General

Lisabeth Salander in northern Canada?

The girl with the dragon tattoo was to have come to remote Sachs Harbour

“Did you know that 134 people live in Sachs Harbour, whose only contact with the world is a postal plane twice a week when the weather permits?” Stieg Larsson wrote a friend about the fourth novel in his Millennium series, left unfinished at his death in 2004. “But there are 48,000 musk-ox and 80 different types of wild flowers that bloom during two weeks in early July, as well as an estimated 1,500 polar bears.” The plot, Larsson wrote John-Henri Holmberg, “is set 120 km north of Sachs Harbour, at Banks Island in the month of September,” and he’d written the beginning and end—some 320 pages of a projected 440—but was still working on connecting the start and finish. But that’s all Larsson told Holmberg, and the only other person who might know more—Larsson’s longtime partner Eva Gabrielsson—isn’t talking. Locked in a bitter dispute over the author’s estate with Larsson’s legal heirs (his father and brother), Gabrielsson won’t even reveal its whereabouts. If the book could be finished, perhaps by Gabrielsson who was deeply involved in the previous three novels, it might prove a gold mine: combined sales of the first book are currently running at 50,000 copies a day in the U.S. Gabrielsson initially acknowledged she had the laptop containing the fourth manuscript, but in a recent interview said she doesn’t want to see any other book in the Millennium series published and that she does not have the manuscript. The Larsson family also say they have no idea. The reason for the dispute is a Swedish law that stipulates partners aren’t entitled to inherit from each other unless they are married or have special wills. Like many Swedish couples, Larsson and Gabrielsson never married, which meant Erland and Joakim Larsson inherited everything after the author’s premature death. For a long time, negotiations to settle the dispute were stalled as both parties threw accusations at each other in the Swedish media. Last December, the parties’ lawyers resumed talks but they collapsed again in mid-June.

Canadian Press

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