Torsten Akrell and Louise Forsell
Toronto Daily Star, October 14 1947
This edition of the Toronto Daily Star contains this brief article that reads like something from a spy thriller:
So what we have here is a man disguising himself as a doctor, extracting the love of his life - who happens to have only one arm - from a Swedish sanitorium, and flying her to Norway in a private plane. The movie script practically writes itself.
I did a bit of searching and went down a variety of interesting rabbit holes. First off: I could find no evidence that Torsten Akrell (also written as Thorsten Akrell) wrote detective stories. He appears to have been a lieutenant and a special agent of the Swedish Defense Staff during the Second World War, part of a team responsible for smuggling secret agents into Poland and Hungary. He also took on missions for the Allies in wartime Berlin. Given this history, smuggling a woman out of a sanitorium would have been a relatively stress-free exercise.
Louise Forsell, not Torsten Akrell, was the writer of detective stories; she was known as Loulou. There is a Wikipedia page for her in Swedish that provides more details on what happened:
- Apparently, Ms. Forsell had been saddled with a narcotics habit as a result of being treated for injuries suffered in a plane crash.
- After being admitted to a Swedish sanitorium, she complained about her treatment there and was then banned from receiving visitors or making phone calls.
- This is the point at which Lt. Akrell stepped into the picture.
The whole affair became something of a controversy in Sweden at the time, as Ms. Forsell was still married to her first husband, a merchant named Nils Kaage. Not surprisingly, this marriage didn't make it through the year.
Despite his heroics, Ms. Forsell and Lt. Akrell never did get married. She married a singer named Anders Börje in 1951, divorced him two years later, and then passed away in 1954 at the age of 31. I couldn't find out what the cause of her death was. She wrote five novels, one of which was co-written by her brother and one of which was published posthumously.
A more complete history of this event can be found on this page about crime in Stockholm (translate it into English and then scroll to the section titled "The Knight and the Virgin 1947"). This page states that Lt. Akrell became a United Nations soldier (presumably peacekeeping); if this is him, he passed away in 1980. A photo of the two of them is available on Wikimedia Commons.
Last but not least: a Swedish movie called The Spy was released in 2019, with an actor named Rolf Lassgård playing the part of Thorsten Akrell. I have no idea what it is about.
Created September 8, 2025.