STOCKHOLM – Former colleagues of bestselling crime fiction author Stieg Larsson have caused a furore in Sweden by questioning his talent as a writer and casting public doubt on whether he wrote his books alone.
Larsson’s work has become enormously successful since his sudden death six years ago. His “Millennium” trilogy of novels, which exposes the underbelly of Sweden’s industrial elite, became a global phenomenon and sold more than 12 million copies.
Lately, however, most talk of Larsson’s work in Sweden has centred on public criticism of his reporting methods and his talent as a writer, as well as allegations that his life partner of 32 years could actually have written much of the trilogy.
“I am definitely not out to defame Larsson – I had a great deal of respect for him,” Anders Hellberg, a former colleague of Larsson’s at the Swedish TT newswire, said. “But a person can’t be good at everything, and writing wasn’t his strong point. He simply didn’t write well.”
Hellberg, now a journalist for Sweden’s top-selling morning paper, wrote that while Larsson was a masterful researcher – “the human form of Wikipedia” – he was an awkward writer who had probably called on his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, to do much of the writing for the trilogy.
Gabrielsson has done little to quiet speculation about her role in writing the trilogy.
"I have trouble seeing what's exclusively mine and what's exclusively Stieg's in Millennium's language, content, and so forth," she told Politiken, a Danish newspaper, in an e-mail. – (Reuters)