Stieg Larsson’s partner bids to finish final novel

THE longtime partner of Stieg Larsson says she could finish a fourth volume in the phenomenal Millennium series left incomplete by the Swedish novelist’s sudden death, if she secures the rights.

In a 160-page memoir to be published in France, Sweden and Norway next Wednesday, Eva Gabrielsson casts new light on the creation of the crime series that has sold more than 45 million copies worldwide.

Larsson, 50, died of a heart attack in November 2004, before the publication of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, all centring on his anti-heroine, the punk computer hacker Lisbeth Salander.

Gabrielsson, Larsson’s partner for 32 years, has been locked in a dispute with his family over his inheritance. The journalist-turned-novelist died without a will, and the couple never had children.

“She is not fighting to recover money, but to obtain moral rights on Millennium and all the political writings of her companion,” said a spokesman for her French publisher Actes Sud.

In her own words, Gabrielsson tells readers that “I am fighting for him, for myself, for you,” according to an advance copy of the memoir, titled Millennium, Stieg and Me.

Not unlike the trilogy’s hero, the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson campaigned throughout his journalistic career against extremism and racism with Gabrielsson, an architect, at his side.

On the much-talked-about fourth volume, Gabrielsson confirmed Larsson, typing on a computer, had got just over 200 pages into the story before his untimely death.

“I am able to finish it, Stieg and I often wrote together,” she said, adding she would only do so once she gets undisputed rights to his work from his family.

“It is not my intention to recount here the plot of the fourth volume,” she said. “ I want to say Lisbeth little by little frees herself from her ghosts and her enemies.”

Confronted with death threats, the couple never married in order not to make it easier for neo-Nazis to track them, she explains in the book.

Under Swedish law, the author’s assets went to his father and brother.