Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "g"
Can't wait for The Corruptionist
I heard from my chum Christopher G. Moore that he just finished writing the 11th in his series of Vincent Calvino crime novels set in Bangkok. That's good news, because I already read his brilliant and forthcoming Paying Back Jack. (See my review "Elmore Leonard in Bangkok"). Knowing Chris's work, I already love The Corruptionist -- I'm enjoying guessing how he'll use that terrific title and his vibrant cast of characters to take us on another superbly original dive into the underworld of Bangkok.
On his blog, Chris recently wrote about my latest Palestinian crime novel, The Samaritan's Secret. I'm delighted he enjoyed it -- not only because I'm such an admirer of his writing, but also because we share a birthday/a UK publisher/a style of examining the foreign culture in which we live through gritty crime fiction which exposes something you'd never expect about the place. Here's what he wrote:
"Matt Beynon Rees is another author who knows the territory, the people, and the nature of the personal conflicts that separate them. Matt’s turf is Palestine, and his novels are brim with people caught in the vice of poverty, tribal and clan conflict, and facing the constant possibility of violence. He brings Palestine to life. And that is no easy thing.
"One of Matt’s Omar Yussef mysteries does more to take a person into the day-to-day reality of the lives of people in Gaza than a library of newspaper and magazine analysis of Middle East politics. Ultimately understanding countries like the Palestine and North Korea are tied to their history, language, enemies, and traditions. The reality of such a country becomes understandable through emotional lens of the people who live there. Matt channels the sensibility of Graham Greene in this series, building a picture of a time and place that stays with you long after you finish the book."
So while you're waiting for The Corruptionist, get stuck into the first 10 Calvino novels. You won't be disappointed.
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.)
Elmore Leonard's 11th Rule of Writing
I’ve always enjoyed Elmore Leonard’s novels and seen him as one of the true stylists of popular fiction. In a review, I even described my pal Christopher G. Moore as the “Elmore Leonard of Bangkok” and I meant it as a compliment. But I have a bone to pick with the great Elmore.
I just read a book of Elmore’s short stories from 2004 titled “When the Women Come Out to Dance.” In many ways it’s superb. The title story turns on the particularly American kind of hardness and determination that takes a character who is not bad into a situation that leaves them ineradicably among bad people.
So what’s the problem? Movie stars, that's what.
In one of the early stories in the book, a character is described as being a “Jill St. John type.” I looked her up. She doesn’t appear to have had a major movie role for about 28 years before Elmore wrote the story, but I suppose her bikini-clad appearance in an ancient Bond film made an impression on him.
In two – not one, but two – of the later stories in the book, there’s a character who’s described as looking like (or smiling like) Jack Nicholson.
This isn’t the work of a great stylist. This is on the level of Dan Brown. (Remember that in The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s hero, the dumbest professor Harvard ever employed, is described thus: “He looked like Harrison Ford.” I wonder if, after the movie came out, later editions updated that to “…He looked like Tom Hanks.”)
This would be a cheap technique if a journalist used it. For a writer with the descriptive powers of Elmore, it’s a real shame.
In his famous 10 Rules of Writing, Elmore says: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” That’s probably why he didn’t write “He looked like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ in the scene where he’s coming through the door with the axe and shouting ‘Here’s Johnny’ with a demented enjoyment on his face.” Too much detail.
Well, if you were trying to describe Elmore, how would you do it? Here’s his picture. I could describe him as “looking like Roger Whittaker.” Mean anything to you? Perhaps you don’t recall much about British easy-listening music of the 1970s. If you did, you’d have a picture. But why should you?
That’s exactly why I don’t like to see Elmore describe a character as looking like a particular movie star.
That doesn’t mean Elmore’s style should be discounted. (Read his 10 rules below. They’re very good in a folksy American sort of way.) But let’s first add an 11th rule: Don’t describe characters as looking like a particular movie star.
Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
I just read a book of Elmore’s short stories from 2004 titled “When the Women Come Out to Dance.” In many ways it’s superb. The title story turns on the particularly American kind of hardness and determination that takes a character who is not bad into a situation that leaves them ineradicably among bad people.
So what’s the problem? Movie stars, that's what.
In one of the early stories in the book, a character is described as being a “Jill St. John type.” I looked her up. She doesn’t appear to have had a major movie role for about 28 years before Elmore wrote the story, but I suppose her bikini-clad appearance in an ancient Bond film made an impression on him.
In two – not one, but two – of the later stories in the book, there’s a character who’s described as looking like (or smiling like) Jack Nicholson.
This isn’t the work of a great stylist. This is on the level of Dan Brown. (Remember that in The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s hero, the dumbest professor Harvard ever employed, is described thus: “He looked like Harrison Ford.” I wonder if, after the movie came out, later editions updated that to “…He looked like Tom Hanks.”)
This would be a cheap technique if a journalist used it. For a writer with the descriptive powers of Elmore, it’s a real shame.
In his famous 10 Rules of Writing, Elmore says: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” That’s probably why he didn’t write “He looked like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ in the scene where he’s coming through the door with the axe and shouting ‘Here’s Johnny’ with a demented enjoyment on his face.” Too much detail.
Well, if you were trying to describe Elmore, how would you do it? Here’s his picture. I could describe him as “looking like Roger Whittaker.” Mean anything to you? Perhaps you don’t recall much about British easy-listening music of the 1970s. If you did, you’d have a picture. But why should you?
That’s exactly why I don’t like to see Elmore describe a character as looking like a particular movie star.
That doesn’t mean Elmore’s style should be discounted. (Read his 10 rules below. They’re very good in a folksy American sort of way.) But let’s first add an 11th rule: Don’t describe characters as looking like a particular movie star.
Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.
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…
Moore's new Thailand noir
Christopher G. Moore has book 10 in his terrific Vincent Calvino crime series out this week. "Paying Back Jack", which will be out in December in the UK. I love the Calvino series for the way it leads the reader into the underbelly of Bangkok in the company of its Italian-Jewish New Yorker private eye. PBJ gives us that and much more. Moore creates a cast of vibrant characters worthy of the best Elmore Leonard caper for this hard-edged, stylish mystery. With the story of snarling Special Ops hitmen and smiling Thai hookers, Moore skewers the simplistic logic of the "war on terror," lays bare its worldwide destructive power, and shows the price it makes people pay. His Vincent Calvino is at once in the finest tradition of the lone private detective and a complete original. You can also read my interview with Moore from earlier this year.
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.)
