out the same message about the causes and forms of the oppression of women.

  As the publisher, I also received my share of her criticism, which while pungent and malicious was not totally unjustified. She reserved her strongest vitriol for Stieg’s co-editor, Cecilia Englund. Cecilia was accused point blank of publishing something that was untrue. She claimed to have been in touch with a specialist on Islam whom she quoted in the book, but when the leader writer checked, that appeared not to have been the case. This created a major crisis of confidence for Stieg, Cecilia and me. Not to mention the publishing house. Stieg went through the roof and wanted me, as the publisher, to write a response to the leader writer. I declined to do so. As a result he immediately wrote a piece that was signed by all nine contributors to the book. It was refused by Dagens Nyheter, which made him even more furious, if that was possible.

  In a way it also resulted in Stieg becoming confused. He claimed that there was a dictatorship preventing the free expression of opinions. In fact, the subsequent debate led to him and his supporters being accused of trying to impose just such a dictatorship by citing all kinds of theories as to why the oppression of immigrant women was being suppressed.

  The whole debate was a mess. It was also a result of other incidents that had taken place earlier in the year. On 11 March we had all donned our best suits in order to attend the inauguration of the Centre Against Racism. It was in fact Stieg’s appeal to the prime minister five years previously that had led to the foundation of this new institution in Sveavägen, in central Stockholm.

  Nevertheless, neither Stieg nor I was welcomed with open arms. We shrugged that off, maintaining that the important thing was that the centre had come into being. But deep down we were both rather offended.

&n
bsp; In September the bomb I had been warning about for so long finally exploded. Stieg phoned and said curtly, “Have you seen

  the article about us employing only men at Expo?”

  “No,” I said with a sigh.

  “We’re in the shit.”

  Of course we were. There was an article in a weekly magazine under the less than flattering headline “Only white men at Expo”. And the content was exactly what we had feared: how Expo didn’t employ women or Swedes with an immigrant background.

  Stieg had given an interview and made a bold attempt to save the situation. But he wasn’t very successful. Expo had an obvious credibility problem, and he ought to have simply apologized, regretting the situation, and promised to put matters right.

  Instead he suggested that it seemed unfortunate that so few immigrants had any interest in questioning nationalist movements. And he added for good measure, “But we have had our nigger-in-chief, Kurdo Baksi, as publisher.”

  I thought he must have been under a lot of stress when the interviewer phoned him. It didn’t sound like Stieg at all. Then it occurred to me that what he needed was some peace and quiet. I wanted to tell him that his body was not made of iron. He needed to rest.

  He called and apologized for what he had said about me. Then he seemed to find a new source of energy.

  “We’ll be getting lots of women and immigrants on Expo, just you wait and see.”

  Oddly enough, it was only a couple of days later that we met and he showed me the first interview he had given as a crime novelist. Svensk Bokhandel, the Swedish book trade journal, had carried a long article about the books he was about to publish.

  The very headline stopped me in my tracks: “A man for the history books”. It was impossible not to see how thrilled Stieg was. All I felt when I read the text was incredible pride and happiness. There was one sentence which attracted my particular attention. It was a quotation from Stieg: “I can tell you that this is my pension insurance.”