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Interview
3 January 2016 2.00 h

Following in the footsteps of genius

Swedish writer David Lagercrantz was chosen by the Nostedts publishing company to continue Steig Larsson's Millennium saga with a fourth instalment

Tak­ing over a saga like Steig Lars­son's Mil­len­nium se­ries fol­low­ing the death of its cre­ator seems like a big ask, but David Lager­crantz has man­aged it. The writer has cre­ated a grip­ping story in his own lit­er­ary voice but cap­tur­ing the best of Lars­son's style. The Girl in the Spi­der's Web (pub­lished by Columna as El que no et mata et fa més fort) is the fourth entry in se­ries and tells a tale of es­pi­onage, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and math­e­mat­ics in which the strange Lis­beth Sa­lan­der and jour­nal­ist Michael Blomkvist meet once more.

What did you think when the Nos­t­edts pub­lisher of­fered you the fourth part?
That it was a joke, but when I re­alised it was for real, I be­came com­pletely taken with the idea be­cause I loved the books and the char­ac­ters. I was also scared and at first I couldn't write a thing be­cause I felt the pres­sure of all the fans and crit­ics, it was if he was breath­ing down my neck. One rea­sons I de­cided to go for it was be­cause I saw that Lars­son and I shared a lot of things: we were both jour­nal­ists from the same gen­er­a­tion.
Was it dif­fi­cult to take on Lars­son's voice?
Yes, but I told my­self that the reader had to feel at home in the Mil­len­nium uni­verse. At the start it was hard to find the code that Lars­son had cre­ated: the changes of per­spec­tive and his nar­ra­tive, but I did not want to copy him en­tirely be­cause I could never pre­tend to be him, so I had to make it mine and ex­press my­self on the page. What's more, by read­ing the first three books I was able to see cer­tain in­di­ca­tions of where he wanted to take it and where he wanted to focus Lis­beth's story.
What do you think he would think?
When he died, most peo­ple did not know who he was. In fact, al­though both us were jour­nal­ists, I didn't know who he was ei­ther. Now, since his death, he has be­come fa­mous, like Kafka or Van Gogh. I do not know what he would think of my book, but if he were to see who he has be­come, it would make him happy.
Lars­son cre­ated the two main char­ac­ters. Was it hard to write about them with­out know­ing the per­son who thought them up?
No re­ally, be­cause in a way I al­ready knew them. It is al­ways dif­fi­cult to make up new char­ac­ters, which you as a writer feel are real. For this I had to re­search two things: the real and fic­tional life of Lars­son's world. While he was the ge­nius who cre­ated them, once I had un­cov­ered his code I began to feel that char­ac­ters were also mine.
Which of the two were most dif­fi­cult to por­tray?
Sa­lan­der was the hard­est be­cause she has quite a com­plex struc­ture. Mean­while he is the boy I want to be: a bril­liant jour­nal­ist who fights for his sto­ries. So, it was eas­ier to get in­side him, be­cause I iden­ti­fied with him. How­ever, with Lis­beth I had to learn to un­der­stand her so that I could por­tray her.
Sa­lan­der is cold but also very strong. Do you feel read­ers iden­tify with her?
I think at least for women be­cause only a few years ago the clas­sic hero­ines were all princess types, sit­ting in cas­tles wait­ing for their white knights. Lis­beth is very dif­fer­ent and every­thing de­signed to weaken her makes her stronger. She is a new type of fem­i­nist hero­ine that chal­lenges the cliché.
The book starts with a case of spy­ing rem­i­nis­cent of the Snow­den case. Was that an in­spi­ra­tion?
Of course, Snow­den is a hero who has ed­u­cated us and shown us how things re­ally work and that they are watch­ing us. Sa­lan­der needs chal­lenges, so I could not re­sist turn­ing her into a hacker.
What do you think about the con­tro­ver­sial issue of hack­ers?
In most cases I think that the hack­ing is il­le­gal and un­eth­i­cal, but if the United States hack us, maybe we need peo­ple who can do it back to them, don't you think? In the writ­ing I learnt that there are three types of hack­ers: black, grey and white, and not all of them are bad. While I was re­search­ing the novel, I con­tacted some hack­ers to learn about the issue and they told me a lot about it.
The saga deals with con­tem­po­rary is­sues. Is that one of the keys of its suc­cess?
Yes, their moral strug­gles are im­por­tant. They are not just en­ter­tain­ment but deal with real causes, which make you fu­ri­ous, and that has dri­ven the suc­cess.
How did the writ­ing process and cre­at­ing the char­ac­ters go?
There was a pe­riod when I was get­ting up at four in the morn­ing be­cause when the pub­lisher pro­posed con­tin­u­ing the Mil­le­nium saga they also de­manded a good plot. So I spent a lot of time until I found a good one. One pos­i­tive thing was that I live in an area close to the places that ap­pear in the other books, so I would visit them to get in­spi­ra­tion. To come up with the new char­ac­ters I took el­e­ments from lit­er­a­ture and from real life, and put a bit of my­self into them. The pro­fes­sor, for ex­am­ple, is in­spired by Alan Tur­ing.
Do you think the rise of the crime novel is be­cause itre­flect real life cases?
Yes, read­ing crime nov­els is like ther­apy be­cause they have he­roes who solve prob­lems and, usu­ally, there is a happy end­ing. Per­haps noir fic­tion plays the role of ad­dress­ing our con­cerns about in­jus­tices.
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