IE 11 is not supported. For an optimal experience visit our site on another browser.

Partner of 'Dragon Tattoo' author dismisses new novel

Don’t get too excited about that fourth installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy just yet. After initially floating the tantalizing news that there may a fourth book by the best-selling author of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’’ Larsson’s partner of 32 years has made a new installment sound like a long shot in a recent interview. Eva Gabrielsson told BBC Radio 4’s Woman H
/ Source: TODAY books

Don’t get too excited about that fourth installment of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy just yet.



After initially floating the tantalizing news that there may a fourth book by the best-selling author of “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’’ Larsson’s partner of 32 years has made a new installment sound like a long shot in a recent interview.





Eva Gabrielsson told BBC Radio 4’s Woman Hour Wednesday morning that the 200 pages of an unfinished work left behind by Larsson following his death in 2004 “doesn’t hang together’’ as a novel.



“Stieg was a spontaneous writer, he could write scenes and not knit them together until later on — he just liked the scene,’’ she told the BBC. “You can't call it a novel.’’





While promoting her own book, "'There Are Things I Want You to Know About Stieg Larsson and Me," in June, the Swedish architect told TODAY that there were 200 pages of a fourth novel kept on a laptop computer that only she had ever seen. At that time, she declared the work “far from finished’’ but did not dismiss the possibility of it eventually being published.



Her change in stance on the unfinished work by Larsson, whose books have sold more than 60 million copies worldwide, could be the latest twist in an ongoing legal saga between Gabrielsson and Larsson’s family. While Gabrielsson lived with Larsson for 32 years, the pair never married, and Gabrielsson claims she hasn't seen a penny of Larsson’s estimated $40 million estate. A Swedish law awarded the rights to all of Larsson’s novels to his brother and father.





The fight between the two parties has fueled headlines for years. During Gabrielsson’s book tour, she hoped to generate international attention to amend the Swedish law that has prevented her from sharing in Larsson’s fortune.





In her book, she made clear she'd rather not help Larsson’s family profit off another novel.



“I assume that Stieg would want me to finish writing the fourth part, but I have no desire to,’’ she wrote. “Why should I make money for a publisher and give the family more money?’’



In the new radio interview, Gabrielsson also claims to have played an important role into the creation of the Millennium trilogy.

“Lots of the thoughts and ideas that went into Millennium weren't Stieg's but were mine,’’ she told the BBC. “So I do have a grip on what's in there. Some things are purely mine in that book, some things are his and some things are ideas and things we developed together.

"The descriptions of Stockholm, the locations, that's taken straight from a manuscript I was working on."