Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "cotterill"
Great new International Crime Fiction blog
My good pal Christopher G. Moore -- who shares with me a birthday today -- came up with a great idea for a new blog on international crime fiction. Chris, who writes a gritty, stylishly literate series of crime novels set in Bangkok, wanted to set up a blog where several authors of international crime would come together to write about their work and share ideas. The result is online as of today: International Crime Authors Reality Check. It features Chris, who lives in Bangkok; me, writing from Jerusalem; Colin Cotterill, a resident of Thailand whose delightfully acerbic detective character Dr. Siri is a Laotian coroner; and Barbara Nadel, author of the successful series of Istanbul novels about Inspector Ikmen.
The blog opens today with an amusing memoir from me called "Quick, woman. Go and get the Koran!"
I hope you'll follow the blog and see what this interesting collection of writers comes up with. (There'll also be some guest bloggers, so you never know who'll turn up.)
The blog opens today with an amusing memoir from me called "Quick, woman. Go and get the Koran!"
I hope you'll follow the blog and see what this interesting collection of writers comes up with. (There'll also be some guest bloggers, so you never know who'll turn up.)
Clitoris follows vagina on Cotterill blog
I've joined up with a few other crime writers to fill a single blog, International Crime Authors Reality Check, with original content. Last week Colin Cotterill wrote about his attempt to get a "vagina" into the title of one of his novels. This week, Colin has a hilarious post about his bemusing appearance at the Crime Writers Association's Daggers dinner -- at which Colin was awarded the "Dagger in the Library" for his excellent body of work. During the post, he notes that his name sounds like an adjective for the clitoris. (I was thinking he might have moved backwards from the vagina to another less specifically female spot, but there's always next week's blog for more bodily musings from the inimitable Colon Clitoris.) Tune in later this week for fellow bloggers Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and yours truly.
Omar Yussef for President of Palestine!
My latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.
But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.
There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.
The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.
So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.
Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.
On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.
But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.
It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?
If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.
Or is that just fiction, too?
Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.
Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.
Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.
Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.
But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.
There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.
The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.
So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.
Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.
On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.
But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.
It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?
If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.
Or is that just fiction, too?
Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.
Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.
Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.
Win a copy of my book
I've been writing for a new blog founded by me and three other crime writers. One of them, the ever-inventive Christopher G. Moore, came up with the idea for a competition. He got the idea after I suggested in a blog post last week that my Palestinian detective character Omar Yussef ought to stand for Palestinian president. Here's what Chris wrote on the blog and how to enter:
A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog
How to win a free book.
The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.
I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.
The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.
The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.
Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com
A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog
How to win a free book.
The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.
I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.
The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.
The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.
Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com
The Last Man in London
Here's my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:
During my teens, my family lived in a house in Addington, at the very farthest reach of South London. At the bottom of the hill, the road made its final exit from London. Not quite wide enough for two cars, it traveled onto the North Downs of Kent. Sometimes I would ride my bike along the lane and up a hill overlooking the Downs and lie on the grass. I was the border between London and the rest of the world. When a car went by below, I’d send out a silent message to the driver: “You just passed the last man in London.”
Much of my time was spent looking in the opposite direction, wishing we lived in central London– where things happened, where the Underground came to your neighborhood, where there was life, damn it. Where I would feel at one with those around me. Not like “the last man,” the one at the edge of everything. Like any suburban teenager, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where I was. And central London was both elsewhere and not impossibly far away.
Most of my friends from that time and from university, too, ended up living and working right there in central London. Perhaps they knew it was the right place for them, or maybe they never cared to ask themselves that question. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, and I never lived there. I went down the lane that wasn’t wide enough for two cars, and I never came back. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d still have written. But I doubt I would have seen as much or learned what I have about myself.
The Palestinian sleuth of my crime novels Omar Yussef is, for me, a satisfying character because he represents the insights I’ve gathered in distant, eventful travels. But he’s also a measure of my ability to understand the outsiders of other cultures. Not the people journalists typically rush toward–the prime ministers and generals and imams with their false rhetoric and their stake in things staying as they are. Rather they’re the people who seem to climb the same marginal hill that I mounted as a youth and look out wondering why their world isn’t better than it is. That’s the essence of Omar Yussef (and of the best “exotic detective” fiction).
