David Lagercrantz, wild of eye and slightly jerky of limb, darts to his desk, which is tucked behind a curved wall right in the middle of his Stockholm flat, and returns waving a couple of copies of Dagens Nyheter, the Swedish newspaper whose nearest British equivalent is probably the Times. “I wrote my diaries for it,” he says, rather breathlessly, plonking himself back down beside me on a sofa. “Look, here they are, trailed on the front of the daily.” He shows me a cover, the banner including his name taking up most of its top half. After this, he opens the Sunday edition’s culture section, in which the journals finally appeared, and briskly turns its pages. One, two, three… A photograph of his face flashes by. Four, five, six… So, too, does an image of the aforementioned desk. Seven, eight…
“It runs over nine pages. Honestly, there’s never been anything like this in Sweden for a book before. I mean ever. It’s nuts. Actually, I’m a bit embarrassed. What about Isis ? What about Palestine? People are going to get angry because there are a lot of brilliant authors writing novels, and they’ll get a review [more frantic page turning]… this big.” He points to a tiny, unillustrated piece. There it floats, lonely and rather pathetic, in a vast sea of Lagercrantz.
He wasn’t, or so he insists, even remotely prepared for this level of interest. When he and the estate of Stieg Larsson agreed in September 2013 that Lagercrantz would write the fourth novel in the series that began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo – Larsson, in case you’ve been off visiting another planet, died of a heart attack at the age of 50 in 2004, before his trilogy of bestselling novels had even been published – half of him wondered if anyone would care. “I thought they might just yawn. But then, that December, we announced it to the world and the world exploded. In Sweden, every paper sent out newsflashes. It was crazy.”
A fortnight before the publication of his novel, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, he has already done so many interviews he feels “like Julia Roberts in Notting Hill” – and it’s not over yet. Is he now trembling at the thought of what the critics will make of his attempt to breathe new life into Lisbeth Salander, avenging angel extraordinaire? He grins. “I’m neurotic, and I care,” he says. “But I’ve worked hard, and done my best, and I’ve heard good things from my translators, so I feel a bit comfortable. My wife is more nervous than me. She wonders how I’m going to cope with it all. I’m going to be away from home for weeks.”
It goes without saying that Lagercrantz’s book is, in one sense, entirely critic-proof: the pre-orders alone are, he tells me, enough to make the mind boggle. But what will the fans make of it? Having read it – speedily, and in strictly controlled conditions – I would say that it is as good, or as bad, as any of Larsson’s efforts, depending on how you felt about those in the first place. When the new novel opens, Lisbeth, misfit hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, crusading leftwing journalist, have not seen each other for a while. Blomkvist has been contacted by a Swedish scientist, Professor Balder, who has a horrifying tale to tell – a story he desperately wants Blomkvist to publish. However, Balder is also in contact with Salander, who is trying to hack the US National Security Agency. She, in turn, is now the target of the Spiders, a bunch of cyber-gangsters.
Dangerous times all round, then. In fact, the only thing that really marks The Girl in the Spider’s Web as being the work of an impostor is that it is so much less violent than the original books, which were very violent indeed. Was this intentional? Lagercrantz, who is both skittish and rather intense, emits a kind of squeak. “Oh, I’m very bad at violence in real life. I can’t stand it. And I’m so fed up with crime novels that have too much violence. I can’t really do it. It’s unnecessary. You don’t have to say it. Often, it’s more terrifying and exciting just to feel it. I’m more interested in intellectual thrillers. I like a riddle, a puzzle. I had to be faithful to Larsson’s work, but I also had to be true to myself.”
Lagercrantz, a 52-year-old journalist-turned-novelist who is most famous in Sweden for having ghostwritten a controversial autobiography of the footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic (of which more later), landed his latest gig when he changed agent. “My new agent represented the Larsson estate. We had a lovely lunch and a glass of wine, and she came up with it. I was writing a novel, a love story, but I was a bit fed up. As my wife says, when I base my characters on parts of myself, they’re always too depressive. I’m an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise – then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I’m a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles. My sister [Marika Lagercrantz] is a famous actor here, and when I was young I dreamed of being one too. An actor-writer: that’s what I am.”
All the same, he didn’t bite immediately. Thinking his agent was crazy, he disappeared to his family’s island on the Finnish archipelago, where he keeps a rowing boat he likes to mess about in. Only when he met with the team at Larsson’s publisher, Norstedts, did he have a change of heart. “I realised this was real, and then something happened to me: a fever. I’d never felt anything like it before. I thought, ‘I want to do this.’ Blomkvist is a bit like me. He’s a reporter, too, only maybe he’s a bit more stable than I am. And Salander… Well, I wrote a novel about Alan Turing [the British codebreaker], you know. My life as an author has always been about brilliant, odd people.”
