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By Root 517 0

and what happened then is still not common knowledge today. In 1955, Severin quit his job in a factory and left Skelleftehamn—where Stieg was born—to move into that small wooden house with his wife and their baby grandson. To support his little family, Severin repaired bikes and engines and did odd jobs on the local farms. Stieg adored going hunting and fishing with him. At the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Mikael Blomkvist accepts an offer from Henrik Vanger, Harriet Vanger’s uncle, to move into the guest house not far from Hedestad. It’s the middle of winter, and he describes the “ice roses that formed on the inside of the windows”: they were the same ones that used to fascinate Stieg in his grandparents’ home, roses that grew from vapor in the family’s breath and the water always boiling on the stove. He never forgot those magnificent visions, or the cold he could describe from personal experience. His childhood was a hard one, but it was full of joy and affection.

In black-and-white family snapshots, a little boy smiles between two grown-ups who’ve been having fun disguising themselves for the camera. Those two taught Stieg that nothing is impossible in this life. And that chasing after money is contemptible. His grandfather had an old Ford Anglia, the motor of which he’d probably repaired thanks to his skills as a mechanic and handyman, and this very car, with AC on its license plate for Vasterbotten, is the one Mikael must track down during his search for Harriet Vanger. To write his trilogy, Stieg used a thousand such small details taken from life. From his life, from mine, and from ours.

IN DECEMBER 1962, Severin Bostrom, Stieg’s grandfather, died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of fifty-six (as did his daughter, Stieg’s mother, in 1991). Six months later his widow, unable to stay on in that isolated house with her grandchild, moved with him to the area around Skelleftea, in Vasterbotten County, where Stieg would later visit her every summer until she died, in 1968.

Severin’s death brought Stieg’s happy, carefree world to an abrupt end. He was not quite nine years old when he rejoined his parents in Umea. In 1957 Erland and Vivianne had had another son, Joakim, and they had married in 1958. Stieg barely knew them anymore. He used to speak often about his maternal grandparents but rarely about his parents, although some very close friends of his grandparents have told me that his mama, Vivianne, did go to see him several times when he was very little. In the autumn of 1963, when Stieg began attending elementary school in Umea, his life changed completely. He found the urban environment foreign, even hostile. He was used to living in a house out in the middle of nature, coming and going in perfect freedom, but from then on he lived shut up in a tiny apartment in the middle of town, and this switch from countryside to asphalt was painful for him. Stieg’s parents worked all day and were often absent, whereas his grandparents had always been available. The rhythm of life grew stricter, more cramped, governed by regular hours.

Stieg’s first name was originally spelled without an e, and I’m not sure when he added the extra letter because he was already “Stieg” when I met him. There was another Stig Larsson in Umea, and the story goes that they flipped a coin one day to see who would change his name. What I do know is that after Stieg received an impressive number of letters from the village library demanding the return of books checked out by the other Stig, he decided it was time for a new name. (And I’m always amused when people trot out similar anecdotes about him as if they’d been there at the time or Stieg had personally told them what happened, when I’m the only one who knew those particular stories, which they’ve gleaned from the interviews I’ve given.)

When he was seventeen, Stieg moved out of his family’s apartment into a small studio in the basement of the building where they lived. Beyond the fact that he wasn’t too happy, I don’t know what really went on during all those years. I