No fourth book, says Stieg Larsson’s partner

The partner of the late Stieg Larsson has attempted to end rumours that there are more books to come from the Swedish author and journalist. Eva Gabrielsson told BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour that the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo writer left just a couple of hundred pages of writing and certainly did not leave an unfinished manuscript.

The news will disappoint Larsson's legions of fans after his father and brother claimed in October that there was at least one more novel to come. They told CBS that the author, who died of a heart attack in 2004 at the age of 50, had left a "nearly finished" manuscript which was the fifth, not the fourth, in the Millennium crime series.

Larsson's best-selling trilogy, which includes The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, was published after his death and went on to sell 27 million copies worldwide and inspire a successful film franchise.
 
But Gabrielsson, who was with Larsson for 30 years, insisted that there is "not much truth" in those claims. She said that while he had written some new pages on a laptop, it was only "the beginning of a fourth novel". She added: "I would estimate it to be about 200 pages, given what I saw in late August during our last vacation, and given what I knew of Stieg's workload in his last two months."

Gabrielsson, an architectural historian, has been locked in a legal battle with Larsson's family for the past seven years after he left no legal will. She told Woman's Hour that, as well as being his longtime partner, part of her right to control Larsson's literary legacy stems from the fact that her ideas went into The Millennium Trilogy.

"Some things are purely mine in that book, some things are his and some things are ideas and things we developed together." The books' descriptions of Stockholm were one example of her ideas, she added. "That's taken straight from a manuscript I was working on."
 
She also said that Larsson would have hated the way publishers changed the name of his first book - called Men Who Hate Women in Sweden - to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. "He would have objected strongly to that kind of change. Making the theme of the whole three books almost like a child's book - a girl and a tattoo and a dragon. The books are very, very serious and really directed against violence against women, that's why he chose that title." ·