Stranger than fiction

Wroclaw, Poland

The Polish author of a best-selling murder mystery is on trial for allegedly committing the murder he wrote about. Novelist Krystian Bala said his 2003 book, Amok, was a work of fiction inspired by news reports of the 2000 torture and murder of a businessman. Police noticed that grisly details of the crime—which were never reported in the press—appeared in the novel, but there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Bala. More recently, they discovered that the victim was a friend of Bala’s estranged wife, and that the e-mails to a Polish investigative TV show praising the murder as “the perfect crime” came from Bala. The author insists he is innocent. “The police are treating my book as if it were a literal autobiography,” he said.

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