That lane near our house went up onto the Downs and undulated toward Westerham, a beautiful place built around a sloping village green. At the center of the green, there’s a statue of General Wolfe, a native of the village who led British troops to victory against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War of the mid-Eighteenth Century. The latest historical research on Wolfe suggests he was a megalomaniac glory-hunter who got exactly the kind of heroic immortality he wanted when he died at the moment of victory in Quebec.
I haven’t paid the price exacted of Wolfe. (But then, no one’s built any statues of me, either.) I’ve been stoned, abused, hectored, threatened, held at gunpoint. I’ve come out of it with the kind of knowledge granted only to one of those who never expected to be loved by everyone and yet was never driven by hate–namely, an observant outsider.
The sense of being an outsider I experienced as the Last Man in London was alienating back then. But in Bethlehem and Gaza it still gives me a sense for the outsiders—whether that’s the Palestinians without their state, or the minorities who live among them, like the Christian Palestinians featured in THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM or the few hundred Samaritans who live on a hill overlooking Nablus and are at the center of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. It helped me identify the people who could teach me the most about myself, to build a bond of trust with them and understand them. It also led me to write the Omar Yussef mysteries as a direct challenge to every accepted Western idea about the Palestinians.
And to every idea I ever had about me. But that’s for another blog…
During my teens, my family lived in a house in Addington, at the very farthest reach of South London. At the bottom of the hill, the road made its final exit from London. Not quite wide enough for two cars, it traveled onto the North Downs of Kent. Sometimes I would ride my bike along the lane and up a hill overlooking the Downs and lie on the grass. I was the border between London and the rest of the world. When a car went by below, I’d send out a silent message to the driver: “You just passed the last man in London.”
Much of my time was spent looking in the opposite direction, wishing we lived in central London– where things happened, where the Underground came to your neighborhood, where there was life, damn it. Where I would feel at one with those around me. Not like “the last man,” the one at the edge of everything. Like any suburban teenager, I wanted to be anywhere else in the world but where I was. And central London was both elsewhere and not impossibly far away.
Most of my friends from that time and from university, too, ended up living and working right there in central London. Perhaps they knew it was the right place for them, or maybe they never cared to ask themselves that question. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted, and I never lived there. I went down the lane that wasn’t wide enough for two cars, and I never came back. If I hadn’t, I’m sure I’d still have written. But I doubt I would have seen as much or learned what I have about myself.
The Palestinian sleuth of my crime novels Omar Yussef is, for me, a satisfying character because he represents the insights I’ve gathered in distant, eventful travels. But he’s also a measure of my ability to understand the outsiders of other cultures. Not the people journalists typically rush toward–the prime ministers and generals and imams with their false rhetoric and their stake in things staying as they are. Rather they’re the people who seem to climb the same marginal hill that I mounted as a youth and look out wondering why their world isn’t better than it is. That’s the essence of Omar Yussef (and of the best “exotic detective” fiction).
That lane near our house went up onto the Downs and undulated toward Westerham, a beautiful place built around a sloping village green. At the center of the green, there’s a statue of General Wolfe, a native of the village who led British troops to victory against the French in Canada in the Seven Years War of the mid-Eighteenth Century. The latest historical research on Wolfe suggests he was a megalomaniac glory-hunter who got exactly the kind of heroic immortality he wanted when he died at the moment of victory in Quebec.
I haven’t paid the price exacted of Wolfe. (But then, no one’s built any statues of me, either.) I’ve been stoned, abused, hectored, threatened, held at gunpoint. I’ve come out of it with the kind of knowledge granted only to one of those who never expected to be loved by everyone and yet was never driven by hate–namely, an observant outsider.
