The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson's Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin

by Jan Stocklassa

Stieg Larsson’s three books—known as the Millennium Trilogy or The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series—have sold more than eighty million copies, but his greatest achievement wasn’t writing thrillers. He devoted his entire adult life to fighting right-wing extremism.

At moments it develops with the speed of a Robert Ludlum novel. Other days it turns out to be more of an Agatha Christie puzzle, only to develop into an Ed McBain police procedural touched off by a Westlake comedy.

It had marked the loss of the country’s innocence and was sometimes referred to as the European equivalent of the John F. Kennedy assassination, complete with an infinite number of conspiracy theories and shadowy suspects.

Newspapers published caricatures of Palme with a hooked nose, bad teeth, and dark rings under his eyes. That said, there were clearly others who didn’t think there was anything wrong with his appearance. As women such as actress Shirley MacLaine, among others, came forward and claimed to have had affairs with Olof Palme, rumors of his extramarital infidelities spread, though they were likely exaggerated.

“The assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme is, to be perfectly honest, one of the most unbelievable and amazing cases of homicide I ever had the unpleasant job of covering.”

Hence in the spring of 1986, the path was already clear for Holmér to prove the PKK’s guilt in the assassination of Olof Palme. What Holmér didn’t know was that this was the first step into the labyrinth of bizarre, far-fetched theories that would ensnare the Swedish police for decades to come.

The more I read, the more I started to see the connections I knew Stieg had also seen. How the groupings of right-wing extremists in the 1980s were reminiscent of the ones we had now, with their varying degrees of racism, nationalism, and fascism. And how their hostility toward immigrants united them even back then.

There were up to ten people who claimed that they knew about the assassination in advance and notified the press or the police (and the police then leaked this to the press). Two of these warnings stuck out because they had unquestionably been passed on to the authorities prior to the assassination and should therefore have resulted in Säpo raising the threat level for Palme’s security team, which might have prevented the assassination from taking place.

The South Africans had a motive: Palme’s outspoken opposition to apartheid. And, if it was true, Palme’s repeated attempts to stop their arms trading were further motivation for the South Africans to want him dead. They also had a history of demonstrated violence against those who opposed them, violence that did not stop at the level of heads of state.

If I wanted to do his work justice, I was going to have to think and act more like Stieg.

a thought started to take shape in Stieg: What if he had walked into the most basic of journalistic traps and combined different pieces of information into something that looked like a whole picture, using imagination as the spackle to fill in any gaps?

In total there were twelve pages about Jakob Thedelin’s possible involvement in the Palme assassination, with quotes from witness statements, illustrations, timelines, and quotes from the Facebook conversations and emails. I submitted my memo to the police, and I waited for them to act. And waited. And waited . . .

Someone estimated that it would take nine years for a person with legal training to read through all the material in the police investigation, which is collected in binders that take up 820 feet of shelf space. The investigation has been ongoing for over thirty years. A total of 10,225 people have been questioned at least once. More than 130 people have claimed responsibility for the assassination.

Once again, the Swedish police failed where others succeeded, but as Hanlon’s razor says: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.