Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "murders"

It’s great to hear good news. It’s even better to hear it when you’ve just arrived in Paris. Everything sounds better when you hear it in Paris.

Last week I had a few days in the French capital courtesy of my publisher Albin Michel, which brought me over for the release of my third Palestinian crime novel “Meurtre chez les Samaritains” (English title: “The Samaritan’s Secret”).

On arrival my publicist, a delightful Marseillaise named Agnes Chalnot who works with the elegantly Parisienne Florence Godfernaux, informed me that the first of my Palestinian crime novels “Le Collaborateur de Bethleem” (“The Collaborator of Bethlehem” in the US; "The Bethlehem Murders" in the UK) had been shortlisted for the Prix des Livres de Poche. The winner will be announced in the autumn, but in the meantime it was a lovely way to start my visit.

Albin Michel usually puts me up in the Hotel Lennox, just around the corner from their offices in Montparnasse (that’s the 14th Arondissement, if the numbers make sense to you as they spiral out from the very center of Paris…). It’s a fabulous old artistic area. Norwegian-born photographer Ulf Andersen has lived in the neighborhood a long time and, as we walked about, he showed me the atelier where Picasso used to work, the café where Sartre (“He was very ugly,” Ulf remembers) used to have his morning coffee, and the art deco Hotel Aiglon where Bunuel used to stay when he visited Paris. Nowadays Montparnasse is a bit too pricey for artists, who tend to live in the area near the Bastille.

I enjoy returning each year to Paris when my books come out. Partially that’s because of the culture of books and intellectualism that’s specific to France. The head of Albin Michel who’s a great supporter of my books, Olivier Betourne, used to be the editor of Jacques Derrida, the great deconstructionist philosopher, and my editor Vaiju Naravane is a polymath Indian woman who’s able to tell hilarious tales of trekking to the furthest regions of southern India with Shiva Naipaul.

It’s also because I’ve come to know some of the journalists I meet quite well, particularly those like Philippe Lemaire of Le Parisien and Vladimir de Gmeline of Valeurs Actuelles who have been out to Jerusalem to tour the West Bank with me. This year Philippe remarked that I seemed more relaxed than when my last book came out. I was pleased to hear it, and I must credit my wife Devorah and my son Cai for calming me down!

Another friend I was glad to see during my quick visit was Francois Busnel. He’s one of the most important literary journalists in France and he has an approach to his work that’s vastly different from most of those who write about books. Francois came to Jerusalem to write about me a couple of years ago. He travels each month to interview writers around the world. This summer he’s spending a few weeks in Afghanistan with his friend Kabul-born Atiq Rahimi, who won the Prix Goncourt last year. Not your typical book reviewer, as you can see. If you read French, take a look at his articles in L’Express. They’re excellent.

With only a few hours left in Paris, I picked up a Quiche Lorraine and feuillete de Roquefort near the parliament. The quiche you probably know has chunks of ham. The feuillete is a rich, rich pastry packed with Roquefort, and frankly it was a little too intense for me. But as I sat in the Jardins du Luxembourg with my pastries, watching the French reading books (not playing with Blackberrys) beneath the massive bust of Paul Verlaine, I wished I could take a little of their ethos home with me.

A new review in the Ann Arbor Chronicle suggests healthy grassroots popularity for my Palestinian crime novels. The review of my first Palestinian crime novel "The Collaborator of Bethlehem" (UK Title: The Bethlehem Murders) is written by Robin Agnew, owner of Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookstore in Ann Arbor. She writes: "When enough customers ask you about a certain author in a short period of time, it makes you take notice. When several of my more discerning “guy” readers mentioned Matt Rees as a wonderful writer, I was intrigued enough to pick up the first book."

Robin goes on to say:"Rees is able – like the very best of novelists – to convey absolute horror without sentimentality. Some of the things that happen in this book will probably haunt you, but they also seem like things that can and do happen. The real bit of grace in the book is the way Yussef chooses to deal with what happens. He shows that even a somewhat frail 56 year old can find a reason to move ahead in the world. I can’t recommend this book highly enough." Read the full review in The Ann Arbor Chronicle.

The magazine of Harvard's Nieman Fellowship asked me to write an essay about Jeffrey Fleishman's "Promised Virgins: A Novel of Jihad". I wrote about why international correspondents like me and Fleishman, Cairo bureau chief for the LA Times, turn to novels to express the depth of what we learn about a foreign culture. Here's how the article begins:

Jay Morgan, the central character of Jeffrey Fleishman’s thought provoking “novel of Jihad,” carries an undeveloped roll of film shot by his young photographer wife in the moments before she was killed in Beirut. Morgan lifts her wounded body to safety, but she dies anyway. It’s a fitting image on which to build Morgan’s deep bitterness and disillusion about journalism as he covers the war in Kosovo. In these days of cyberjournalism, idiotic reader “talkbacks” and nonsensical newsroom cutbacks, the only thing apparently more useless to the media industry than an undeveloped film or a dead photographer is a living foreign correspondent.

