BBC News - What publishers can do when a best-selling author dies What can a publisher do when one of its best-selling authors dies? Increasingly they're commissioning other writers to write new books featuring popular characters like James Bond, and now, the Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Stieg Larsson died aged 50 in 2004 - and even though he had plot outlines for more books in the so-called Millenium series, he had only completed three of them. Now his estate has hired in another local writer to pen a fourth instalment. Our reporter Philip Hampsheir spoke to Christopher MacLehose, who is publishing the English edition, and asked him whether characters are now becoming a marketable commodity that outlive their creators.