The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo has sold 32 million copies worldwide, and the English-language film version promises to be a mega-hit. But the woman who was the late author Stieg Larssons companion for more than 30 years hasnt seen a penny of it, thanks to Swedish laws and the authors failure to make a will.
The series of novels The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest - has become the biggest global publishing phenomenon since the Harry Potter books. Daniel Craig and newcomer Rooney Mara are set to star in the Hollywood version of Dragon Tattoo, the story of a crusading Swedish journalist and a young woman who is a computer hacker.
So far, none of the estimated $50 million from the series a figure that is growing every day - has gone to architect Eva Gabrielsson, because Larsson didnt have a will. As a result, since the couple never married, the estate automatically went to Larssons father Erland and his brother Joakim. Stieg would never have imagined that something like this would have happenedthe inheritance thing, that his father and brother would be against it, Gabrielsson told the UK newspaper the Mirror.
The couple never married because under Swedish law they would have had to publish their address after the wedding. Larsson, an investigative journalist like his fictional character Mikael Blomkvist, was worried that he and Eva would be targeted by the neo-Nazis he wrote about in his magazine, Expo.