The story of “Promised Virgins” revolves around Morgan’s trek through the mountains as he interviews Serbs, Albanians and CIA operatives on the hunt for a newly arrived jihadi who has brought Islamic fundamentalism to the otherwise nationalistic Muslims of Kosovo. In truth, the book is about a foreign correspondent’s uncomfortable personal connections with the society he covers and his realization that they’re the only things keeping him from despair at his ever-shabbier trade. Read more...

Much as I love Nordic crime fiction, the Europewide megaseller “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson made me want to throw knives like the Swedish chef on The Muppet Show. Why?

Two reasons.

First, the minor reason. Written by a (tragically deceased) Swedish journalist, the book is entirely in the style of a magazine article. Complete with page after page of “research.” It’d be enough for the author to tell me that Swedish women are often assaulted by men. I don’t need five pages of real background. A writer ought to understand that the greater the temptation for the reader to skim, the worse the book is. You end up with a good 250 page mystery trapped inside a 600 page monster.

Overloading with journalistic background is a common technique in contemporary thrillers and mysteries. It’s as though making things up was somehow a distortion of reality. Whereas it actually gets you a lot closer to reality than journalism or journalistic techniques, because it opens up the reader emotionally. (That’s what I’ve found with my Palestinian detective series.)

Second, the major reason. The Internet.

In “Dragon Tattoo,” the eponymous heroine is the now generic thriller/mystery character: the Internet hacker genius. Whenever Larsson needs to inject some new information or to unravel a tricky plot point, his hacker opens up her laptop and links into www.secretgovernmentinformation.com, the well-known (to fiction writers) site where all governments, in particular their intelligence networks, store material they want to be sure is available only to fictional hacker geniuses (and by proxy to thriller writers).

“Dragon Tattoo” isn’t the worst offender. Just the biggest seller.

But I’m only naming names here because poor old Larsson is dead. Those (here unnamed) living writers who use this technique ought to be ashamed of themselves.

In my novels the only time the Internet comes up is when detective Omar Yussef’s granddaughter sets up a website for him in her attempt to make him seem more professional. “The Palestine Agency for Detection,” as she calls her site, is merely embarrassing to Omar. No plot-point-shifting Houdini act there.

The Internet has essentially taken over from the Mossad as the thriller writer’s cure-all. In the old days, if there was something your main character couldn’t figure out, all he had to do was get in touch with the nearest Mossad agent, who’d be sure to know all the secrets in the world and was happy to pass them on with a few dark words about never forgetting the Holocaust and a cheerful “Shalom.”

As a resident of Israel, I can tell you the Mossad doesn’t operate that way. Neither does the Internet.

So stop writing books that pretend it does. (I wonder how you say that in Swedish...)

The video blog Watch the Video features the clip I made for the second of my Palestinian crime novels A Grave in Gaza (UK title: The Saladin Murders). The rest of my videos feature on my Youtube channel.

Many writers make promotional videos for their books these days, as you'll see from the Watch the Video site. Most of them are made up largely of still photos and have quite a lot in common with the narrative voice-over of movie trailers ("In a time of wearing boxers, one man wore briefs..." etc.)

I've tried to give each of my videos for each book a different flavor. For A Grave in Gaza, videographer David Blumenfeld and I chose to imitate the great noir movies of the 1940s and 1950s. We watched Carol Reid's "The Third Man" to study the angles and lighting. I wrote a brief script in which I aimed to deliver my lines in the rasping, hardboiled tone of that period.

We figured the contrast of a style associated with Los Angeles or post-war Vienna with the backdrop of Jerusalem's Old City would be thought-provoking.

I also wanted to show that the book, while based on my factual research and years of reporting in Gaza, was fiction. So I took a less journalistic approach the video than I had with the clip for my first novel The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title: The Bethlehem Murders).

Next week, David and I will be shooting a video for my next novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. The book won't be out until January, but we'll be loading the video onto Youtube within a couple of weeks. We're taking a different approach to this book. I'll keep you posted on its progress and, having seen some of David's early footage, I'm sure you'll like it. Meanwhile enjoy the existing videos, which I hope will give you some insights into the locations of the books.

