Existence of Unpublished Stieg Larsson Novel is Confirmed
CBS and The New York Times are reporting that the long-rumored fourth novel in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series does, in fact, exist.
Whether it will ever be published in another matter. The complete text has yet to surface, and the only person reportedly in possession of a copy is his longtime companion Eva Gabrielsson, who is believed to have a laptop containing the manuscript. However Gabrielsson does not control the rights to the book, which are held by Larsson’s family. CBS is reporting the Larssons have, to date, forbidden publication.
The Millennium trilogy began with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and continued in The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Larsson reportedly planned to write 10 volumes.
Larsson, who died of a heart attack at the age of 50, did not live to see the books published. They have become an international phenomenon, with roughly 30 million copies sold. All were published originally in Sweden and then translated into English.
Among the disclosures today was the fact that the manuscript is believed to be the fifth book in the 10-volume series, rather than the fourth, “because he thought that was more fun to write.”
I bought these books for my mother on her birthday, only to discover she’d already read them. That pretty much makes me the last person in North America not to have read them. On the bright side, at least now I have copies.
It begins with an imp, some dwarves, a stolen set of bowling balls, and a cigar-smoking dragon in a flat newsboy cap. It gets stranger from there, sprawling through an epic of long-jawed mudsuckers, oddly literate stonedrakes, bad puns, bounty hunters, and some of the most spectacular color comics pages you can imagine.
So I finally had a chance to sit down this week with Swords & Dark Magic, the 
have been several attempts to do this sort of thing, most of which have had short life spans (anyone remember the