How a brutal rape and a lifelong burden of guilt fuelled Girl with the Dragon Tattoo writer Stieg Larsson

Ed here: The Daily Mail online (UK) published not one but two long articles about Stieg Larsson. Well worth reading.

How a brutal rape and a lifelong burden of guilt fuelled Girl with the Dragon Tattoo writer Stieg Larsson
By KURDO BASKI

The chapel in southern Stockholm was packed on that icy December day in 2004. We filed past the coffin to pay our respects, whispering final messages to Stieg Larsson.

The Stieg we were mourning was a tireless hero in the fight against neo-Nazism, but the man the world now remembers is someone quite different - the author of one of the biggest, least expected publishing successes of modern times.

His crime novels - The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest - were published after his death, have sold 30million copies and have made Stieg Larsson a global celebrity.


Private: Stieg Larsson, right, who died in November 2004, and his partner Eva Gabrielsson are seen relaxing over a cup of coffee at cafe in the city of Strangnas, Sweden

People beg me to sign his books, simply because I was his friend. A critically-acclaimed Swedish film version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo has already been released and now Hollywood is planning its own take, with Carey Mulligan and Daniel Craig rumoured as stars.

Despite the acclaim, however, Stieg remains a man of secrets. Before his death few people knew he was writing his novels, and he was intensely private, rarely talking about the first 20 years of his life. On one occasion though, he told me a chilling story about something in his past that drove his passion and creativity.

I did not know the whole story but I was given the bare but brutal details. As a fellow journalist and former colleague of Stieg's, I wanted to know more. In short, who was Stieg, and what fuelled his writing? I found out - and uncovered the dark secret behind The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

A year after Stieg's death from a heart attack, the journalist in me was still asking questions. No human being is capable of working as hard as he did. Did he do it to achieve ambitious goals or was it a form of escapism?

Stieg had so many secrets - the most extreme was the trilogy that he wrote at night. That was unusual enough, but stranger still was the fact that he waited to complete three thumping great novels before submitting them to a publisher.

for the rest go here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1299216/Stieg-Larsson-wrote-novel-The-Girl-Dragon-Tattoo-fuelled-brutal-rape.html