Stieg Larsson, My Friend - Kurdo Baksi [4]
A friend of his told me that Stieg was also a keen photographer as a teenager – but the pictures were not the usual family snaps: he took photographs “in order to record injustice in the world”.
Umeå soon became too small for Stieg. He had big ambitions. At the age of seventeen he hitched a lift on a long-distance lorry to Stockholm, and from there set off for Algeria. He had raised the necessary money by taking temporary jobs as a newspaper delivery boy and a dishwasher. But he didn’t get very far: he was mugged, lost all his travel money and had to return to Umeå. Nevertheless, being the stubborn mule that he was, he worked hard to raise the funds for another attempt. This was the beginning of a series of long journeys. He finally reached Algeria and sold his leather jacket in order to be able to prolong his stay. After a two-year gap to do his military service in Sweden, he set off on his travels once more – this time to Africa.
He was twenty-one when he landed in Khartoum, continuing from there to Eritrea and Ethiopia. The innocent abroad who had lost all his money almost before he had even set off was by now a seasoned globetrotter. In northern Ethiopia Stieg was interrogated by M.I.6, the British security service. In addition to being scared stiff and angry, he fell seriously ill after staying in a cheap hotel in Addis Ababa. For some considerable time he had no opportunity to contact anyone in Sweden, and it was not until he arrived in Kenya in a bus convoy that he could send a message confirming that he was O.K. From Kenya he continued on to Uganda, where he was able to catch a flight to Moscow, and from there back home to Sweden.
It wasn’t the actual travelling that attracted him, though. More relevant was the fact that this way of gathering knowledge would help him to become what he now knew he wanted to be: a journalist. He had already made up his mind to enrol on a course in Stockholm. As if to mark the fact that this signalled a new phase in his life, he changed his first name.
That was when he became Stieg Larsson.
As with so much else in his life, his name change was something he preferred not to talk about, and he never told me exactly why he did it. Perhaps he was afraid that people would find it a bit odd. If there was anything he avoided like the plague, it was seeming to pretend to be somebody special.
Yet again I found myself asking myself the same old question: Who was Stieg?
I think the only answer that holds water is that he was a combination of the people who influenced his life, not least his grandfather Severin, his grandmother Tekla, his mother, Vivianne, his father, Erland, and his partner, Eva. But there was also an element of escapism. He was always aware of the need to keep pushing at the boundaries. He moved from Umeå to Stockholm. Took his typewriter and telescope with him. But he needed to keep pressing on. New goals, new challenges. The letter added to his first name fitted the pattern, because it also hid something. Stieg always kept something hidden, despite the fact that he invariably gave so much to everyone with whom he came into contact.
It suddenly occurs to me that it could well be this ability to hide things that made him unique as a writer of crime fiction. He had so many secrets – perhaps the most extreme example of that is the crime trilogy he wrote at night. Quite a lot of people knew that he was writing, and he also referred frequently to crime novels by other authors, claiming that he could write at least as well as they did. But that is not what I mean. The fact is that he wrote three thumping great novels before getting round to submitting them to a publisher. How common is that?