Sonny Mehta Probably Wanted to Kick a Hornet's Nest at Imus

There is no sweeter victory for Imus than proving someone wrong. Today, that person was Esther Newberg, his longtime agent and friend, who doubted that Sonny Mehta, the editor-in-chief for Alfred A. Knopf book publishers, knew who the I-Man was.

“I watch you religiously on my treadmill,” Mehta, sitting in the Fox studio, told Imus. It’s going to be a long week for Esther.

The reason for Mehta’s visit was because The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, the third installment of Stieg Larsson’s wildly popular novels featuring heroine Lisbeth Salander, comes out today.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Mehta said of Larsson’s posthumous success. He died in 2004, before the first novel was even published.

 The first and second novels in the series, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, have sold around five million copies in the U.S., and, as Mehta understands it, around 40 million globally.

“The preorders on Amazon are the largest since Dan Brown’s last book was published,” Mehta said of the anticipation surrounding The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. “The audience is just kind of growing exponentially.”

Mehta originally signed Larsson after hearing a lot of buzz at the Frankfurt Book Fair a few years ago. “It’s been exciting watching something like this build, because it’s not what happens regularly in our business,” he said.

Known for being particular, Mehta told Imus he was drawn to the ambition of Larsson’s trilogy. “While they are three distinct and separate novels, they tell a sort of very big story,” he said. “It’s a story about corruption. It’s a story about the state, and the responsibility of the state. It’s about banking. It’s about all the big, big international subjects.”

A computer hacker who has been maltreated by society, Salander somehow ties all of these grandiose themes together. “And yet, she does not perceive herself as a victim,” said Mehta. Salander teams up with an unlikely partner: an investigative print journalist who runs a radical magazine, much as Larsson did when he was alive.

“He ran an anti-fascist magazine,” said Mehta. “He was concerned with issues of immigration, corruption, issues of attention and treatment of women. It was a left-wing magazine.”

There were rumors that Larsson, who collapsed and had a heart attack after climbing seven flights of stairs, Stieg Larssonwas actually murdered, but Mehta brushed off those allegations.

“As you know from watching this program on your treadmill,” said Imus. “Had you published the first novel, it had done okay, and then he died, I would have accused you of killing him.”

Protesting that he would have done anything to keep Larsson alive, Mehta hinted that there is a fourth novel on Larsson’s computer that nobody has seen. Stay tuned.

-Julie Kanfer