My second Palestinian crime novel A Grave in Gaza (UK title: The Saladin Murders) is just now published in Holland. The Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant asked me to contribute a list of my five favorite books, or at least those which've had the biggest impact on me as a writer. Here's what I wrote:

Let It Come Down – Paul Bowles

Writers look for resonance. You might say Bowles has us with his title alone, which resonates with doom even before he writes his first sentence. (It’s drawn from “MacBeth.” When the murderers come upon Banquo, he says that it looks like there’ll be rain. The murderer lifts his knife and says: “Let it come down.” Then he kills him.) But with this novel about Morocco, as in his more famous Algerian novel “The Sheltering Sky”, Bowles was even more resonant. When writing, he would often travel through North Africa. Each day, he would incorporate something into his writing that had actually happened during the previous day’s journey. Working in the Middle East, I often follow that technique, adding details from yesterday’s stroll through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem or a refugee camp in Bethlehem.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

This is the novel that Chandler labored over longest and thought his best. He was right. It exposes a deep emotional side to his great detective creation Philip Marlowe. Chandler was the greatest stylist of Twentieth Century American fiction. Try this image, when a beautiful woman has just walked into a bar full of men and everyone falls silent to look at her: “It was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.” Chandler inspires me to make every image in my book as good as that.

The King Must Die – Mary Renault

I was heading for Jordan to cover the dieing days of King Hussein a decade ago. I happened to pick up a used copy of this book -- the title seemed appropriate. But as I waited in a rainy Amman winter for the poor old monarch to die, I discovered that Renault had a capacity to describe the classical world as though she had lived through that era. Her novels are the best portrayal of homosexual love and of the great values of Greece in literature anywhere.

The Cold Six Thousand – James Ellroy

I love to see real characters from Hollywood and Washington turn up in Ellroy’s terse, hip, hardboiled poetic fiction. This story of CIA/FBI renegades in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is perfect. I saw Ellroy read years ago in New York and he blew me away. If you can find a better opening paragraph to a chapter than this one, let me know: “Heat. Bugs. Bullshit.” Dig it.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

Greene went to Mexico to research a travel book, but he showed that journalistic research can turn into literature of great spirituality with this story of a drunken priest on the run. I try to remember that as I flick through my old reporter's notebooks for new ideas for my novels. Greene's is such a powerful examination of the loss of belief that it captivates even a non-Catholic, non-believer like me. The scene where the priest steals a hunk of meat from a stray dog is astonishing. The priest starts to beat the dog: “She just had to endure, her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.” Like Mexico under dictatorship. Like the priest before a disapproving God.

I'm taking a break of a couple of weeks between drafts of my latest novel. To clear my head and to allow my body to accustom itself to a step up in desert heat here in Jerusalem (it's hard to concentrate the first day the temperature hits 35 degrees, particularly when you write standing up as I do). So it's good to have reminders of how my novels are establishing themselves on the international thriller and mystery scene.

In the post yesterday, I received some copies of the small-format UK version of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET from my editor at Atlantic, the delightful Sarah Norman. The large format edition, published in January, was green. The new one, which'll be published on July 1, is brown. I like it because it's slightly larger (B format in publishing parlance) than the tiny A-format versions of my first two novels, released in the UK as THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS and THE SALADIN MURDERS.

Over at my agent's office, I also picked up copies of my first novel in the French pocketbook version. LE COLLABORATEUR DE BETHLEEM (as THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is known to thin, well-coutured ladies and men who shrug a lot when they say "Boff!") has been nominated for the Prix des Lecteurs des Livres de Poche.

Before I tracked across my agent's courtyard with my pile of French pocket books, I signed a contract for the publication of my first novel in Greek. I'll be with Kastaniotis Editions in Athens. Thus my shelf of foreign-language books will now test my language abilities with one which will be "all Greek to me" and, as my second book came out this month in Holland, "double Dutch."

Maybe the heat's getting to me. With wordplay like that, I ought to get back to the next draft of my novel....

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs is organizing donations of books to libraries and schools in the Gaza Strip. I'm delighted to learn that my Palestinian crime novels are included on the list, which I should add includes works by many of my favorite Arab and Muslim writers (I'm a big fan of Tariq Ali's series of novels about Muslim history, in particular The Shadow of the Pomegranate Tree, which recalls the last days of al-Andalus in medieval Spain.)

You may wonder if people sitting in the ruins of Gaza would want to read crime stories about Palestinians. Actually I've received many emails from Palestinians and other Arabs thanking me for showing the reality of the situation in which they live. I hope the people of Gaza will read my books and feel happy to know that their plight is portrayed in as accurate a manner as possible for readers all around the world -- rather than in the stereotyped terms often used in newspaper reports.

I hope you'll consider participating in the donation scheme. Gaza was truly flattened in the war that took place there at the turn of the year. Whether you consider yourself "pro-Palestinian" or "pro-Israeli," it's clear that a better life for the people of Gaza will contribute to a better, more peaceful life for their neighbors. And despite all the other necessities lacking in Gaza, books are one thing no one should have to live without.

