The Girl in the Spider’s Web: David Lagercrantz reveals he wrote Millennium

As brilliant as The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is, the subsequent volumes dug so deep into Salander and Blomkvist’s back story that there is little left to say.

Mikael Blomkvist, the main character in Stieg Larsson’s “Millennium” trilogy, could have been the deceased author’s alter ego. He does not take heed to operas.

Larsson’s three books, published in 2005-2007, inspired a series of films in Swedish as well as a Hollywood version.

“I was not the simplest individual to stay with as a result of I was serious about it on a regular basis”, he advised AFP, saying he was “scared to demise” that his guide would not stay as much as the trilogy written by Larsson who died abruptly of a coronary heart assault in 2004 at age 50, earlier than the collection gained worldwide fame. David Lagercrantz, the Swedish author who has completed Larsson’s draft for the fourth book in the Millennium series, is a journalist as well, known for his biography of the Swedish-Bosnian soccer star Zlatan Ibrahimovic.

“I don’t see a problem with a new writer”. Larsson’s long-term partner Eva Gabrielsson called the move “tasteless” and the choice of substitute author “idiotic”.

“I was not the easiest person to live with because I was thinking about it all the time. She’s fearless, she’s intrepid, she’s unfrightenable, she’s got a moral core”, he says.

The 52-year-old Lagercrantz was chosen to continue the series by Erland and Joakim Larsson, the father and younger brother, respectively, of the series’ creator.

The book completed by David Lagercrantz was in any case completely rewritten in cooperation with the Norstedts publishing house and Larsson’s father and brother. “I don’t know whether in hell I would have agreed to conditions like this myself”, he said. “I mean, I can’t start to wonder how would Stieg Larsson have written this, because then I had this character in my blood system. I have to just go berserk in a way, as you should in a good thriller”. “They say heroes are supposed to live forever”.

“Normally we would never speak to an author without having read the book first”.

In a statement, Lagercrantz said, “Stieg Larsson was a master at creating complex narratives, narratives made all the more forceful because of the journalistic authority with which they were originally written”.

“The secret they are both chasing is at the center of a tangled web of spies, cybercriminals, and governments around the world, and someone is prepared to kill to protect it”, reads the book’s synopsis.

“The worry of not doing Stieg Larsson justice stored me going”.