Who wrote The Girl With the Dragoon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest? The publication of a Swedish biograhpy about Stieg Larsson has sparked a new debate in Scandinavia over this. As Stieg Larsson was the bestselling author in Europe in 2009, this is somewhat interesting.

It started with a comment in a Swedish newspaper – Dagens Nyheter – by a former colleague of Stieg Larsson, Anders Hellberg, who said that at the time when he worked with him, Stieg Larsson could not write a single coherent sentence. That he was a bad writer. And Hellberg speculated that perhaps someone else had written the books in the Millennium-series. Today Danish newspaper BT has a headline saying “Stieg Larsson was not alone in writing the Millennium series”.

The debate over this has been back and forth for a while in a number of Scandinavian newspapers. Now, in an email exchange with Danish newspaper Politiken (a very reliable newspaper), published today, Eva Gabrielsson – Stieg Larsson’s partner for 32 years – says that “I did not only correct language”, and goes on to say that her involvement in the writing process extended far beyond commenting on the language.

“It is difficult for me to identify what is Stieg and what is me in the Millennium language, content, and so on, ” says Eva Gabrielsson

The only thing I am sure of, is that this is not the end of it – now that the lid has been opened, many will want to see the inside of this case.

The American publishing house Knopf – the publisher of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series in the United States – is currently being publicly punished for gross incompetence by book stores and readers in the US. An interesting spectacle, if you ask me.

New York Times reports that book stores are importing Stieg Larsson’s latest,The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest (link to same at Amazon UK), from England, where it has already been published. The price in England is about $ 15, and it is selling in the US for up to $ 45. So this is pretty good business. As will notice if you click on the image of the book, Amazon only sells preorders, and not the real thing because they are loyal to silly Knopf!

So wherein lies the folly and incompetence of Knopf? In behaving as if we live in 1909 and not 2009! In 1909 few people would have known that the book had already been published in England (or, indeed, that English printing presses managed to churn out The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played With Fire much quicker as well). But in 2009, in the Age of Internet, the Age of the informed consumer, virtually everybody know. Including, of course, small independent book sellers throughout the land.

So people do the smart thing – some readers order from Amazon UK, some from other online booksellers in England, some bookstores import from England. People buy several copies of the book in England whilst traveling and bring it back. There are many possibilities! And in the Age of Internet people are smart – they find them!

Only Knopf still lives in the pre-internet age. They could have coordinated the US publication dates with those in England. Indeed, perhaps they could even have beaten England to the mill? But like GM, the market insensitive giant whose market shares have steadily dwindled since World War II, they chose to do it the way they preferred, ignoring the nuisance of consumers preferences. It is hard to see any other reason why the US is the last country in the civilized world to get The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest?