A Fugitive's Romantic Fiction

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THE NOVELIST GENERATING the most buzz at Belgrade's international book fair was notably absent during last week's page peddling. It turns out that former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who was indicted by the U.N. war-crimes tribunal for genocide in 1995, has used his many years on the run to focus on the gentler art of writing romance novels. The so-called Butcher of Bosnia penned a 416-page bodice ripper titled Miraculous Chronicles of the Night that quickly sold out all 1,200 copies.

"If we'd had 50,000 copies at the fair, we would have sold them all," gushed Miroslav Toholj, Karadzic's publisher and former Bosnian Serb information minister. Toholj explained that his publishing company printed only a small number of copies because critics panned Karadzic's previous books of poetry. "I'm surprised how good he is at writing fiction," says Serbian author Branislav Crncevic.

This literary makeover couldn't have come at a better time for the Karadzic family. The European Union last month ordered Karadzic's assets frozen, and the royalties for his autobiographical love story--about a wrongly imprisoned psychiatrist in prewar Sarajevo--will go to his wife. Although Toholj claims he obtained the manuscript through an intermediary and doesn't know the author's whereabouts, one thing is certain: with a $5 million bounty on his head, Karadzic won't be toting his laptop to the local Starbucks to write a sequel. --By Julie Rawe and Dejan Anastasijevic