Truth or Fiction?

When can a writer's writing be used against him in a court of law?  This is the question David Grann examines in his fascinating article "True Crime, A postmodern murder mystery," in the February 11, 2008 issue of The New Yorker.

The case arose in Poland when, in December of 2000, the body of Dariusz Janiszewski was found in a river. He had been bound and brutally beaten.  Mr. Janiszewski was a handsome, youngish advertising exec with no obvious enemies and no criminal record.  His murder became a cold file after six months.

In 2003, detective Jacek Wroblewski decided take another look at  Janiszewski's case.  Maybe the investigators had overlooked a clue.   Indeed, Wroblewski found that a series of calls from a phone booth near Janiszewski's office had been made to his cell phone the day he disappeared.  Janiszewski's cell phone was never found.  Wroblewski did some digging and discovered that the phone had been sold on an Internet auction site four days after Janiszewski disappeared.  Wroblewski tracked down the seller of the phone, a thirty-year old Polish man named Krystian Bala.

Now, this is where this story gets really weird.  Bala had recently published a novel called Amok, a sadistic, pornographic story, according to Grann, featuring a murder startlingly similar to Janiszewski's.  The narrator of the story-the fictional murderer-was named Chris, which is  the American version of Krystian.

Wroblewski believed the novel might be the break he was hoping for.  He set his team of investigators to work combing through Amok for clues and used the novel as a blueprint for his investigation of Bala's possible connection to the murder of Janiszewski.  There were a number of  intriguing parallels between the novel's main character and Bala's actual life

Bala vehemently denied all charges and disagreed that the story mirrored his own personality or experiences saying that writers often use pieces of their life experiences in their writing.   A piece of fiction is not proof that the writer acted out the fictional events.

Using the novel as a "profiler" of sorts,  Wroblewski dug up enough evidence to try Bala for Janiszewski's murder.  I won't ruin the fun of reading Grann's article, because it is well researched, and a suspenseful, taut read.  But, for writers and for readers, the case raises some interesting issues.

As a reader, each time I start a novel, I first turn to the author's bio.  I love it if there is a photo.  Part of the fun of reading a novel is to think about the unique baggage the writer brings to the story.  As a writer, for years, fear of revealing my most horrid and embarrassing secrets kept me from going where I wanted to go with my writing.  But, after being told "write what you know" over and over, I'm just beginning to learn how to weave real-life episodes into a fictional plot in a way that sharpens my writing and keeps it from turning into a true confession. 

How valid is it to use an author's fictional writing to tie her to a crime?  What if the book parallels the writer's life to a stunning degree?  Should works of fiction be inadmissible as evidence since the work, by definition, is not factual?  How much of a writer's personality and philosophy can be gleaned from a work of fiction?   Call me paranoid, but I don't think I'll be writing any murder mysteries for a while.