Basic good, weak heart
Dear Stieg Larsson,
As you know, there is a time to live. And a time to die. Something you have to do - I'm just dueling you because that's so common in Sweden and among socialists - so you have to misunderstand something. When your heart decided on 9 November 2004 not to be available for further beatings, you were only 50 years old. Apart from the fact that nobody should have died at the age of 50: your time had just not come. What makes me so sure? All that you have missed after your sudden cardiac death. On the day of your demise, you were an upright Swedish journalist and socialist, and a world-leading expert on racism and neo-Nazism. Today you are a world star.
And that's because of three books, more precisely: three thrillers. You've written that since 2002, always at night, because you were on the one hand infographics and on the other editor of a political monthly magazine. It was not until 2004 that you ran to a publisher who tore the three volumes of your "Millennium" series out of your hands. You never had a lot of money, but the publisher has promised you that you would have made financial sense from now on. You were amazed to see how five generations ago in October, hosts of publishers fought over international rights at the Frankfurt Book Fair. A month later, before even one of your books was on the shelves, you collapsed at your desk in the newsroom. And a myth was born.
Stieg Larsson wrote the rage of the soul at night
Of course, your death has fueled the hype, but it would be too easy to blame it alone for its incredible success (16 million books sold worldwide, with a daily tendency to increase!). No, "delusion," "damnation," and "forgiveness," as your books are improperly called in German, make you addicted. Addicted to your wonderful leading actors. The journalist Mickael Blomquist, for example, for whom you serve as a template - he has founded the magazine "Millennium" in the books. He also inherited your basic good attitude. Unlike you, however, your hero looks pretty good and tames women in the chord. You had the same friend for 32 years. But the real sensation of your books is Lisbeth Salander - a meager, taciturn private investigator, punk, hard, socially untalented, a victim of the system and sadistic men and a genius on the computer. She is perhaps the most unusual investigator of the crime story. With her, you wrote the rage of the soul at night, on inhuman corporations, on old Nazis, on men who hate women.
You have always argued for what was sacred to you. That was dangerous for you. Eva Gabrielsson, the woman at your side, kept you secret for over a quarter of a century. You did not marry her so as not to put her in the focus of right-wing groups that constantly threatened you. That might have made sense. But could not you at least have put on a reasonable testament? Because now that your books throw off profits in the high tens of millions, Eva has nothing of it. Your family up in Umeå has inherited everything, and it does not look as if it will give your girlfriend something of her new wealth. After all, the whole country is behind your Eve, who now wants to write a book about life with you. And in your laptop another treasure treasures: the fourth, to two-thirds finished book of the "Millennium" series. Maybe she'll finish it. But you will never know, not even how great the film adaptation of the first volume has succeeded, which runs in our cinema from 1 October and is already the most successful Swedish film of all time.
You know, it's a bit strange. When you died, I did not even know you existed. But today I miss you right. Not only because I'm so likely to go through six or seven books that are formidable. No, also because I know now: you were one of those who urgently needs our world. You had courage, a conscience and the heart in exactly the place to which it belongs. It is such a pity that it was not strong enough to carry you like a little longer.
Your Stephan Bartels
