Millennium sequel to be written in American detective fiction style

Stockholm: Swedish author David Lagercrantz, who took over the Millennium crime series from the late Stieg Larsson, said the fifth book will be written in a straight-talking style popularised by Raymond Chandler.

But in an interview with the Swedish daily newspaper DN published on Tuesday, Lagercrantz admitted that finding his voice in this new style was tough.

"It's so much harder to write hard-boiled fiction than I thought. Good hard-boiled prose needs rhythm. You have to vary the sentences even if they are short - and when the punch line comes, it needs to be prepared for," he said.

While the book will be a continuation of Larsson's crime fiction Nordic noir trilogy, the style will be closer to the terse, blunt prose used by Chandler, whose detective novels featured a solitary anti-hero solving crimes in the seamy and corrupt underbelly of Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Lagercrantz said his last Millennium novel, "The Girl in the Spider's Web," was stylistically different because it included long passages of popular science on black holes.

The new novel, he says, will be far less technical.

"I'll write more like Chandler did or the way I wrote Zlatan (Ibrahimovic)," he said referring to his biography of the Paris Saint-Germain football player, whose wise-cracking jabs are regularly found on the sports pages of European newspapers.

The new novel, which is due out in early 2017, will be published by Norstedts and translated into 56 languages.

Larsson died in 2004 after writing the manuscripts of three novels. He didn't live long enough to see how popular the series would become.

Published between 2005-2007, his three books -- which follow the story of Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker, and Mikael Blomkvist, an investigative journalist -- sold more than 80 million copies worldwide and inspired several film versions.

But the decision to continue the series after Larsson's death upset some.

Larsson's former long-term partner, Eva Gabrielsson, who was excluded from his inheritance because they were not married, criticised the project and childhood friends reportedly said they saw its publication as a form of "grave robbing."

Despite the criticism, "The Girl in the Spider's Web" won positive reviews and sold 3.5 million copies worldwide. The sixth book is scheduled to be published in 2019.