_There Are Things I Want You to Know_ About Stieg Larsson and Me - Eva Gabrielsson [50]
DURING JULY, I learn that a Millennium audiobook edition is due to come out. I remember Weyler mentioning this in December 2004. But there was no contract for audiobooks between Stieg and Norstedts….
Wednesday, July 20
FIRST WEEK of vacation. I’ve learned that an offer for the film rights of the trilogy from Strix, a Swedish television production company with major dealings in the Nordic countries, has been rejected by Norstedts, which wants a bigger suitor. I took another look at the contract Norstedts has for Stieg’s crime novels to see if they really control those rights. And no, they don’t. There’s nothing there about any audiobooks, either. After talking with friends and colleagues in publishing, Stieg had in fact decided not to let Norstedts be the agent for film rights to his work. If a film adaptation of the trilogy became a possibility, he wanted to make any decisions about that two or three years down the line, after the first book had come out, meaning in around 2007-2008. Stieg intended to find an agent and a production company in the United States, to make sure any film would be a top-quality product. So in that contract Stieg signed in April 2004, he didn’t check off the box for film rights. What’s more, strangely enough, outside of the separate agreement giving the Pan Agency (the Norstedts foreign rights department) the right to sell the novels abroad, the main contract deals only with a paperback edition.
Puzzling over this oddity, I found an explanation: when it was time to sign the contracts, the two separate documents were presented to Stieg for his signature, but no one realized that the second one was actually both contracts, stapled together by mistake. The first document concerned the paperback rights, and Stieg signed the last page, so that contract is valid. When he signed the last page of the second document, which was supposed to be the main publishing contract, he was really signing only the Pan Agency contract again. So Stieg never signed the principal contract. Stieg and I never noticed, and neither did Norstedts.
I could imagine what happened then. After Stieg’s death, when Norstedts discovered the problem, they had Erland and Joakim sign a new contract so that they’d have a free hand and could get the books out quickly. Further contracts must have been signed later to allow the publisher to sell the film rights. All supposition, of course. Anyway, no one who knows Stieg would believe that he’d let his family or publisher control his work or his image. That’s completely absurd—he was way too independent for that! Which is why it’s so important to me to obtain contol of the intellectual property rights to all his work. I’m thinking above all of his articles for Expo, for Searchlight, his books on the far right, and so forth.
I’VE FINISHED packing for my second week of vacation. Tomorrow I take off into the archipelago. I’m supplied with half a pound of Lipton tea, some mustard, tomato pasta, couscous, salt and pepper, oil, vinegar, and dishwashing liquid, which I’ve put into little jars from my pantry.
Plus my Koala Macintosh and a pad of paper in a leatherette folder. I have of course hooked the compass and survival knife onto my Klattermusen jacket. And slipped the can of mace into a pocket.
Thursday, August 4
A PERVASIVE melancholy came over me on July 19 during my first week of vacation without Stieg, and I can’t escape it anymore. It’s everywhere. I see it in the summer evening light as orange melts into gold, ocher, and copper. The life I knew is over. The one I used to imagine will never be. I’d like all this to end quickly. Rather than wait for nothing in particular