Unseen Stieg Larsson work to be published in 2014

A short story written by the creator of the best-selling Millennium crime fiction trilogy, Stieg Larsson, when he was only 17, is to be published in English for the first time next year.

The story – entitled "Brain Power" – has been described as a suspense story set in the near future. It will be published in an anthology, A Darker Shade of Sweden, alongside stories from other Swedish writers including Henning Mankell and Eva Gabrielsson, Larsson's former partner.

Larsson caught readers' imaginations with his gruesome murder stories set against the brooding backdrop of northern Sweden. His first novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, introduced the world to truculent computer hacker Lisbeth Salander, and her struggles continued in The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. Already a bestseller in 2008, sales of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo were sent stratospheric by the release of a blockbuster film adaptation in 2011.

Brain Power will be published in February 2014 by US publisher Mysterious Press, which has previously brought out books by authors such as James Ellroy, Mickey Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Elmore Leonard, and grew out of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York. Mysterious Press holds world rights to the story, and editor John-Henri Holmberg's own translation will mark its first publication.

Larsson was central to the Scandinavian-crime scene of translated fiction that has gripped readers over the past decade, along with the likes of Mankell, and Iceland's Arnaldur Indridason. At the same time TV series The Killing and The Bridge, and subtitled adapatations of Wallander, fed UK fans' appetite for the chilling northern exposures of Scandinavian noir.

In his novels Larsson, a journalist and leftwinger who spent time researching the far right, taps into an unsettling feeling among some people in Sweden that the country's appearance of social justice concealed deeply held racist and misogynistic views.

All of Larsson's novels were published after his death in 2004, aged 50, from a heart attack. Though he had left everything to the Swedish Socialist party in his will, the document was unwitnessed, meaning that all royalties from his books go to his father and brother, which has created a rift between them and Eva Gabrielsson.

Her bitterness spilled out in a book about their life together, Stieg and Me, in which she described her former partner as "a talker, curious about everything, generous, a very moral person".

guardian.co.uk

Sharon x

   
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