The jolly good little UK booktrade e-zine Book2Book alerted me to this Daily Telegraph piece:

Stieg Larsson: lover reveals why she won't hand over final manuscript

Eva Gabrielsson, the lover of the late The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo author Stieg Larsson, has refused to hand over his final unpublished manuscript.

By Laura Roberts
Published: 7:36AM BST 23 Aug 2010

She has claimed he would not have approved of the way the trilogy has been treated.

Gabrielsson, who was Larsson's lover for 32 years, possesses a laptop containing a finished manuscript with the fourth instalment in the best-selling Millennium saga.

It was completed shortly before Larsson, an investigative journalist, died of a heart attack aged 50, six years ago. Gabrielsson has refused to hand it over to Larsson's estate which is run by his father Erland and younger brother Joakim.

[. . .]

Gabrielsson, 56, has not benefited financially from her lover's success because they never married. Instead the revenue from his books and sale of film rights has gone to his father and brother.

[. . .]

She told the Daily Mirror that Larsson would not have accepted the change made to his first novel's title. The series was originally called Men Who Hate Women, she claimed, and he would have objected to publisher's decision to call his book The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

"The theme of all three books is the subjugation of women, the abuse and violence against them," she said.

I have to say that, based on what little I know, I'm much on the side of Gabrielsson in this dispute. It's been my impression that she played more than a sounding-board role in the creation of the novels. Even if this isn't the case, what kind of greedy low-grade turds would cut her out of a share of the books' earnings on the basis of a legal technicality? The father and the brother weren't living with Larsson while he was writing these remarkable books. They presumably weren't there for him during those periods when the words weren't forming themselves right, the insinuating cloud of self-doubt was beginning to blot out everything else, or weariness was all. So far as I know, they did nothing at all to earn the vast sums in royalties and movie fees the books have brought them save be related to the author; Gabrielsson, who lived with the guy, could hardly have failed to contribute more than they did.

Oh, and she's right about the title change. The original was better.