PW: Before dealing with falsely claimed identities in The Great Pretenders, you've written about, among other things, street slashers and people being buried alive. What draws you to these types of subjects?
Jan Bondeson: I've always had a profound interest in history, especially the history of medicine, and a bit of a fancy for the macabre and odd. This book of historical mysteries, for example, is something I've been researching since 1996. When I started, I had nine or 10 of these cases, then I selected the six best.
PW: When you wrote Buried Alive, a lot of the research documents ended up in your personal collection. Did that happen with this book?
JB: Not as much, I must admit, but I do have a tall bookshelf full of books about these historical mysteries, particularly the Kaspar Hauser story, which has a huge bibliography. The collection for Buried Alive isn't really huge. I do have a large iconographical collection I acquired during the two years I was researching that book, but the main motive was to avoid paying exorbitant fees to various museums and libraries [for reproduction rights]. In this country [the U.K.], and I'm sure it's true in the States as well, they try to flog an author for all he's got. So the collection serves dual purposes. They're nice collector's items, but they can be used in books, articles and TV programs for the rest of my life—they'll be quite a cash cow in the end.
PW: When you addressed the medical aspects of these cases, did you have better data available in some cases than in others?
JB: Some of them had hardly any medical data at all, really, but I did have information about the dauphin, Louis XVII, and Kaspar Hauser. In the case of Louis XVII, I was actually hoping to solve the mystery at one point, because I discovered something all the previous authors had not been able to grasp, which was that the boy who died in the tower was suffering from a quite advanced tuberculosis, whereas the little prince, when he was put into the tower a few years earlier, was relatively healthy. At least he wasn't suffering from overt tuberculosis. So then I researched how long it would take a child of that age to develop tuberculosis severe enough to affect the bowels and the bones, but the results weren't conclusive.
PW: As you're looking through the documents, do you ever find yourself wishing the doctors had done this or that procedure, or done things differently?
JB: Well, that's a pretty futile thing to do, but in the case of Kaspar Hauser, the German doctors were absolutely incompetent, even by the standards of their time. Not only did they almost certainly kill him by failing to treat his wounds properly, they bungled the autopsy in the most blatant manner.
PW: Were you able to acquire any artifacts from these cases?
JB: That's not been possible, unfortunately. I'd love to have the dauphin's heart, but that's very well guarded. There are a lot of memorabilia related to Kaspar Hauser, but they're all very valuable and in various German museums, even his stockings and the paper box where he kept his pencils.
PW: Where's your research taking you next?
JB: My next book is quite different. It's about the murder of Sweden's prime minister, Olaf Palme, in 1986. When the country's foreign minister was killed a few months ago, she was stabbed in the middle of the day when she was out shopping; the killer left a lot of technical evidence; and they believe they caught him soon after. But Palme's murderer waited calmly for the prime minister to walk home from the cinema, killed him with a well-aimed shot, ran away and was never seen again. The investigation has cost as much as the JFK investigation did, but they've never found a killer. The medical evidence in the case is inconsequential, but after researching the case, I've come to some conclusions, and it'll be a very controversial book, certainly in Sweden, where Palme is still regarded as their Kennedy.
