New novel for 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' series

Swedish writer David Lagercrantz will pen a fourth installment in the 'Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' series originally written by Stieg Larsson, according to Larsson's publisher. It will be released in August 2015.

A new book in Stieg Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” series, written by Swedish author David Lagercrantz, will be released in 2015.

Norstedts Förlag, Larsson’s publisher in Sweden, announced that Lagercrantz will be taking on the job and that the book will be released in August of that year.

“We are proud and excited to now have signed an agreement with David Lagercrantz who, urged by his agent Magdalena Hedlund, has undertaken the challenging task of providing Blomkvist and Salander a second life, in a fourth standalone part of the Millennium series,” Eva Gedin, Norstedts Förlag’s publishing manager, said, according to The Bookseller.

Lagercrantz called the process “insanely fun,” according to The Bookseller.

“It's an amazing world to step into,” he said of Larsson’s novels.

Larsson, the original author of the series, died in 2004 but had reportedly planned to write 10 books in the series. A fourth was begun and his partner, Eva Gabrielsson, told the BBC that Larsson had written “the beginning of a fourth novel” and that she believed he had written about 200 pages. Gabrielsson says she possesses the laptop on which the pages are stored, according to the New York Times. However, she didn’t think the manuscript could be published in its current form.

“It probably doesn't hang together,” she told the BBC. “Stieg was a spontaneous writer, he could write scenes and not knit them together until later on – he just liked the scene. You can't call it a novel.”

After the new novel by Lagercrantz was announced, Gabrielsson told the BBC that Norstedts Förlag had not had seen Larsson’s new novel beginnings and so Lagercrantz’s book would not be based on it.

She believes it is “distasteful to try to make more money” from the series, Gabrielsson said of the project, according to the BBC.

Gabrielsson was not married to Larsson and so, because of Swedish law, she did not receive anything through his estate after his death. His estate became the property of Larsson’s brother and father. She was offered a seat on the company board that is in charge of the author’s books as well as a settlement in 2009 but turned it down. 

All three of Larsson’s “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” books have become international bestsellers since his death and have been adapted into film twice, once in a Swedish three-part series starring Noomi Rapace and Michael Nyqvist. Hollywood took on the first book in 2011, with the American version starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig.