Murder, He Wrote

In 1992, Joe Eszterhaus, the Mr. Sleaze of Hollywood scriptwriters (a very competitive category) gave us “Basic Instinct,” in which a best-selling author is suspected of committing the ice-pick murders described in her novels.

Now Life has outdone Awful Art in Poland (no joke) where an “author, travel writer and intellectual whose best-selling novel described a grisly murder has been jailed for 25 years for committing the crime he had so vividly portrayed.”

Krystian Bala makes the movie’s Sharon Stone character look tame. His victim was “humiliated, starved and tortured, before having his hands bound with a rope that was looped around his neck in a noose.”

In addition to writing “Amok,” with details about the killing that had never been publicized, Bala kept taunting Polish police with e-mails and finally clinched their case by selling the victim’s cell phone on the Internet.

Bala claims he was framed.