Read Online The Man Who Left Too Soon: The Life and Works of Stieg Larsson by Barry Forshaw - Free Book Online

him a particular sympathy for the similarly heavy-smoking Stieg Larsson. Sonny Mehta has, however, outlived his Swedish star author.
    Mehta has remarked that the extraordinary success of the books in the Scandinavian countries was unprecedented, and he points out that the three top spots on the bestseller lists were at one time taken up by all three books of the trilogy. ‘And this has happened,’ he says, ‘in France, Germany and Italy – with America being one of the last in a long queue of people to catch up with the phenomenon.’
    This delay was not necessarily a bad thing, according to Mehta, as it generated a considerable build-up of anticipation for the appearance of the books in America. ‘Readers were aware that something extraordinary was happening abroad,’ he says. Mehta regards any comparisons with Larsson’s Scandinavian contemporaries (such as Henning Mankell) as specious. ‘Larsson,’ he says, ‘is totally different from other Swedish crime writers. He paints on a bigger canvas… I find that the social commentary and the social analysis reminds me of John Grisham. Larsson also shares some of the social preoccupations of Sara Paretsky, Michael Connelly and George Pelecanos. But an interesting thing about Larsson… is the fact that he was also a book reviewer; his passion was crime writing, and his trilogy is peppered with references to his peers in the crime writing community. He read crime fiction voraciously. There are references to Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, but he also mentions scenes by contemporary authors, both Americans and Brits. He’s like a magpie that way, and that to me is part of the pleasure of reading him. And I think other readers will share this pleasure at the references.’
    When talking to me about the translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo , Mexico-based Steven Murray (aka Reg Keeland) said that he found it the most fun and engrossing translation task he had ever faced. ‘I could tell as I worked on the books that they would be hits,’ he said, ‘but no one could imagine how big… What strikes me most about Stieg Larsson is the way he kept his prose moving, even when in the midst of arcane digressions on any topic under the Swedish sun. Part of it is creating characters that seem like real people, with all their talents, contradictions and faults.’
    Steven Murray dates his days as a translator of Scandinavian crime fiction to when he ran a small press called Fjord Press, which started in the Bay Area then moved to Seattle. ‘We published a lot of Danish classics, which in those days sold better than contemporary titles,’ he says. ‘My interest in Scandinavian fiction began when I studied at Stanford, and then went to a campus in Germany near Stuttgart. I met a group of people from Scandinavia, and moved around with them – I was impressed with the fact that they could speak whatever language was appropriate for wherever they were. I remember thinking “That’s pretty good!” I knew American students were speaking German, but I decided to raise my game.’
    I asked Murray how he felt about the fact that signed editions of Stieg Larsson books now have an extra cachet in the collectors’ market if they are signed by Murray as translator; his reply to this was modest: ‘Oh, I think that’s just because the author is dead, and he’s not around to sign it. I’m the only one around to sign it – but Christopher MacLehose, his UK publisher, has a connection too – he could sign them!’
    But people are more conscious of translators these days, surely? Most literary editors when reviewing foreign fiction rendered into English now expect the reviewer to comment on the translation. ‘Actually, we don’t always get a mention – quite often, even these days, we are ignored. But translators like me have been working on that very issue for at least 25 years, and perhaps our status has risen somewhat. We do usually get a royalty, even though it’s