The novelist Krystian Bala was jailed yesterday for 25 years for inspiring and organising a murder that he had written about in a macabre bestselling thriller.

A court in the Polish city of Wroclaw found the philosopher and photographer guilty after an extraordinary trial that tested the boundaries of fact and fiction and, for a while, forced the police and prosecutors to become literary critics.

Bala, 33, was jealous of Dariusz Janiszewski who he suspected of being a lover of his former wife. In December 2000 Mr Janiszewski, the young owner of an advertising agency, was fished out of the river Oder, bearing signs of torture. He had been thrown into the river alive, trussed up with a noose round his neck. The police could find no motive and had no suspect.

Three years later Bala published his book Amok, about a group of young intellectuals using sex and drugs to explore the meaning of crime, punishment and truth. The book contains an account of a murder remarkably similar to the fate of Mr Janiszewski.

An anonymous phone call to the police alerted Chief Inspector Jacek Wroblewski to the parallels. One theory is that the call was made by the author himself, playing a form of mind-game with his baffled investigator. When the case was presented on the Polish equivalent of the BBC programme CrimeWatch, the producers received calls from Asia describing the murder as “the perfect crime”. Bala was in Asia at the time.

Bala even offered to sit through a police lie detector test - and held his breath using techniques that he had learnt as an underwater photographer, reducing stress levels and giving him a positive result.

“He has two faces,” said Judge Lidia Hojenska in her summing-up yesterday. “One is the face we see in court, composed and thoughtful, and the other is very aggressive, aggravated by alcohol.” She recommended that he serve at least 20 years in jail since he was already gathering information on another suspected lover of his former wife.

“There are indeed similarities between the author and the main hero of the book, Amok,” said the judge, but she emphasised that they were not the decisive proof of the crime.

The clinching evidence, she said, was Bala’s attempts to sell the telephone of his victim on the internet four days after his disappearance. Bala claims to have found the phone in a café.

That blunder wrecked the possibility of Bala getting away with the perfect crime.

The police had been mocked and criticised for taking fiction as fact. He argued that Poland was gravely restricting the freedom of expression by taking his imagined murder as the literal truth. He was guilty merely of thorough research.

“They seemed to know the book by heart,” said Bala in a statement that he released to the internet. “They quoted pieces from it that they found offensive and asked me about even the smallest detail. The police were treating the book as if it were a literal autobiography,” he added.

Inspector Wroblewski was not convinced. Neither was the court yesterday. Bala is expected to appeal against the sentence. During the trial, the prosecutor amended the charges from direct physical murder to the organisation and inspiration of the crime.

The actual killer may still be on the loose.

Criminal prose

— Sir Thomas Malory’s 15th-century Le Mort D’Arthur is considered the definitive version of the story of King Arthur. He composed most of it while behind bars. A renegade knight, Malory was convicted of robbery, extortion and attempted murder

— William Burroughs, author of The Naked Lunch, killed his partner Joan Vollmer in 1951, while trying to shoot a glass balanced on her head at a party

— New York writer Laura Albert was found guilty of fraud this year after being revealed as the author of Sarah, a book purporting to be the autobiography of JT LeRoy, a transgender teenage prostitute

Sources: who2.com; crimelibrary.com; Times archives

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