The sense of being an outsider I experienced as the Last Man in London was alienating back then. But in Bethlehem and Gaza it still gives me a sense for the outsiders—whether that’s the Palestinians without their state, or the minorities who live among them, like the Christian Palestinians featured in THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM or the few hundred Samaritans who live on a hill overlooking Nablus and are at the center of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. It helped me identify the people who could teach me the most about myself, to build a bond of trust with them and understand them. It also led me to write the Omar Yussef mysteries as a direct challenge to every accepted Western idea about the Palestinians.
And to every idea I ever had about me. But that’s for another blog…
No more Mister Nice Guy
This is where it gets ugly.
Last week I zapped off the manuscript of my new novel to my agent in New York. My wife told me to get working on the next book. It’s not because she’s worried about me slacking off and failing to pay the rent. No, it’s because she knows what happens when I’m not writing.
Ever read “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”? When I’m writing, I’m Dr Jekyll. All my unloveable urges are intellectualized and subsumed to a pleasure in the creative impulse. As soon as I stop writing, I shuffle about the apartment like Mr Hyde, hunched and suspicious, leering, weak-willed and a bit vicious.
It happens every time I finish a book and I’ve dealt with it on each occasion with a different degree of success. This time I’ve gone straight into the documentary research for my next book, which will be a historical novel. Even so, over the weekend I was conscious that the calm I feel when writing was leeching away. My teeth were on edge. I yelled at a motorist (admittedly he’d failed to stop when my son and I were on the crosswalk in front of him, but nonetheless…). I went a couple of days without shaving and, though I didn’t knock over any small girls standing on the street corner, I did start to think I was degenerating into a vulpine Hyde.
I turned to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic and found this:
“Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. … My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them.…Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
What makes Stevenson’s tale great (in its original, non-Hollywood form) is that he nailed so clearly the dilemma at the heart of every civilized man. Freud wrote that man fights wars because we can only bear the restraint and repression of civilization for so long, before we blow. In my case, I write novels for the same reason.
As a writer, I have to be closer to my emotions perhaps than anyone except a shrink. The emotions need to be close enough to the surface that I can put them into sentence form and into the mouths of characters on the page.
If I was an accountant I wouldn’t need to do that every day. So I’d probably let it go.
I’ve realized that the annual post-completion jitters and self-doubt is merely what happens when I feel the strain of repressing those emotions. When I’m writing I don’t have to tamp them down – in fact, the opposite, I tease them out and give them form. Between books, I have to fight them because there’s nowhere for them to go. (It’s a little bit like Manhattan in August when all the analysts take their holiday. Everyone breaks down and blames the heat, but it’s really that they have nowhere to unload their neuroses.)
So long as I know what’s going on, I know that I won’t really turn into Mr Hyde. Not often, anyway.
(I posted this first on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a group blog with other crime authors Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel and Colin Cotterill. Take a look.)
Last week I zapped off the manuscript of my new novel to my agent in New York. My wife told me to get working on the next book. It’s not because she’s worried about me slacking off and failing to pay the rent. No, it’s because she knows what happens when I’m not writing.
Ever read “The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde”? When I’m writing, I’m Dr Jekyll. All my unloveable urges are intellectualized and subsumed to a pleasure in the creative impulse. As soon as I stop writing, I shuffle about the apartment like Mr Hyde, hunched and suspicious, leering, weak-willed and a bit vicious.
It happens every time I finish a book and I’ve dealt with it on each occasion with a different degree of success. This time I’ve gone straight into the documentary research for my next book, which will be a historical novel. Even so, over the weekend I was conscious that the calm I feel when writing was leeching away. My teeth were on edge. I yelled at a motorist (admittedly he’d failed to stop when my son and I were on the crosswalk in front of him, but nonetheless…). I went a couple of days without shaving and, though I didn’t knock over any small girls standing on the street corner, I did start to think I was degenerating into a vulpine Hyde.
I turned to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic and found this:
“Between these two, I now felt I had to choose. … My two natures had memory in common, but all other faculties were most unequally shared between them.…Strange as my circumstances were, the terms of this debate are as old and commonplace as man; much the same inducements and alarms cast the die for any tempted and trembling sinner; and it fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.”
