The first three books in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium crime series, featuring the intrepid hacker Lisbeth Salander and the crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist, have sold over 80 million copies ever since they were published in Swedish in 2005 and subsequently translated into several other languages.So the hype surrounding the fourth book in the series, The Girl in the Spider’s Web, published on August 27, was not at all surprising. All the same, the controversy surrounding the book was expected, too, given that the book is not authored by Larsson, who died in 2004, but by David Lagercrantz , a former Swedish crime journalist who has also ghostwritten footballer Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s autobiography, among other books.In a telephonic interview with ET Magazine’s G Seetharaman from Manchester, England, where he was promoting the book a day before he turned 53, Lagercrantz touches on the reasons behind taking the premise of the book beyond Sweden, Larsson’s partner Eva Gabrielsson’s opposition to the book, and why Salander is iconic.The world is getting globalised. Larsson was a contemporary author dealing with the problems of his time. Now the world is coming closer and it is certainly part of the daily life even in Sweden. I sort of found the story during the (Edward) Snowden affair. In one way or another I was inspired by it. Lisbeth Salander is a star hacker. She is a girl who needs a challenge. So I thought, what about hacking the NSA? I couldn’t resist the temptation that she would do things like that. It’s a really important issue of our times, losing our privacy and integrity. I thought it was a good issue to bring out, among others.Honestly I was not at all hesitant. I felt this fever in my body, I was passionate about this project. I knew that if I said no to this I would regret it my whole life. I of course knew it was a huge risk. If I wrote a bad book, the critics and fans would come after me but I couldn’t resist the challenge. What troubles me is Eva Gabrielsson’s view (on the book). But I respect her deeply and everything she has gone through. I know it is good for Stieg Larsson’s authorship. A new of generation of readers are reading his books. They are even discussing his real-life work, fighting intolerance, racism and the extreme right.I am best as a writer when I collide myself with another world. It makes me better as a writer. I said from the start I had to be trustful of the Millennium universe. It was not going to be a Stieg Larsson book, but my interpretation of his iconic characters and universe. I wrote about Alan Turing, the great mathematician and code-breaker. He was an absolutely different person, certainly more brilliant than I ever will be. Then I wrote about an absolutely different guy from the ghetto who became this great football star, Zlatan Ibrahimovic. This is what I do best, going into things unfamiliar to me. It’s good to be a bit terrified as it gets you to work harder. I am sad that certain people got upset with the book.First of all, Larsson was a master at creating complex storylines, with many threads coming together. And as with Sjöwall-Wahlöö (Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö), you could feel his moral pathos. His books are just not entertaining, he is trying to tell us something. He was a moral crusader like Blomkvist. Most important of all, he created an absolutely iconic character like Lisbeth Salander. She changed crime fiction in a way. If you go back a hundred years, the female heroine was sitting in castle waiting for her prince and the horse. Salander is so far from that. She refused to be a victim. Society tried to crush her but she became stronger and stronger.I read his books over and over. It was important to me that readers felt at home in his universe. I tried to find out why he is such a great writer and I tried to use the same rushing storyline with different perspectives. He was a great writer but he was not literary. He wrote in this effective journalistic prose. I tried to recreate his work but I also put a lot of myself in it. In the beginning of the writing, I watched Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and I understood what I really inherited was not only this great personality, Salander, but it was also her mythology, her background. Like all superheroes she has this great mythology. Superman was sent as a sort of Christ figure to earth, Batman had his parents killed. Lisbeth had to grow up in this home with her mom and her evil father, raping and abusing her, and she had to avenge that. That was something I had to dig into and go back to and I also had to answer questions Larsson hadn’t because he so sadly died: why is she such a great hacker and why did she use the alias of ‘Wasp’ while hacking?Of course I was aware of it, and I couldn’t have written the book if I didn’t share his values. Who doesn’t? This is the most important question of our time. We must fight intolerance, racism and the far-right. Back in Larsson’s time, these racists were just a small group of lunatics, now the whole Swedish society and the whole world have changed. Now we have a near-racist party in Parliament. I think Larsson saw into the future, he saw what was coming.