Gabrielsson says she doesn’t care about money. She told me that all she wanted was her share of the apartment and control over Larsson’s literary estate, which she would administer in return for a small percentage of the royalties. The father and brother were in no position to know what he would have wished, she added, and already serious mistakes have been made. Gabrielsson says, for example, that Christopher MacLehose, a legendary editor and publisher who acquired the books in England and gave them their catchy titles, needlessly prettified the translation. The translator, Steven T. Murray, says that he feels the same way; he was so upset by MacLehose’s tinkering that he asked that his name be removed and a pseudonym be used instead. MacLehose pointed out to me that the translations were commissioned by the Swedish film company and were originally intended not for publication but to aid an English-speaking screenwriter whom the producers were hoping to hire, and for that reason they were done with unusual speed. All he did, he said, was polish and tighten them up a bit, the way he might with any translation.

Image Larsson on assignment in Hong Kong in 1987. Credit... Per Jarl/Scanpix/Sipa Press

Gabrielsson is also furious that Norstedts changed the name of one of the characters — the doctor who treats Salander in the third volume — from Anders Jakobsson to Anders Jonasson. Larsson frequently used the names of real people, and Jakobsson, a surgeon in Gothenburg, was a friend of his. But after Jakobsson and Erland got into an argument over how Gabrielsson was being treated, Erland demanded that Jakobsson’s name be removed.

THE LARSSONS SEEM unlikely to give up any control of the literary rights — they kept insisting to me that these rights are not transferable — and in any event many of the important decisions have already been made. Some people have suggested that Joakim and Erland were taken advantage of and should have negotiated a better deal with Norstedts and the film company after it became clear just how much money the Millennium franchise was worth.

Gabrielsson considers herself a shrewd businessperson. But at the same time, she has an odd, moralistic view of the books, which she seems to regard not as entertainment so much as didactic tracts. Larsson was able to write the books so quickly, she told me, because he felt “deep frustration and rage that things were sliding ever more downward,” and she added that the worldwide success of the books was in some ways unfortunate, because it seemed to reflect that corruption and abuse of power was a problem everywhere, not just in Sweden.

As for the novel on the laptop, she said she hoped that it would never be published. “They have made enough money, which is their main objective,” she said, referring to the Larssons. But the manuscript is her only bargaining chip, and she may be in the best position to know what needs to be done to make the text publishable. John-Henri Holmberg has guessed that because of the way Larsson wrote, often working on more than one book at a time, there may be a fair amount of outline and even actual text for a fifth book and possibly a sixth. The computer files are an enormously valuable property, because of readers’ appetites for more Larsson and because, as Scott Rudin suggested to me, of the movie potential. At the moment, film producers have rights to only the three published novels. A new contract could conceivably liberate Blomkvist and Salander from books altogether and allow them, like James Bond, to go on having movie adventures indefinitely.

I met Larsson’s father and brother at a brand-new office suite they have rented in Umea. There were a couple of desks and computers, some Millennium movie posters waiting to be hung and a shelf of awards that the books won from various mystery writers’ groups. Joakim Larsson, who worked for 22 years as an accountant at Ernst & Young before quitting to look after Stieg’s estate, looks a little like his brother and has some of the same conciliatory personality that enabled Stieg to listen patiently on the phone when right-wingers called up to rant at him. Erland, who is now 74, is sharper-tongued and more forceful. Practically the first thing he said to me, in his direct, Norrlander fashion, was that he didn’t understand why it took Gabrielsson so long to pull herself together. Both he and Joakim lost spouses, he pointed out, and they had soldiered on. “Eva Gabrielsson is very peculiar,” he added. “People say she was that way even as a child. She isn’t like everyone else.” There is some family history, it turns out. Years ago, Erland says, he lent some money to Gabrielsson’s father so he could pay the taxes on some land he owned. In return, he was given lifetime use of a Gabrielsson summer cottage.

At this point Gabrielsson and the Larssons can’t even agree on things like whether she was told when the books were officially being published or whether she was properly invited to the movie premiere. But the Larssons’ position on the estate is straightforward: the law is the law, and they can’t change it; and it’s fitting, they say, that any money left over in the next generation should go to Joakim’s two children and not Eva’s sister’s. Joakim and Erland also insist that there is a will of sorts: a letter Stieg wrote before leaving for Africa in 1977 and sealed in an envelope marked: “Contains my will. Do not open before I die.” This document was never witnessed and has no legal validity, which is probably just as well, because it leaves everything to the Socialist Party in Umea. But the Larssons see the letter as a partial clue to Stieg’s intentions. “He had 25 years to change it,” Joakim said. He added that he advised Stieg to get married, saying it was the “common-sense thing to do,” and that his brother made fun of him. Later, when the book contract was signed, he said, he kept urging Stieg to make a will until his brother became irritated.