Monday, August the 2nd, 2004
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Sometimes those little items buried in the “in brief” section of the newspaper can be written with such panache that they leave you begging for more detail. Consider this, from last Saturday's Guardian (via Reuter's):
Swedish Lutheran pastor Helge Fossmo was jailed for life after faking text messages from God to get his lover to murder his wife and try to kill the husband of another lover.
One sentence, thirty two words, but what endless fascination! There is the germ of a story here, or a novel, and certainly a Hitchcock film. I read that, and I had to know more. Typing “Helge Fossmo” into Google brings up a variety of pages—like this one—but somehow, for me, reading a fuller version of events detracts from the genius of that brief snippet.
STOP PRESS : Pansy Cradledew begs to differ. She writes : “I found the full story about Pastor Helge quite intriguing. I'm desperate to know more about a ‘strange sect’ that allowed middle-aged men to behave like Casanovas, and how the Uppsala court could possibly have believed that Helge's text messages were ‘supporting’ his nanny in her faith rather than inciting her to kill…It's like a Scandinavian Stepford. And what of the mysterious first Mrs Fossmo? I think we're only seeing the tip of the fjord, myself.”