leapyearbaby:
You are welcome!
I have a question, though....why was it so vital that they not marry out of fear of the danger? I would think that anyone close to him whether married or not, would be a target....
You're asking a question that opens up areas that are contentious in Sweden and, at least to us English-speakers who live in our English-speaking countries, genuinely mysterious.
From what I've read (quoting people who span a fair breadth of being pro or con regarding any of the people involved), he didn't have anyone other than his life partner that he was "close to." He had a vast array of people he had worked with for many years and people who considered themselves his friends, but who--evidently--he really wasn't very close to. From his standpoint, he was probably very "friendly" without ever being what we would call a "real friend."
Most everyone is agreed that his relationship with his father and his brother was difficult and what we would call "estranged" (although I'm not sure that, in Swedish terms, this would be an accurate description, since I "get" that their idea of "relationships"--both family relationships and otherwise--can be significantly different from ours). I think it's fair to say, from what I've read, that his relationship with both his father and his brother was both cool and distant (very distant emotionally, in addition to being distant geographically, since the father and brother are, from what I have read, very typical of the general pattern of Swedes who come from the extreme north of Sweden). The fact that his father and his brother wound up with "everything" (pretty much) is, given their real life relationship with him, pretty much akin to unexpectedly winning the world's biggest lottery with a ticket someone bought you as a small gift and you didn't even quite know you ever had.
He was, from what I've read, EXTREMELY aware of the constant danger he (and Eva) were in. He took pains to never have the same schedule or route to anywhere. He varied everything on a daily basis so that no one observing him could predict when or where he would be or would be going at any particular moment. There were pains taken to be as unobtrusive as possible, both when he was alone and when he was with Eva. (And she is an architect. She had her own life that she could use, to some extent, to obscure his life when he was alive.)
There is also some question about her contributions to the three books. Some editors who had, over the many years of his career, seen his attempts at fiction (he was a prolific non-fiction writer) flatly do not believe that the man who wrote what he, personally, submitted to them for possible publication over the years COULD have been the same person who wrote the Salandner trilogy. People who knew both of them very well have said that Eva's contributions to the trilogy were (at the very least) substantial, and could well have been SO substantial that she fully and rightfully deserved co-credit as author, with him. There really has been some fairly sophisticated analysis of his earlier (unpublished, so far as I know) attempts at fiction, and there seems to be a growing body of expert belief that he was definitely not the sole author of the the three novels...and if this is so, then the person who turned what were probably his personal initial ideas into publishable fictional form was Eva. So far as I know, she has always refused to speak about this when asked.
He left a whole lot of real life mysteries behind when he died, and why he (inadvertently) left his estate to probably the last two people on earth he ever wanted to leave it to may be just the beginning.
[This message edited by Kjersti at 7:25 PM, October 15th (Saturday)]