Mind you it may have been the karma bus - the bastard had a long term mistress.
So hate the man - love his books.
This characterization is really unbelievably misleading and unfair, given the realities of the situation, and I think that the person who wrote this must not have any idea of the real life facts or this never would, or could, have been said.
Stieg Larsson, both as a journalist and as a private citizen, fought for all of his adult life for good causes and against the extreme Swedish right wing (neo-Nazi, the Scandinavian version: racists, etc.)--to the extent that his life was perpetually, every single moment, in genuine danger. He, quite consciously, lived every day in actual threat of being murdered that day.
In Sweden, the laws require that the names and addresses of married couples must be public (I think they're kept in a local municipality or something, available at all times to anyone who wants to see them), published, and constantly displayed at the front doors of their residences. (This is why there is so much made of whose name is on the door in one of the novels, and why Lisbeth Salander has to go to such misleading lengths when she wants to move to a different, full-time residence when her life is in danger. There is no such thing as being able to live anonymously in Sweden.)
Stieg Larsson and his lifetime partner never married because, for them to be married in Sweden, SHE would have instantly become a target of the extremely dangerous forces he was constantly working against.
They were together as a committed couple something like twenty-five years, and were a totally devoted couple...and they didn't get married so that BOTH of them wouldn't be murdered some day because even if HE got murdered, he didn't want HER to get murdered too.
To characterize her as a "mistress" is (in my opinion) unbelievably ugly given the circumstances...and why anyone should hate this man because he was a constant fighter for the good and the honorable in his country, and who fought with everything in his journalistic power against the forces of hate, is also unbelievable.
This characterization of him (and of Eva Gabrielsson, his lifetime partner) has just got to be a situation where the facts weren't known, and the suppositions were made in ignorance of the facts.
This was a really good man, who really loved the woman he shared nearly all of his adult life with.
And much of what is in the novels (which he wrote very late at night, after his day job as a journalist) is what he experienced in his own real life.
He died at age fifty, of a sudden and unexpected heart attack. As happens in Japan (there is a word that has been coined for this in Japanese), he had worked himself to death.
[This message edited by Kjersti at 4:35 AM, October 13th (Thursday)]