It was in 1983 that Eva Gabrielsson and Stieg Larsson first decided to get married. They had been together for a decade, after meeting at an anti-Vietnam war group when they were both 18. He had immediately caught her eye "because he was so different from the others in the anti-war movement", she says, sitting in a bar in Soho in central London, a quiet, precise Swedish woman in her late 50s. "Some of them could be quite arrogant, obnoxious and self-righteous, but he was there because he thought the war was wrong, that this was a good way of doing politics, and of having fun." They argued furiously, passionately, over political ideas; made posters, sold newsletters, organised feverishly. It was a year or so before they became a couple, says Gabrielsson, "but I think the people around us understood our relationship much faster than we did," she laughs.
So in 1983 they had two rings engraved "Stieg and Eva", looked into the formalities of getting married, and discovered it was more of a bureaucratic maze than they'd imagined. Both had pressing professional obligations, so the idea was put aside momentarily.
That same year, Larsson, an illustrator and journalist at a news agency in Sweden, began writing for the British anti-fascist magazine Searchlight. It was the start of a career spent investigating and exposing the far right, which would include the 1991 book Rightwing Extremism, the founding of Swedish anti-fascist magazine Expo in 1995 – and regular death threats against him. Bullets arrived in the post, anonymous calls referred to him as "Jew-fucker", and on one occasion a group of neo-Nazis gathered outside his office with baseball bats (he spotted them and headed back inside).
The pressure affected everything in Larsson's life. "The extreme right wing wasn't that vocal or visible in Sweden when he started," says Gabrielsson, "but then the racist killings and beatings started, and it escalated very, very fast, culminating in 1999." That was the year a car bomb left investigative journalist Peter Karlsson with a serious spinal injury; months later, trade unionist Björn Söderberg was shot and killed in a Stockholm suburb after exposing a colleague as a neo-Nazi.
The couple's life became one of extreme care and evasion. In cafes, Larsson started to sit with his back to the wall; Gabrielsson kept her partner's name from her colleagues. And this also precluded them from getting married. Had they done so, Swedish law would have required them to publish their address. "It was absolutely impossible for us to go back to the wedding plans we had had," says Gabrielsson. "We had to take more and more security measures."
Still, they had their rings, and the idea kept cropping up. It did so for the last time one evening in August 2004, 32 years after they'd first met, while they were on holiday at a small rented cottage on the Stockholm archipelago. Larsson had sold a trilogy of crime novels, which were soon to be published, and he was looking forward to scaling back his work for Expo and writing the seven novels that would complete the series. The way ahead seemed clearer, less threatening, and one evening Larsson asked Gabrielsson again. She was surprised and delighted. They decided that later that year they'd have an enormous joint birthday party, invite all their friends, and only once the evening was underway would they tell them that this was, in fact, their wedding celebration.
The party never happened. Three months later, Larsson went for an appointment at Expo, where the lift was broken. He walked the seven flights to the office, was taken ill at the top, and rushed to hospital. It was a heart attack. He died that day. He left behind the Millennium Trilogy – the novels, starting with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, have sold more than 55m copies to date – a fragment of a fourth novel and no valid will. His estate, including all rights to his novels, passed to his father Erland and brother Joakim (his mother had died some years before). Gabrielsson would have a struggle just to hold on to the modest apartment she and Larsson owned together. Legally, she was only entitled to half of it.
Earlier this year Gabrielsson, an architect and historian, published Stieg and Me: Memories of My Life with Stieg Larsson. This came about when she started compiling her handwritten diary notes on her computer. "After doing that for the better part of a year," she says, "I realised this was the kind of book, full of grief and loss, I would have wanted when he died … I could get down on paper, without distortions and misconceptions, the events after his death, so I won't have to answer these questions for the rest of my life. I don't have the time!"
She laughs, but her voice is weary. It is clearly painful for her to keep talking about Larsson's death, and the ugliness and upheaval that has come since. I suspect she feels she has little choice though. The tussle between her and Larsson's family continues, and she feels bound to highlight the legal morass unmarried people face when their partner dies intestate. She has already published another book specifically on this subject, been to parliament and put forward proposals for legal change. "People whose misery was private, who have lost everything to their dead partner's family overnight, they cheer me on and say: 'You are our voice as well. Please don't be silent.'"
She also feels an obvious responsibility to represent Larsson. "I'm a most reluctant public person," she says, and I believe her. She has none of the underlying eagerness of someone who yearns to be interviewed. "I had to stay in Stieg's shadow all these years, which was necessary, but it's odd to suddenly come out and not just talk about him, but also to have to prove our life together existed."
Some of the stories that have appeared since Larsson died have infuriated her; suggestions that he was an introvert, anti-social, a workaholic. "They've said he didn't write Millennium, he was a bad journalist, he fabricated facts as a journalist … They've called him a sado-masochist, have said he was murdered." The insinuation that seems to upset her most is that he was a bad writer. Last year, in the New York Times, a colleague was quoted to this effect. "They've tried to diminish him. Why? All it proves is they're capable of being extremely disloyal and deceitful."
In her book, Larsson comes across as warm and deeply determined, with strong feminist as well as leftwing ideals. She traces these to his upbringing. As a baby, she writes, he went to live with his maternal grandparents in northern Sweden, "in a small wooden house on the edge of the forest"; his parents, Erland Larsson and Vivianne Boström, were apparently too young to look after him properly, and ended up living 600 miles away. Larsson's grandfather, Severin, had been a communist who spent time in a labour camp during the second world war, and Gabrielsson suspects this background "made Stieg's politics more personal".
