Literary crimes, pt. 1
A murder trial currently under way in Poland suggests that there is definitely such a thing as too much author research. The defendant, according to an article in The Guardian, is 33-year-old writer Krystian Bala, and police say his popular novel Amok mirrors the facts of a real-life killing much too closely to be coincidence.
In Amok, Bala describes how the man was tied up in a similar fashion to [the victim] Dariusz J, with his hands bound behind his back and round his wrists and neck. The murdered man, the owner of a small advertising agency, had also been tortured.
Bala has vigorously denied having inside knowledge of the killing. He says he was simply an avid reader of the press reports and that he has been framed to cover up for what he described as a “bungled” police investigation.
It sounded like a tenuous accusation to us at first, but then the Guardian piece goes on to mention that the victim was a close friend of Bala’s ex-wife, and that, four days after the murder, Bala sold the victim’s mobile phone over the internet. Creepy.
