by CHARLES R. LARSON
Eva Gabrielsson met Stieg Larsson—the celebrated author of The Millennium Trilogy—in 1972, at an anti-Vietnam war meeting. They lived together for thirty years, until the time of his death in 2005, shortly before any of the novels were published. They never married, though they had planned to once his novels brought them economic stability. Before that time, when Stieg edited Expo, which exposed right-wing fascism in Sweden, and there were constant threats on his life. The two of them feared that the marriage records would make it easy for right-wing fanatics to identify where they lived and possibly go after her.
Eva was a trained architect, Stieg a journalist with less formal education. Both had been born in the northern part of Sweden, 600 away from Stockholm where in the winter there were only thirty-five minutes of daylight. Metaphorically, that darkness permeates much of Larsson’s fiction. Stieg was raised by his grandfather, a man with strong Old Testament values.
Expo had always been erratically funded, surviving from issue to issue. Gabrielsson provides this chilling context: “In the 1990s, more than a dozen people were murdered in Sweden for political reasons by individuals involved with neo-Nazi groups. Säpo—the Security Service, an arm of the Swedish National Police—estimates that during 1998 alone, there were more than two thousand unprotected racist attacks, more than half of which can be directly linked to neo-Nazi militants in White Power groups.”
Some of the fanatics obtained the telephone number of the apartment Stieg and Eva shared. They received anonymous calls, so they installed a security system. Bullets were sent to Stieg in the mail. Anyone who has read The Millennium Trilogy understands the context. Gabrielsson remarks that nothing in the three novels was made up: all the murders, the violence, and the extremism were based on actual events. Interestingly, Stieg saw the arrival of the Internet as an obvious concern. He wanted it regulated like other media. “For racist groups,” he said, “cyberspace is a dream.”
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Then Stieg died, suddenly from a heart attack. And then even though they had lived together for most of their lives, because they had no children, the National Swedish Institute of Statistics classified Eva as “single,” not legally heir to Stieg’s estate. Instead, the estate fell to Stieg’s father, Erland, and his brother, Joakim, two people with whom he had almost no connections, other than biological.
The rest is pretty much a horror story. Eva Gabrielsson has spent several years trying to get Stieg’s brother and their father to assign her control of Stieg’s literary estate—not the royalties—but the intellectual property. This is her reason: “I do not want his name to be an industry or a brand. The way things are going, what’s to stop me from one day seeing his name on a bottle of beer, a packet of coffee, or a car? I don’t want his struggles and ideals to be sullied and exploited. I know how he would react in every situation I’m facing today: he would fight.” The two “official” heirs have treated her shamelessly, even proposing at one time that the only way she could manage his literary estate would be by marrying Erland, Stieg’s father. What kind of monsters can these people be?
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