She believes his feminism was also strongly rooted in this period. "The culture you have up there in the north is based on co-operation and respect between men and women. I guess it's the same in all countries, but I think it's exaggerated in places where you don't have much money and the conditions are harsh. I come from the same county, from the coast, and I never experienced during my upbringing that women were somehow below men, or that their word didn't matter. The men up there are macho in the positive sense that they know who they are, which means they aren't afraid of 'the other'. They're rough guys, but good guys."
When Larsson was eight, his grandfather died of a heart attack, and he went to join his parents and younger brother Joakim in Umeå, a town in northern Sweden. Gabrielsson writes that "he found the urban environment foreign, even hostile … Stieg's parents worked all day and were often absent, whereas his grandparents had always been available."
During these years he had another experience that would influence him heavily. As a teenager, he witnessed some boys he had considered friends commit a gang rape at a camp site. Years later, he still blamed himself for not intervening. He and Gabrielsson had been together for about a decade, she says, when he told her, "and it was obvious it still haunted him, he was still pained by the memory, the shame that he couldn't do anything. I think he was angry with himself for being such a bad judge of character. Coming from the forest into a city at nine years old you have to make new friends, and he was still upset about it. I am the only one he ever told."
Years later, Larsson's feminism would come to the fore in the Millennium Trilogy, the first chapter of which opens with the words: "18% of the women in Sweden have at one time been threatened by a man." It also, of course, features the avenging heroine, Lisbeth Salander, a pierced, antisocial, tiny but fiercely tough private investigator and computer hacker whose father viciously beat her mother. In Stieg and Me, Gabrielsson describes the trilogy simply as "a catalogue of all forms of violence and discrimination endured by women", which Larsson signalled clearly with the title of the first book. In Sweden it is called, quite baldly, Men Who Hate Women.
Larsson began writing the books in the summer of 2002, when the couple were on holiday. Gabrielsson was working on a book about the architect Per Olof Hallman, "and Stieg had nothing to do. He just walked about, grumbling. Then he came to think about a small text he had written five years earlier, about an old man who receives flowers [anonymously] each year on his birthday, and so we started talking about that. I read it too, and said: 'It's a very interesting story. What is it about?' 'I have no idea,' he said, and off he went. It was that spontaneous."
There have been suggestions that Gabrielsson had a hand in the novels – that she was, at the very least, a co-writer. She both denies and clarifies this. "The actual writing, the craftsmanship, was Stieg's. But the content is a different matter. There are a lot of my thoughts, ideas and work in there." She says, for instance, that Larsson didn't have time to research all the locations for the book – he did, after all, write 2,000 pages in just two years. So he used information from her unfinished book about Hallman, "and we went out to double- and triple-check some places, to discuss where people would live and why – according to the story, their character, or financial status. So there's a large part of my knowledge, life and world in it, and large parts of his. Then there's this grey zone that's joint. That's why I think it would have been a good idea if I could have managed the literary legacy."
When Larsson died, Gabrielsson imagined this was exactly what would happen. He'd told her he was setting up a company in which she would be co-founder, and into which they would pay all the money they earned for books and articles. "There was no need, Stieg explained to me," she writes, "to start dealing with a mass of paperwork like wills, for example, because we would be equal co-owners of everything and the company statutes would stipulate that if one of us died, the other would get everything."
It turned out, after his death, that this company had never been set up. Gabrielsson was devastated, but imagined she would still have a claim to the estate; at a gathering after Larsson's commemoration, his father Erland allegedly said he didn't want any part of the estate, and she writes that she received an email from Joakim saying (in her words), "there must certainly be some way to carry out Stieg's wishes and set up the company, even after the fact".
Months later, she learned that the entire estate was being passed to Erland and Joakim. She says she was offered the other half of her apartment, only if she handed over Stieg's laptop; she refused. In 2007, his family relented and allowed her to keep the whole property, but she has no other significant inheritance. It's a bitter situation, particularly since she claims Larsson and his family were far from close. She admits they used to see his father a couple of times a year, but says she can't remember when she first met his brother. "I've been thinking back to how many times I actually saw him, when Stieg was alive, and I'm being generous when I say half a dozen." (The Larssons have disputed such claims; Joakim has said he used to talk to his brother regularly on the phone, for example, and Erland has said he discussed the manuscript of the Millennium novels with Stieg.)
In November 2009, the Larssons said they were willing to settle with Gabrielsson for £1.75m. She refused. I ask what her lawyers are aiming for, and she says it is "the same as always. That I would manage the literary legacy for a fee, which would be a percentage of the royalties for Millennium, a percentage that the family themselves could decide or propose … I think after two or three years my lawyer suggested I would get 20% for managing the literary legacy, and they don't want that. They could keep 80%. But they want the control – or the businesses around them do, because it gives them maximum freedom."
Gabrielsson has been upset by some of the changes that have been made to the books, including the original title being dropped in the international editions. "Stieg refused to let the Swedish publisher change that – they said [Men Who Hate Women] wasn't commercial, and he refused. I have that in an email." She says that calling Lisbeth Salander "the girl with the dragon tattoo" diminishes her. "And the actual tattoo, well, in the original book, that's huge – it runs from her shoulder, along the spine, and ends somewhere on her buttock. Even that image is changed in the English version. It's changed to a small tattoo on her shoulder, because that's the cover they had in mind. You shouldn't be able to do that." She bangs a hand on the table, clearly incensed.
If anyone could continue Larsson's work, it's been said, it would have to be Gabrielsson. I ask if she still has his computer and she says she can't tell me; she won't talk about it. She says she hasn't read what's on it, but thinks the unfinished manuscript must run to about 200 pages – maybe 30% of a complete book. "Not worth publishing as it is," she says. "I once offered to finish it, but I have to have the legal rights to do so, and they didn't want to give me that, so I think we should all be happy that there are just three." She looks down at her hands. All these years later, she still wears both wedding rings.