He put together a synopsis of his plot – the whole thing sprang, in the beginning, from the image of a savant child who had witnessed something terrible and yet was unable to communicate this – and it was translated and sent to Sonny Mehta at Knopf, publisher of the Millennium trilogy in the US, and to Christopher MacLehose, who runs MacLehose Press, its British publisher. Once they’d both read it – the global stakes are spectacularly huge, 80m copies of the series having been sold around the world – Lagercrantz was duly anointed the man who would continue what Larsson started. “When I began, I tried to be like him. I’d read that he used to work through the night, the words flowing, so I sat up late, too. Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of writer. I was scared. I was terrified. What a disgrace it would be if I wrote a bad book. So I was slow at first. Being terrified, though, wasn’t only a bad thing. Fear can also get you going, it can give you energy, the way it does if you’re a journalist and it’s 10 minutes before your deadline.”
He knew that it was vital that he did not mess around with the character of Lisbeth, whom Larsson had drawn very clearly. But with Blomkvist, who is fuzzier around the edges, he felt a greater sense of freedom: “His main purpose is to be this politically correct contrast to the rebel, Lisbeth. In the first book, awful things happen to him, and he just takes a shower, and that’s it. I realised I could mould him more easily.”
The novel took a little over a year to write, in conditions of extreme secrecy. He points to his desk, where two computers sit side by side. One has an internet connection, the other does not, and it was on the latter that the novel was typed. “I was like a real Lisbeth Salander. We had code words, and we didn’t email anything; even my editor worked on a computer without an internet connection. Once the news that I was writing the book was out, someone could very easily have hacked me. So we took no risks at all.”
He thought about Lisbeth and Blomkvist all the time. Like them, and the man who created them, Lagercrantz lives in Södermalm, a bohemian part of the city that was once working-class but is now increasingly gentrified, and thanks to this the characters were in his mind even when he left his apartment. “I didn’t exactly see them on the streets, but I was a bit crazy, I think.” Only when he handed over the first 100 pages to his editors did he finally calm down. “Of course, they were all nervous. But once they’d read something, we could all begin to believe in the book.”
Lagercrantz isn’t the first author to take over a famous franchise like this. The Fleming estate has commissioned a whole series of new James Bond novels (by William Boyd, Jeffery Deaver, Sebastian Faulks and Anthony Horowitz), and in London recently, he met Sophie Hannah, the author of a new and fully authorised Poirot mystery. His project, however, is not without controversy. On Larsson’s death, his partner of 32 years, Eva Gabrielsson, discovered that because they had never married and he had died intestate, she was not, according to Swedish law, entitled to inherit his estate. Instead, everything would go to Larsson’s father, Erland, and his brother, Joakim. Gabrielsson, who spent some years fighting the family through her lawyer, mostly without success, for what she regarded as her rightful share of the estate, has never been happy with the way it has looked after Larsson’s work. She loathes the English translations of the novels; Christopher MacLehose, she says, fatally prettified the original dialogue. Naturally, then, she regards the decision to sign up Lagercrantz as little short of grave-robbing. “This is just business,” she told a journalist recently. “It’s all a question of money.”
Lagercrantz pulls a miserable face (his natural mode is, by the way, frantically smiley). “The estate is giving all the profits to Expo, the [anti-fascist] magazine that Larsson founded. That’s beautiful. You know, in Stieg Larsson’s day, the extreme right was just a small group of lunatics. But he saw what was coming. Now they’re in parliament, for God’s sake. So his paper is more important than ever, and every penny will go to it, to help it fight racism and investigate dark elements. Norstedts is earning money, of course, but it’s a good publishing house; it has Nobel prize-winners. Look, if I’d had any moral problems with this, I wouldn’t have done it.
“The sad thing for me is Eva Gabrielsson. I’m sorry this makes her unhappy or angry or whatever she is, but she is just one person, and the readers are millions. I understand her. It is a sad situation. I know she is angry at me, but I have the deepest respect for her.” Has he ever met her? “No. I never met Stieg Larsson either. It’s strange. I didn’t even know his name. None of us did, perhaps because he used a pseudonym.” (Thanks to Larsson’s efforts to expose the extreme right, at least one serious attempt was made on his life, with the result that he took care to protect his identity in his political writings, and his whereabouts.)
How much does Lagercrantz believe that Sweden has changed? I tell him that, for all that we in Britain are now thoroughly obsessed both with its crime fiction (Henning Mankell, Camilla Läckberg, Karin Alvtegen among others) and with TV series such as The Bridge, in which horrible things occur with alarming regularity in freezing cold Malmö, most of us still think of the country as a place where equality comes as standard, and where every apartment is equipped with good lighting and at least one piece of fine mid-century furniture (this is certainly true of his place). He laughs.
“The noir came out of the old Sweden,” he says. “I think when our society really was safe, that maybe we dreamed of darker things, of the threats to it. But now Sweden is changing, and fast. It’s still far more equal for women. We know this from women friends who have gone to live in Britain, and who have found that they have gone back 40 years. But the rich are getting richer, and the poor, poorer. There are two sides to Sweden. The tolerant side is so beautiful. But a growing number of people are feeling scared, and they hate the [intellectual] elite, who say it is good to look after minorities. It is more segregated. Tension is growing. There is this envy around.”
Does he worry about extremism?
“Yes, on the left and the right.”