What makes Stevenson’s tale great (in its original, non-Hollywood form) is that he nailed so clearly the dilemma at the heart of every civilized man. Freud wrote that man fights wars because we can only bear the restraint and repression of civilization for so long, before we blow. In my case, I write novels for the same reason.
As a writer, I have to be closer to my emotions perhaps than anyone except a shrink. The emotions need to be close enough to the surface that I can put them into sentence form and into the mouths of characters on the page.
If I was an accountant I wouldn’t need to do that every day. So I’d probably let it go.
I’ve realized that the annual post-completion jitters and self-doubt is merely what happens when I feel the strain of repressing those emotions. When I’m writing I don’t have to tamp them down – in fact, the opposite, I tease them out and give them form. Between books, I have to fight them because there’s nowhere for them to go. (It’s a little bit like Manhattan in August when all the analysts take their holiday. Everyone breaks down and blames the heat, but it’s really that they have nowhere to unload their neuroses.)
So long as I know what’s going on, I know that I won’t really turn into Mr Hyde. Not often, anyway.
(I posted this first on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a group blog with other crime authors Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel and Colin Cotterill. Take a look.)
Looking for somewhere to kill someone: suggestions please
I’m always looking for a good spot in which to kill someone. Still, as a crime writer, I rarely have to ask about potential locations for a good murder. People are keen to suggest that the blood be spilled on their doorstep.
Most recently, it was a pastor and his wife.
To be fair, they actually said I ought to have my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef visit their church on the top of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where I live. But when I noted admiringly that it’d be a great place for a murder, they nodded and smiled in agreement.
Last week I visited the Augusta Victoria Compound on the Mount of Olives as a guest of the delightful Ulrike Wohlrab and her husband, Michael, the pastor of the Church of the Ascension. The compound, which was built to accommodate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898 and named after his wife, is home to the second-biggest hospital in East Jerusalem, as well as Michael’s church. It’s also a meeting place for Germans in the city.
The idea behind my visit was for me to give my own little sermon on the mount – a talk about my Omar Yussef crime novels, which have been particularly well-received in Germany. But the discussion soon turned to murder…
“Omar Yussef hasn’t been to Jerusalem yet,” Michael said. “He ought to come here to the Augusta Victoria.”
It’s true that Omar has so far solved mysteries in Bethlehem, Gaza, Nablus and (coming in February) New York. My intention is for him to hit Jerusalem next and Augusta Victoria is a real center of the Palestinian community.
The symbolism of the Mount of Olives would be hard to resist as a setting for an Omar Yussef Mystery. Starting at the far end of the ridge, there’s the Mosque of the Ascension, a simple structure of Crusader origin with (so it’s said) the imprint of Jesus’s last footprint in the stone from which he launched off over Bethany en route for his seat at God’s right hand. (It’s a mosque because, though Jesus’s ascension isn’t mentioned in the Koran, Muslims believe in it. The Crusader building was improved upon in Saladin’s time by some of his followers.)
Moving along the hill with the golden Dome of the Rock across the valley on your left, you reach the Church of the Ascension (the Russian Orthodox version) with its tall slim tower and nuns bound in all-black wimples.
Next is the German Protestant church, which has some of the most striking mosaics you’ll ever see – featuring a massive Kaiser Wili on the ceiling, of course. Keep going and with only a slight dip in the road you’re onto Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University. (I’ll have to leave that out of my mystery novel. Batya Gur’s already been there.)
I always warn people that inclusion in my books may not work out so well for them. One of my friends, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who runs a book shop, asked me over coffee a while back if he could be a character in one of my novels.
“Sure, but I may have to kill you,” I said.
“Okay. Just make it quick,” he replied.
I can’t say yet quite how the German pastor and his wife will feature in my Omar Yussef series. I must confess that I don’t think I’ll have the heart to kill them. They’re too nice.
I must be going soft.
(I posted this on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and Colin Cotterill. Check it out.)
Most recently, it was a pastor and his wife.
