The story of Stieg Larsson is as strange as any in recent publishing. In the early 2000s, with his career established as one of Sweden’s leading investigative journalists and experts on the political far right, Larsson wrote a trilogy of dark, winding crime novels featuring the detective team of reporter Mikael Blomkvist and computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. He dubbed the books the Millennium series. In late 2004, just months after having the three manuscripts accepted as a group by the major Swedish publishing house Norstedts, he died at the age of 50, the victim of a massive heart attack.

Since then, however, the Millennium series has become something of an international sensation: the first book, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (Penguin Canada), has alone sold upward of 15 million copies worldwide, and the second, The Girl Who Played With Fire (Viking Canada), landed on the New York Times bestseller list immediately after being released in English earlier this month. (A translation of the third installment, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest, is still on the way.)

The Straight recently contacted Norstedts publisher Eva Gedin to talk about the author she knew and the series whose publication she oversaw. We reached her by phone at her office in Stockholm.

Georgia Straight: From your time working with Stieg Larsson, do you have any sense of what he would have thought about the international success of his work? Would he have been happy or comfortable with the attention and so forth?

Eva Gedin: That’s quite a difficult question to answer, because his success is so huge. But I suppose he would have got used to it, because it’s been a while. We started publishing the first book in Sweden in 2005. And, I mean, since he was writing crime, and since he said that this would be his retirement fund”¦he wanted us to sell books so he could become a writer full-time. But I think there is a point in your question: he wasn’t very convenient [sic] with doing public things. Actually, he said to me that if we would like him to, you know, sit on a TV sofa and make interviews or sign books, that wouldn’t really be his thing. He wasn’t so keen on that. But I told him, “Maybe this is the kind of thing you have to do.””¦He was a quite shy person and wasn’t one who liked to be in the centre of things. In his work as a journalist, he did TV discussions and debates, but he’d rather send someone else.

GS: What kind of writer was he to work with as an editor? In other interviews you’ve said he could be difficult.

EG: I think to write articles, as he did, on right-wing extremists, he had to be very specific with all the facts. But he was—I mean, everything you say now, afterwards, is like you are sort of making things a bit better than they were—but actually he was a dream kind of writer to edit, because he said, “I don’t mind you having opinions. And do a thorough editing, because I’d like to hear what you say.” And there was never any fuss about commenting on things or cutting out parts. I mean, we did a thorough editing of the first book, and we did talk about books two and three also.

GS: All three books were written in one go and then submitted for publication—is that right?

EG: Yes, he delivered two full manuscripts in February and March 2004, and in the summer of that same year he was finished with the third book.

GS: So were you able to complete your work on the series before he passed away?

EG: Yes, in most parts. We had to do the line editing in books two and three without him. But since we had done such thorough work on book one, we had set all the characters and their way of speaking, and all the fundamental work. And I had also discussed some vital things about the ending and the start of book two and three. So, yes, we did all the editing.

GS: Do you have any idea why he took the unusual route of writing all three before approaching a publisher?

EG: I’ve been sort of asking my friends and colleagues about that. He did send the manuscripts to another publishing house, sometime before, but since they didn’t publish newcomers at all, they didn’t even open the package. And why we had it—it was because one of his journalist colleagues had published books here. So he was the one telling Stieg, “Now you must stop writing and have a publisher read this.” It was his friends and colleagues who said, “Stop talking about all your crime writing and please send it into a publisher.” [laughs] This was very joyful for him, and he had this idea—he called it a trilogy, so it had its start in book one and ending in book three. So I think they stuck together. It was sort of a big project for him. He was planning to write more books about Salander and Blomkvist, so we knew that he would go on writing in this Millennium series.

GS: So it wasn’t just meant to be three books and that would be the end of it for those characters?

EG: No, but I think he had this idea that the first three were one big story.

GS: You really get that sense—that he benefitted greatly by writing all three in one go, and being able to control the whole thing, instead of writing one book and then deciding what to do next with the characters. Were you surprised at the quality of his work when you first saw it?

EG: Yes, he was a very mature writer”¦.He was reading a lot of crime since he was a teenager, and he also reviewed mostly foreign, translated crime. And you can see that in his writing. He knows the genre very well. So the first one is a typical closed-room mystery, and the other one is more of the standard police story, and the third one is more of a political thriller. So he has all these elements that he used. So, yes, I was surprised. Maybe the first book had more editing to do than books two and three.

GS: And he was writing these after work, right?

EG: Yes, in his spare time. He said, “I don’t need to sleep that much.” So he wrote them at nighttime and in his short vacations. And, I mean, he worked almost day and night. But I was really surprised. I asked him, “How did you have time to write these books?” I think he started, as I have heard, in 2001.

GS: Really? That seems like a relatively short time to write all three books.

EG: Yes. We got them in 2004.

GS: Do you have any insights into his working methods? The first two books give you the sense that he must have had some incredible charting system to keep track of all the story lines and characters.

EG: Yes, exactly. That’s one of the amazing things—that he never loses one thread”¦.He knew exactly where everything was going to lead. He had this sort of fantastic mind, like some people have—an encyclopedic mind, to keep all of these things in his head. And he used the Internet a lot, to check up things. But I think he was—I wouldn’t say he was Salander, but I think he had this capability of remembering things that he once read. A little bit. I mean, Lisbeth has a photographic memory—she’s a bit extra-special. [Laughs]

GS: Did he ever explain to you how he came up with Salander, or what she represented to him?

EG: There is one interview that he did shortly before he died, in October of 2004. He said that he had this idea—do you know Astrid Lindgren, the famous children’s book writer, and [her character] Pippi Longstocking?”¦He said about Salander that the first idea was: “What if I take Pippi Longstocking as a grown-up—as a girl probably [with] Asperger’s syndrome. How would she be as a grown-up?”...I’ve heard that there is a girl or woman that he worked with at some time, around Expo [the news magazine Larsson edited], that also was quite similar to Salander. So, as writers do, he picked bits and parts from different characters and figures like that.

GS: Is it true that after the third book, there are no more to come? There’s nothing else in the bank?

EG: There have been rumours about a fourth manuscript. And as I said, it was in his plans to go on writing, and go on writing in this series, so probably he had started something. But I have never seen that manuscript. I don’t know more than I’ve read in the press here. And the family has sort of decided that they won’t publish the fourth part, even if it is existing. But he probably didn’t finish that part.

GS: Do you have any theories about why this series has been so successful?

EG: I think that Salander is the very short answer. She’s a fantastic character—and both Blomkvist and Salander, as a couple. But then, exactly as you said, how he constructs those quite complex stories, but holds it so well in his hand—you can really trust the writer while reading.”¦The first people here in the publishing house who read the manuscripts said, “When I started, I couldn’t stop reading.” And I still have lots of mail from readers who say that. So it has a real quality of a page-turner. Too few crime novels today are keeping that tempo. But as I said in the first line, Lisbeth Salander is a character that people really love”¦. It’s like a play: he makes the bad guys really bad, and the good guys are quite good. And people like that in our times, when social questions are quite complex.