Mystery clouds Larsson's fourth manuscript

Stieg Larsson. Photo / Supplied

It is September in Sachs Harbour, northern Canada. In the cold and desolate landscape, Mikael Blomqvist and Lisbeth Salander are about to begin a new adventure.

Their journey in the fourth book of Stieg Larsson's best-selling Millennium crime series is a mystery. The book was left unfinished on the author's laptop when he died suddenly in 2004, aged 50.

Only two people know the content of the manuscript: Larsson's long-time partner Eva Gabrielsson, who has refused to talk about it and won't reveal the whereabouts of the last instalment in the series, which started with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo; and Larsson's friend John-Henri Holmberg, who received an email about the book from Larsson less than a month before his death.

Gabrielsson is in a legal deadlock with Larsson's family over the author's estate. Holmberg said Larsson was 320 pages into the fourth book and had planned to complete it by the end of that year.

"The plot is set 120km north of Sachs Harbour, at Banks Island in the month of September," Larsson wrote in the email. "According to the synopsis it should be 440 pages."

Holmberg, who met Larsson at a science fiction convention in the 1970s, said his friend had finished the beginning and the end of the story but had to find another plot for the middle.

"Did you know that 134 people live in Sachs Harbour, whose only contact with the world is a postal plane twice a week when the weather permits?" Larsson wrote. "But there are 48,000 musk-ox and 80 different types of wildflowers that bloom during two weeks in early July, as well as an estimated 1500 polar bears."

Holmberg says he knows nothing more than that about the plot, but that Larsson had wanted all his books to follow a theme about women.

He says the author probably had a detailed outline of the story among his notes, making it possible for someone such as Gabrielsson, who worked closely with Larsson on the first three books, to complete the manuscript.

However, Holmberg says completing the story would have to be done soon so it doesn't become just a "historic curiosity".

"The risk ... is that it turns into one of those idiotic things like The Mystery of Edwin Drood, he said, referring to Charles Dickens' half-finished final work that many other writers tried to complete after his death.

"Give it 10 years," after the last Hollywood film is released, he said. "After that, there will be no meaning to it. And I believe Stieg was focused on having some kind of meaning in what he wrote."

- AP