To be fair, they actually said I ought to have my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef visit their church on the top of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where I live. But when I noted admiringly that it’d be a great place for a murder, they nodded and smiled in agreement.
Last week I visited the Augusta Victoria Compound on the Mount of Olives as a guest of the delightful Ulrike Wohlrab and her husband, Michael, the pastor of the Church of the Ascension. The compound, which was built to accommodate Kaiser Wilhelm II’s visit to Jerusalem in 1898 and named after his wife, is home to the second-biggest hospital in East Jerusalem, as well as Michael’s church. It’s also a meeting place for Germans in the city.
The idea behind my visit was for me to give my own little sermon on the mount – a talk about my Omar Yussef crime novels, which have been particularly well-received in Germany. But the discussion soon turned to murder…
“Omar Yussef hasn’t been to Jerusalem yet,” Michael said. “He ought to come here to the Augusta Victoria.”
It’s true that Omar has so far solved mysteries in Bethlehem, Gaza, Nablus and (coming in February) New York. My intention is for him to hit Jerusalem next and Augusta Victoria is a real center of the Palestinian community.
The symbolism of the Mount of Olives would be hard to resist as a setting for an Omar Yussef Mystery. Starting at the far end of the ridge, there’s the Mosque of the Ascension, a simple structure of Crusader origin with (so it’s said) the imprint of Jesus’s last footprint in the stone from which he launched off over Bethany en route for his seat at God’s right hand. (It’s a mosque because, though Jesus’s ascension isn’t mentioned in the Koran, Muslims believe in it. The Crusader building was improved upon in Saladin’s time by some of his followers.)
Moving along the hill with the golden Dome of the Rock across the valley on your left, you reach the Church of the Ascension (the Russian Orthodox version) with its tall slim tower and nuns bound in all-black wimples.
Next is the German Protestant church, which has some of the most striking mosaics you’ll ever see – featuring a massive Kaiser Wili on the ceiling, of course. Keep going and with only a slight dip in the road you’re onto Mount Scopus and the Hebrew University. (I’ll have to leave that out of my mystery novel. Batya Gur’s already been there.)
I always warn people that inclusion in my books may not work out so well for them. One of my friends, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who runs a book shop, asked me over coffee a while back if he could be a character in one of my novels.
“Sure, but I may have to kill you,” I said.
“Okay. Just make it quick,” he replied.
I can’t say yet quite how the German pastor and his wife will feature in my Omar Yussef series. I must confess that I don’t think I’ll have the heart to kill them. They’re too nice.
I must be going soft.
(I posted this on International Crime Authors Reality Check, a joint blog I write with Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and Colin Cotterill. Check it out.)
Jerusalem's a zoo
When foreign correspondents come to Jerusalem they often ask me for advice on stories and places from which to witness the various conflicts that play out in this city. Next time, I’m going to buy them a ticket to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.
I go there every Saturday afternoon with my two-year-old son. But perhaps because our favorite animals (the cute little prairie dogs) have hibernated, I noticed that the zoo is a microcosm of all the things I covered here in a decade and a half as a journalist—conflicts which have turned up in my Palestinian crime novels, too.
Because despite being a writer of fiction, this is stuff you can’t make up. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
Conflict number 1: Ultra-religious Jews and secular Jews.
On the enclosure that’s home to the peccaries, there’s a sign in Hebrew and Yiddish. “Das ist nisht a khazir,” reads the Yiddish. “This is not a pig.” That’s because the large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who cram the walkways of the zoo during the week would freak out if they thought there was a pig running on the sacred earth of Israel. (There used to be a pig farm in northern Israel where the swine were elevated on wooden platforms so they didn’t touch the holy land.)
The zoo’s original idea was to display only animals that appeared in the Bible. A special prize to any reader who can find me a peccary in the Bible. (The Chosen People wandered a long time, but I believe they didn’t claim to have made it to Central America.)
Conflict number 2: Secular Jews and ultra-religious Jews.
