Lewis Jones

What is it about Stieg Larsson?

How an unsuccessful Swedish journalist became a world-conquering thriller-writer

issue 13 August 2011

Stieg Larsson was a rather unsuccessful left-wing Swedish journalist who lived off coffee, cigarettes, junk food and booze, and died aged 50 after climbing seven flights of stairs, having recently sold to a publisher the series of crime novels now called The Millennium Trilogy. It was originally called The Men Who Hate Women, and in Sweden the first of the series was published under that prize-winningly awful title.

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