He learned a great deal about this divide when he was ghostwriting I Am Zlatan Ibrahimovic. His subject, the son of a Muslim Bosnian father and a Catholic Croatian mother, grew up in a notorious part of Malmö, a ghetto by any other name. “He was 20 before he watched Swedish television for the first time,” says Lagercrantz. “He lived in another world, a bubble. What people need to remember is that for every Zlatan Ibrahimovic, there are 10,000 others we’ve crushed just because they don’t fit in.”
Determined to capture the footballer’s formative exclusion, Lagercrantz realised there was no way he was going to turn out a bog-standard football book. “The ones I looked at before I started writing were the worst books I’d ever read. Actually, they were unreadable. I said to Zlatan, ‘We’re going to have write this like a novel.’ Luckily, he understood. So then I started reading writers who used an urban language, like Irvine Welsh, and that helped me to make the book more real.”
Its impact on Ibrahimovic’s reputation – fiery and ill-disciplined, he had often been accused of un-Swedish behaviour by a press who longed for a polite Björn Borg-style football icon – was transformative. But it also had a huge effect on culture more generally (it remains the bestselling book in Swedish history). “Apart from my family, it’s the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me,” says Lagercrantz. “It got a whole new generation reading. All these kids from the suburbs, who’d never even been close to a library, started reading it. Now it’s used in schools. It’s in all the anthologies. It’s a classic here.”
He and Ibrahimovic couldn’t have come from more different backgrounds, and perhaps this helped the project: he struggled to get inside his head. But working as a footballer’s ghostwriter must also have felt extremely transgressive at times. What, after all, would his late father have made of it?
“Lagercrantz is a very famous name in Sweden,” he says, uncertainly.
What does he mean by famous, exactly? Does he mean posh?
“Yes. Very posh. There are a lot of successful people in our family, but there is also a lot of mental illness and suicide.” Lagercrantz’s father, Olof, who died in 2002, was the editor of Dagens Nyheter in the 60s and 70s and the acclaimed author of studies of Dante, Strindberg and Joyce. “It’s hard to understand now how influential he and his newspaper were. Growing up, we always had famous authors in our home. Those dinners… My poor mother. It’s hard to have dinners, don’t you think? I get so tired.”
Lagercrantz’s paternal grandmother, a countess, was lobotomised, and two of his father’s siblings killed themselves. “My sister used to say – and this may be unfair because my father was in many ways very sensitive – that he gave us a choice: be brilliant, or go under. What you could not do was be mediocre. That was the biggest sin: mediocrity. My father wrote a book about his family [Min Första Krets], and he described their suffering with such respect that they became Christ figures. I grew up with the idea that this suffering made our family even more noble – though I was also taught to despise that nobility. I never saw him so angry as when he met uneducated upper-class rightwing people. He hated them. There was this great guilt about privilege. Like his friend Olof Palme [the Swedish prime minister who was assassinated in 1986] he was upper-class but of the left. That meant he was despised by some. We have this expression “red wine communist”. That was what people used to call him.”
Did Lagercrantz ever feel he might go under?
“Yes. When I was depressed, I did feel that I could take the other Lagercrantz way. It sounds private, but in Sweden everyone knows about it. Actually, I have an advance to write a book about it myself. I must do it soon or I’ll have to pay it back.”
It was thanks to the writers who visited when he was a boy that Lagercrantz wanted to be one himself. “Though the embarrassing thing is that I wanted to be like them more than I wanted actually to write.”
What about his father? Did he play a part too?
“Oh, I idolised him. When you have a father like that, you do. But I understood early on that I couldn’t go into writing literary essays or work for Dagens Nyheter. That would have been pathetic. So I went another way. I became a crime reporter.”
After university and journalism school – “it was a leftist time and they were all after me for being a Lagercrantz: if I used a difficult word in an essay, I was an enemy of the people” – he joined an evening tabloid. “I was thinking: this is not me. But I had to do it.” Ever since, he has been conflicted. “Commercial, for me, is a dirty thing. My father despised those who wrote only to sell. If someone really wants to offend me, they only need to say I’m doing something for money. But I want to be read, too.” Suddenly he looks agonised. “Sometimes I write it down: what would your father think of this?”
Will he write another book about Salander and Blomkvist? “I don’t know. We are discussing it. But I get fantastic suggestions from publishers nearly every week now, and perhaps I like the feeling of doing something new and feeling insecure. I think I might be addicted to that.”
He isn’t saying what his father would have made of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, but he knows exactly into what category he would have put its author. “He had this thing about writers. He divided them into hedgehogs and foxes. Hedgehogs can only do one thing, they just put up their spines. Very often, respected authors are like that: they write the same kind of book again and again. The fox, on the other hand, does lots of different things.” He grins, trying, and failing, to look sly. “I’m more of a fox.”
David Lagercrantz will be in conversation with Mark Lawson at Foyles, 107 Charing Cross Road, London, at 7pm on 4 September. Click here for tickets.
The Girl in the Spider’s Web by David Lagercrantz, translated by George Goulding, is published by MacLehose Press (£19.99). Click here to order a copy for £15.99