Of course, on Saturday afternoon, when I usually hit the zoo, there aren’t any ultra-Orthodox Jews there. They’re either dipping back and forth in prayer at the shtieblach or sleeping off a big Sabbath lunch. The fact that people like me can go to the zoo during the Sabbath is a secret from the ultra-religious. A woman passing through the gate asked about that fact recently. The guard explained, “We’re told to tell the dossim [rather negative Hebrew slang for the ultra-Orthodox:] that we’re closed on the Sabbath.”
So you can violate the Sabbath if you keep it a secret and adopt strange little dodges to stay within the letter of the law. The zoo doesn’t sell memberships on the weekend. It does sell tickets. But not from its regular ticket booth. It sets up a little kiosk a few yards away, so that it can claim that its ticket office is truly closed on the Sabbath. Just in case any of those dossim bother to ask…
Conflict number 3: Israelis and Palestinians
Just down from the elephant enclosure the zoo is preparing a new exhibit. It looks quite exciting. There are pools of carp and water falls. Rumor among the regulars is that we’ll soon be able to stroll among sea lions down there. As I was gazing longingly over the new layout (have you got it by now—I’m even more excited by the weekly zoo trip than my son), I glanced down at the checkpoint.
A small white hut, a raised bar and green-and-white concrete blocks, it looks rather like the old Checkpoint Charlie, except that it’s at the bottom of a deep, dusty valley spotted with olive trees. Checkpoints looked this way when I first came to Jerusalem 13 years ago. Most of the main ones have since been turned into enormous terminals, filled with security gear, designed to prevent potential suicide bombers from walking or driving right up to Israeli soldiers. But this checkpoint hasn’t changed. I sighed with something like nostalgia for the old days.
“That’s the West Bank right there,” said my wife.
“Yeah, this road goes around the back of that hill and into the Sidr checkpoint at the top of Beit Jala,” I said.
It’s a beautiful drive, even if the names signify conflict. This is the way I used to go to Bethlehem during the intifada. It takes you to the Christian village of Beit Jala where I set much of my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM.
I pointed toward the hillside. “That rectangular, cream-colored building. That’s Cremisan, the monastery in Beit Jala where they make wine.”
My wife didn’t ask me if the wine was any good—she’s the one who benefits most from the fact that I’m tee-total, if you see what I mean. But I saw her eyebrows rise. I wondered if she was thinking how nice it is that wine is grown in a town that has Hamas members on its city council.
Conflict number 4: Arabs and Jews
Most of the week the bulk of the visitors to the Jerusalem Zoo are either the black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crowds of children, or East Jerusalem Arabs, their women’s heads covered. The Arabs bring crowds of children too. It’s one of the few public places where these two groups mix. The city’s hospitals are the others main locations for such frissons. If I was naïve, I’d say it’s a sign that beneath everything there’s hope that these two peoples can live together in peace.
But I’m not naïve, and the hospitals aren’t so nice. I just like zoos.
Conflict number 5: Lemurs and humans.
Lemurland is an enclosure of olive trees at the zoo where you walk through on a path surrounded by the animals. The ring-tailed lemurs are supposed to frolic delightfully while you watch. They don’t seem to have received that message. They keep jumping on people. Lemurland is closed briefly every time the lemurs get into someone’s bag of corn chips.
Are the lemurs mad? Perhaps they’re angry because, though they’re caged up at the Biblical Zoo, they didn’t get a mention in the Bible. Strange, because that doesn’t seem to bother the meerkats.
(I posted this on a joint blog I write with some other crime noveliest. Have a look at the other posts.)
I go there every Saturday afternoon with my two-year-old son. But perhaps because our favorite animals (the cute little prairie dogs) have hibernated, I noticed that the zoo is a microcosm of all the things I covered here in a decade and a half as a journalist—conflicts which have turned up in my Palestinian crime novels, too.
Because despite being a writer of fiction, this is stuff you can’t make up. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.
Conflict number 1: Ultra-religious Jews and secular Jews.
On the enclosure that’s home to the peccaries, there’s a sign in Hebrew and Yiddish. “Das ist nisht a khazir,” reads the Yiddish. “This is not a pig.” That’s because the large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who cram the walkways of the zoo during the week would freak out if they thought there was a pig running on the sacred earth of Israel. (There used to be a pig farm in northern Israel where the swine were elevated on wooden platforms so they didn’t touch the holy land.)
