_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [13]
In the aftermath of a bank robbery in 1999, two police officers had been killed execution-style in Malexander, a village a hundred miles from Stockholm. The circumstances surrounding these murders alerted Stieg to a connection with the extreme right, which later proved correct, but the manager in charge of staff layoffs refused to transfer Stieg, falling back on the same old argument: “Stieg Larsson cannot write!” Stieg and I talked and argued a great deal about what he should do. I thought it was high time for him to devote more than weekends and evenings late into the night to his passion for investigative journalism. True, we hadn’t any savings and earned only enough to pay our basic expenses, and I couldn’t remember buying any clothes that weren’t on sale or shopping anywhere but in a discount store. Still, even though it was financially risky, the moment had come for him to strike out on his own.
In the end, realizing that he would never get ahead at TT, Stieg chose to take the severance package and was let go in 1999.
SO HE walked away from twenty years of work at TT and never went back. Later on, when he had appointments with journalists still at the agency, he met them in a cafe. Stieg never forgot or forgave what he and other perfectly competent journalists had gone through during the almost completely irrational dismemberment of Sweden’s greatest news agency.
From that moment on, he devoted himself entirely to the Swedish Expo Foundation, which he had cofounded earlier, in 1995, and to its quarterly magazine, Expo.
Expo
DEEPLY IMPRESSED as a child by his grandfather’s anti-Nazi political engagement, Stieg wanted to write for Searchlight, a British antifascist magazine he admired, and back in 1982 he had gone to London to meet Graeme Atkinson, the editor. They rendezvoused at a cafe, and since they were complete strangers, they began with a cautious “security check” by submitting each other to an in-depth interrogation about fascism. It’s a good thing they shared the same sense of humor! That turned out to be the decisive factor in establishing trust between them. In 1983 Stieg started writing for the magazine under a pseudonym, like all the other contributors. Searchlight was the sole exception here, however, because Stieg signed his own name, for example, to the section on Scandinavia that appears in Les Extremismes en Europe, by the French political economist Jean-Yves Camus—as he did with every other article, report, and book he ever wrote.
After Stieg’s death and the success of The Millennium Trilogy, a British publisher wanted to bring out a collection of all his articles written for Searchlight, but was rebuffed by the magazine. He even came to Stockholm to ask me to put pressure on the magazine’s editor to change his mind, and the man was so insistent that I showed him the letter I’d received from Searchlight saying that not one comma of those articles would be handed over to the “Stieg industry.” I was truly moved by the editorial staff’s respect for their collaborator of over twenty years.
After a wave of racist violence in the 1980s, the extreme right became increasingly active in Sweden in the early 1990s. Stieg and I felt it was vital to have a magazine like Searchlight in our country, but British culture is quite different from ours, and we didn’t want simply to create a copycat. Along with a group of like-minded people, we spent over two years in endless theoretical discussions debating the kinds of things our magazine should publish.
Founded in 1985 and inspired by the antiracist French NGO SOS Racisme and its yellow hand logo (bearing the slogan Touche pas a mon pote, which means “Hands off my pal!”), the organization Stop Racism decided in 1995 to enrich its newsletter with a supplement carrying in-depth articles on racist and extreme-right groups. When we joined forces with them, things took off. We suddenly