"There Are Things I Want You to Know" About Stieg Larsson and Me by Eva Gabrielsson
Authors: Eva Gabrielsson
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parry a speculative attack on the krona, the Bank of Sweden was forced into a devaluation, which did not help the debt burden of banks that were already in serious trouble.
New taxes, a staggering rise in interest rates, a drop in construction subsidies.… The real estate sector took a huge hit, with many firms closing or resorting to massivelayoffs. When I lost my job as an architect, Stieg and I entered a period of very tough times.
In the autumn of 1992, Blomkvist says, “I had a variable-rate mortgage on my apartment when the interest rate shot up five hundred percent in October. I was stuck with nineteen percent interest for a year.” That is exactly what happened to Sweden, and to us personally. Fortunately, my severance pay helped supply part of the 100,000 extra kronor—almost $15,000—we had to hand over that dreadful year, and if we hadn’t paid, we would have lost our home, a 600-square-foot apartment on the top floor of a walk-up. Bought two years earlier in a former working-class neighborhood of Stockholm, it was the first apartment we ever owned. And it is still my home.
IT WASN’T until 1996 that the Swedish government began to worry about a very serious situation: aside from a few superexpensive co-op apartments, housing construction had been more or less at a standstill since 1992. Parliament then launched a vast study of plans for both low-cost housing and research into broad solutions to make the construction sector as a whole more productive and less expensive. I applied for a position in the Construction Cost Delegation, and I was hired. Between 1997 and 2000, I labored day and night over questions that have long interested me and which I had already studied extensively on my own. And now—I was being paid to dothat! It was heaven. The project generated over 2,400 pages, and allusions to its contents crop up all through the last volume of
The Millennium Trilogy
. Because Stieg didn’t have time to read the whole report, every day for three years I told him highlights of what was in it. Certain details were eye-opening, and even amusing.
For example: “You want to run a story on toilets? In
Millennium
?” exclaims Malin Eriksson, the acting editor in chief of the magazine, in
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
. She can’t believe that Henry Cortez, their investigative whiz, wants to write about such a frivolous subject in their distinguished magazine. But wait! The real story is that Swedish construction cartels shamelessly and grossly inflate the prices for cheaply manufactured toilets they buy from Asian countries such as Thailand. The mocking description Stieg concocts about how taxpayers are shafted by such price-fixing really tickled my colleagues at the Construction Cost Delegation, who got the point immediately and recognized data from our study.
IN 2000, Stieg and I were disgusted to learn that leading asphalt paving contractors had formed an “asphalt cartel” that for years had been raking in exorbitant sums for routine road maintenance throughout Sweden. Even worse, the Swedish Road Administration was implicated in the affair, which led the minister of industry at the time to admit that the situation was “embarrassing”! That prompted us to write an articletogether that only Stieg signed, because of our wish never to have our names linked together. The piece, entitled “Embarrassing? Criminal!,” appeared in the national evening paper
Aftonbladet
. And it had repercussions: one municipality sued the contractors for reimbursement of all taxpayers’ monies spent, and prices in that sector of construction fell by more than 25 percent.
A result that convinced Stieg and me that we should definitely plan to work together again on issues like these.
Heading for Publication
ON THAT autumn day in 2003, when I walked into our apartment, I remember yelling, “It’s just not possible!”
I was returning from the post office, where I’d retrieved the
New taxes, a staggering rise in interest rates, a drop in construction subsidies.… The real estate sector took a huge hit, with many firms closing or resorting to massivelayoffs. When I lost my job as an architect, Stieg and I entered a period of very tough times.
In the autumn of 1992, Blomkvist says, “I had a variable-rate mortgage on my apartment when the interest rate shot up five hundred percent in October. I was stuck with nineteen percent interest for a year.” That is exactly what happened to Sweden, and to us personally. Fortunately, my severance pay helped supply part of the 100,000 extra kronor—almost $15,000—we had to hand over that dreadful year, and if we hadn’t paid, we would have lost our home, a 600-square-foot apartment on the top floor of a walk-up. Bought two years earlier in a former working-class neighborhood of Stockholm, it was the first apartment we ever owned. And it is still my home.
IT WASN’T until 1996 that the Swedish government began to worry about a very serious situation: aside from a few superexpensive co-op apartments, housing construction had been more or less at a standstill since 1992. Parliament then launched a vast study of plans for both low-cost housing and research into broad solutions to make the construction sector as a whole more productive and less expensive. I applied for a position in the Construction Cost Delegation, and I was hired. Between 1997 and 2000, I labored day and night over questions that have long interested me and which I had already studied extensively on my own. And now—I was being paid to dothat! It was heaven. The project generated over 2,400 pages, and allusions to its contents crop up all through the last volume of
The Millennium Trilogy
. Because Stieg didn’t have time to read the whole report, every day for three years I told him highlights of what was in it. Certain details were eye-opening, and even amusing.
For example: “You want to run a story on toilets? In
Millennium
?” exclaims Malin Eriksson, the acting editor in chief of the magazine, in
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest
. She can’t believe that Henry Cortez, their investigative whiz, wants to write about such a frivolous subject in their distinguished magazine. But wait! The real story is that Swedish construction cartels shamelessly and grossly inflate the prices for cheaply manufactured toilets they buy from Asian countries such as Thailand. The mocking description Stieg concocts about how taxpayers are shafted by such price-fixing really tickled my colleagues at the Construction Cost Delegation, who got the point immediately and recognized data from our study.
IN 2000, Stieg and I were disgusted to learn that leading asphalt paving contractors had formed an “asphalt cartel” that for years had been raking in exorbitant sums for routine road maintenance throughout Sweden. Even worse, the Swedish Road Administration was implicated in the affair, which led the minister of industry at the time to admit that the situation was “embarrassing”! That prompted us to write an articletogether that only Stieg signed, because of our wish never to have our names linked together. The piece, entitled “Embarrassing? Criminal!,” appeared in the national evening paper
Aftonbladet
. And it had repercussions: one municipality sued the contractors for reimbursement of all taxpayers’ monies spent, and prices in that sector of construction fell by more than 25 percent.
A result that convinced Stieg and me that we should definitely plan to work together again on issues like these.
Heading for Publication
ON THAT autumn day in 2003, when I walked into our apartment, I remember yelling, “It’s just not possible!”
I was returning from the post office, where I’d retrieved the
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