Today’s author interview guest is Jan Stocklassa, author of The Man Who Played with Fire: Stieg Larsson’s Lost Files and the Hunt for an Assassin.

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The author of the Millennium novels laid out the clues. Now a journalist is following them.

When Stieg Larsson died, the author of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo had been working on a true mystery that out-twisted his Millennium novels: the assassination on February 28, 1986, of Olof Palme, the Swedish prime minister. It was the first time in history that a head of state had been murdered without a clue who’d done it—and on a Stockholm street at point-blank range.

Internationally known for his fictional villains, Larsson was well acquainted with their real-life counterparts and documented extremist activities throughout the world. For years he’d been amassing evidence that linked their terrorist acts to what he called “one of the most astounding murder cases” he’d ever covered. Larsson’s archive was forgotten until journalist Jan Stocklassa was given exclusive access to the author’s secret project.

In The Man Who Played with Fire, Stocklassa collects the pieces of Larsson’s true-crime puzzle to follow the trail of intrigue, espionage, and conspiracy begun by one of the world’s most famous thriller writers. Together they set out to solve a mystery that no one else could.

Jan Stocklassa is a Swedish writer and journalist focusing on large-scale affairs in international politics. In his books, Stocklassa uses a narrative non-fiction style to unveil earlier unknown facts about important events in recent history.

His break-through came with critically acclaimed bestseller “Stieg Larsson’s Archive – the key to the Palme murder”, a narrative non-fiction book published in 2018 that has been sold to more than 50 countries and translated into 27 languages. Following the publication, Swedish police are actively pursuing the leads presented in the book in the assassination of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme.

Jan Stocklassa first book “Caught by Prague” was published in 2007 and is based on real events that exposes corruption in connection with Saab and British Aerospace’s attempts to sell Saab’s supersonic jetfighters Gripen to the Czech Republic. In the aftermath of the book, police investigations were opened in seven countries.

His professional career comprises being a Swedish diplomat, launching the Metro newspaper in Prague, collaborating as a journalist with major media houses in Sweden and abroad as well as co-producing movies including the documentary “Stieg Larsson – The Man Who Played With Fire”.