The zoo’s original idea was to display only animals that appeared in the Bible. A special prize to any reader who can find me a peccary in the Bible. (The Chosen People wandered a long time, but I believe they didn’t claim to have made it to Central America.)
Conflict number 2: Secular Jews and ultra-religious Jews.
Of course, on Saturday afternoon, when I usually hit the zoo, there aren’t any ultra-Orthodox Jews there. They’re either dipping back and forth in prayer at the shtieblach or sleeping off a big Sabbath lunch. The fact that people like me can go to the zoo during the Sabbath is a secret from the ultra-religious. A woman passing through the gate asked about that fact recently. The guard explained, “We’re told to tell the dossim [rather negative Hebrew slang for the ultra-Orthodox:] that we’re closed on the Sabbath.”
So you can violate the Sabbath if you keep it a secret and adopt strange little dodges to stay within the letter of the law. The zoo doesn’t sell memberships on the weekend. It does sell tickets. But not from its regular ticket booth. It sets up a little kiosk a few yards away, so that it can claim that its ticket office is truly closed on the Sabbath. Just in case any of those dossim bother to ask…
Conflict number 3: Israelis and Palestinians
Just down from the elephant enclosure the zoo is preparing a new exhibit. It looks quite exciting. There are pools of carp and water falls. Rumor among the regulars is that we’ll soon be able to stroll among sea lions down there. As I was gazing longingly over the new layout (have you got it by now—I’m even more excited by the weekly zoo trip than my son), I glanced down at the checkpoint.
A small white hut, a raised bar and green-and-white concrete blocks, it looks rather like the old Checkpoint Charlie, except that it’s at the bottom of a deep, dusty valley spotted with olive trees. Checkpoints looked this way when I first came to Jerusalem 13 years ago. Most of the main ones have since been turned into enormous terminals, filled with security gear, designed to prevent potential suicide bombers from walking or driving right up to Israeli soldiers. But this checkpoint hasn’t changed. I sighed with something like nostalgia for the old days.
“That’s the West Bank right there,” said my wife.
“Yeah, this road goes around the back of that hill and into the Sidr checkpoint at the top of Beit Jala,” I said.
It’s a beautiful drive, even if the names signify conflict. This is the way I used to go to Bethlehem during the intifada. It takes you to the Christian village of Beit Jala where I set much of my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM.
I pointed toward the hillside. “That rectangular, cream-colored building. That’s Cremisan, the monastery in Beit Jala where they make wine.”
My wife didn’t ask me if the wine was any good—she’s the one who benefits most from the fact that I’m tee-total, if you see what I mean. But I saw her eyebrows rise. I wondered if she was thinking how nice it is that wine is grown in a town that has Hamas members on its city council.
Conflict number 4: Arabs and Jews
Most of the week the bulk of the visitors to the Jerusalem Zoo are either the black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crowds of children, or East Jerusalem Arabs, their women’s heads covered. The Arabs bring crowds of children too. It’s one of the few public places where these two groups mix. The city’s hospitals are the others main locations for such frissons. If I was naïve, I’d say it’s a sign that beneath everything there’s hope that these two peoples can live together in peace.
But I’m not naïve, and the hospitals aren’t so nice. I just like zoos.
Conflict number 5: Lemurs and humans.
Lemurland is an enclosure of olive trees at the zoo where you walk through on a path surrounded by the animals. The ring-tailed lemurs are supposed to frolic delightfully while you watch. They don’t seem to have received that message. They keep jumping on people. Lemurland is closed briefly every time the lemurs get into someone’s bag of corn chips.
Are the lemurs mad? Perhaps they’re angry because, though they’re caged up at the Biblical Zoo, they didn’t get a mention in the Bible. Strange, because that doesn’t seem to bother the meerkats.
(I posted this on a joint blog I write with some other crime noveliest. Have a look at the other posts.)
