THE initial British print run of Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo was 200,000 copies; first edition hardbacks now sell for £425 on eBay.
The two sequels were even bigger hits: The Girl Who Played With Fire came out here in January 2009 and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest appeared last October. By last month, 27 million copies of the Millennium Trilogy had been sold in 40 countries. But Larsson never saw them become runaway bestsellers or knew that, when they reached other shores in translation, he was to become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. As Barry Forshaw explains in this pioneering biography, Larsson had died, aged 50, before the first book appeared even in his native Sweden.
He died intestate and had never married architectural historian Eva Gabrielsson, his partner of 30 years, so under Swedish law the beneficiaries were his father and brother.
Unfortunately, when Eva raised objections to this arrangement, they called her "an impossible person with psychological problems". Perhaps she is simply grief-stricken still?
Anyway, there is an impasse. Eva is hanging on to Larsson's computer and notes and any eagerly awaited fresh material has fallen victim to legal acrimony with disputes over copyright and money.
Larsson was born Karl Stig-Erland Larsson on the north-east coast of Sweden, 400 miles from Stockholm, in August 1954. His career was spent as a polemical journalist and he made a precarious living researching articles with catchy titles such as The Nature and Extent of the Relationship Between Racist, Xenophobic and Anti-Semitic Propaganda on the Internet and Hate Crimes.
He was one of the first reporters to sense the danger and potential of cyberspace for spreading political and religious bigotry.
Larsson was devoted to fighting political extremists and exposing religious and racial intolerance. He wrote about honour killings and the upsurge of fascism. He was genuinely horrified at the way Scandinavia was losing its "civic ideals of compassion". He felt there was "a total disrespect for the traditional values of honesty, equality and the common good".
Readers will immediately see how these are the themes also underlying the novels, the "darker and bloodier" reality of the cruel modern world which is barely hidden behind the Ikea furniture. As Forshaw says, the novels are about the loss of innocence, "the withering of belief in a fair society". The cynicism coupled with the nostalgia for moral certainty is the formula for the bestsellers.
Everyone who met Larsson mentions how self-destructively hard he worked, fitting a week into every working day. He was politically active with the Kommunistika Arbetareforbundet, the Communist Workers' League.
He was also an expert in science fiction and edited various specialist magazines. The posthumous appearance of the novels took everybody by surprise, including Eva, who mainly remembers him, "lying on his back, chain smoking and watching spaghetti westerns".
Critics who knew Larsson's journalism claimed he was "not the kind of writer who could have produced the Millennium Trilogy". At the risk of provoking a Nordic version of the Shakespeare Authorship Question, surely there is no conspiracy? From first to last Larsson was producing a portrait of modern Sweden, a place, "undermined from the top by a cabal of thugs and spies".
John Blake Publishing, £17.99.
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