Steve Pratt looks at some of the mystery surrounding the success of the films taken from the work of Swedish writer Steig Larsson.

A LOT of people are surprised when they learn the name of the writer who, in the past few years, has sold more books worldwide than anyone except Harry Potter’s creator J K Rowling.

The Millennium trilogy by Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson has propelled him to such worldwide success with sales of 27 million in 41 countries.

The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets’ Nest are the books in question – and the series is finding a whole new audience around the world in film adaptations of the book. The first took $100m at the box office worldwide and the recent DVD release in the UK has added to the numbers who’ve seen the movie, making it the biggestselling foreign language DVD of the year SO far.

The second film opens this week, followed by the third and final part of the trilogy in late November. An American remake of the first, with Daniel Craig, is already being prepared.

Larsson didn’t live to enjoy his success. He died of a heart attack at the age of 50 in 2004, only a few months before the first book was published, became a best-seller and turned him into a literary sensation.

The two main characters in all three books are Lisbeth Salander, a bisexual, tattooed computer hacker – the Girl in the title – and her unlikely colleague, middle-aged investigative reporter Mikael Blomqvist.

In The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they join forces to unearth the mystery of a young woman from a prominent Swedish industrial family dynasty, long missing and suspected dead. The Girl Who Played with Fire sees Lisbeth on the run as the prime suspect in three murders.

Larsson’s posthumous success has made him a household name in Sweden, and ever since his untimely death, the nation’s press has regularly unearthed new controversies about him.

There have been rumblings about whether he really had the talent to write these books himself. Several biographies of Larsson have either been completed or are in the works.

Then there’s the feud between members of his family and Eva Gabrielsson, his partner for over 30 years. The couple never married, and a will he made as a young man was declared invalid.

At stake are the proceeds of his estate, last valued at £20m.

Gabrielsson also possesses the draft of Larsson’s fourth novel, but is refusing to hand it over to his family.

British crime fiction reviewer Barry Forshaw - author of a Larsson biography, The Man Who Left Too Soon – is convinced that Larsson and no-one else wrote the three long novels. “The evidence is that here was a man who may not actually have been obsessivecompulsive, but was certainly a workaholic and was capable of writing such massive books,” he says Intriguingly, Forshaw thinks the films improve on Larsson’s books, “There’s less extraneous material in them.

They’ve been through an editing process,” he says. “In the film of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, for instance, there are fewer sexual conquests for Blomqvist. And it works better. It’s more believable.

“I think Larsson regarded Blomqvist as a version of himself, so he made him a ladies’ man – as Ian Fleming did with James Bond.”

The three films have continued the book’s success, accounting for half of all box office takings in Swedish cinemas last year.

Before she took the role of Lisbeth, Swedish actress Noomi Rapace, 31, was moderately well-known for her work on stage and in arthouse films. Now her countrymen regard her as a superstar. But she gives full credit to Larsson. “Stieg was pretty brave,” she says.

“He wanted to bring up things that we don’t like to talk about, or like to ignore. In Sweden everybody has this perfect surface.

“For instance, there’s certainly violence against women here, but it gets swept under the carpet. We have immigrants, but you don’t see them in the centre of Stockholm – a lot of people here don’t feel part of this society.

“Stieg was working against all those things and he wanted to force people to see those problems. The most depressing thing is, we’re afraid of talking about them.”

■ The Girl Who Played With Fire (15) opens on Friday