Robert Rees (no relation) writes about my books in this week's edition of The Forward. Admirably Rob read all three of the books before passing judgment, and a good review it is (as well as an interview, because we spoke for some time on Rob's recent visit to Jerusalem). "Rees has created an award-winning crime series which provides a view of Palestinian society, warts and all, not previously available to a wider public," he writes.

Referring to the latest of my Palestinian crime novels THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET, he continues: "The local color — the dank, ancient casbahs, the bad mountain roads, the smell of angry, sweaty peasants — is rendered effectively. So, too, is the mortal danger. Yussef, visiting Nablus for the wedding of a policeman friend, is quickly sidetracked into a murder case, the consequences of which may prove catastrophic for the Palestinian Authority." Read the full article.

Australian blog Reactions to Reading has a new review of the audiobook of my second Palestinian novel THE SALADIN MURDERS (published in the US as A GRAVE IN GAZA). Blogger Bernadette writes of my detective Omar Yussef: "If bravery is defined as taking action in spite of the fear you feel then Omar Yussef must be the bravest hero of them all" while also being a "terrifically believable character."

I'm also delighted that while she acknowledges the book has a political context, she doesn't feel I was lecturing her.

Journalists often dream of turning the more dramatic events to which they’ve been witness into fiction. Relatively few do so successfully, and certainly not with the panache of Dan Fesperman. He has stood out from the crowd of journalist-turned-thrillerists since his fabulous debut “Lie in the Dark.” It was based on his time reporting from Sarajevo during the Balkans War. It’s more informative than any history of that war, because it brings with it not merely dates and death tolls, but a much more important glimpse of what it’s like, emotionally, to live in a war zone. The graft that goes along with conflict tends to be ignored by historians, too, but for a crime writer it’s the most important element. “Lie in the Dark” won the Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger (not the last time the CWA awarded its first-novel prize to a former foreign correspondent reusing his experiences for fiction…. I won’t keep you guessing. I mean, me. Last year, for “The Bethlehem Murders” aka “The Collaborator of Bethlehem.”) Though it seems like a risky venture to ditch a journalistic career for something as financially iffy as writing fiction, Dan has made it work. He also notes that in these days of internet-fuelled media-industry carnage, he probably chose a more secure profession. I'm glad he did.

How long did it take you to get published?

Nearly forever. Or, in layman’s terms, almost two years after I finished my first manuscript. Just finding an agent took about a year and a half, mostly because a couple dozen told me to go take a hike, or, in the memorable words of one of the more callous rejections, “It is obvious from your letter and your submission that you know little about either querying or novel writing.” So maybe that’s why it seemed like forever, when, in the larger scheme of things, I suppose it didn’t really take that long. Or maybe it was that I waited until the age of forty-one to complete my first manuscript.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

Only Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and within that slender volume only E.B. White’s brief but graceful essay on style. Anything beyond that and you’re only reading to avoid the looming confrontation with the keyboard.

What’s a typical writing day?

A typical ideal day, when things are going great and I’m deep into a manuscript, involves waking up with snatches of dialog already circulating like moths in the attic of my mind, followed by a quick cup of coffee consumed as I’m putting those thoughts to the page, followed by a solid three to four hours of writing, then maybe a bowl of popcorn for lunch, a few hours of re-writing, then a run and a shower, followed by several more hours of work until I look up at the clock and realize, “Oh, shit! If I don’t stop soon there won’t be any dinner on the table and it will be 7:30 and everyone in the family will be screaming for flesh, half-starved.” Followed by eight hours of sound sleep in which I dream about the characters in the book as they busily go about solving all of my pending plot problems. Which is partly my way of saying there is no typical day, only good ones and bad ones and ones in which, just when you’re thinking the day will be a total loss, you find yourself scribbling furiously in pursuit of some new thought that has just solved every problem you’ve encountered during the previous three weeks.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

God, I’m terribly awkward about plugging my own books, but maybe for a moment I can channel the spirit of some wonderfully gabby PR person who has just shut the cover, and, hopefully, is totally enthralled by what she has just read. So, let’s see, it’s a literate, intelligent thrill ride down the deepest corridors of the 20th century’s darkest history – most of it occurring in Germany – spent in the company of a rather personable American male professor and a mysterious and fairly tormented young female historian from Berlin. Both of them are on the trails of the doings of an old spy and an old arms maker, whose deeds of purported heroism and venality may have actually been something else altogether, and may even now hold the key to further heroism and venality. Which is why several others folks want to keep our two historians from succeeding. In short, it’s still the same old story, the fight for love and glory, a case of do or die. And if I continue in this vein, I’ll violate copyright law (if I haven’t already), so I’ll stop.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

I try at all costs not to write by any formula – either self-imposed or by genre – but from time to time I do find myself obeying a small voice in the back of my head that keeps saying things like, “Pacing, you idiot!”, or “If you don’t kill someone soon, then I’m going to jump out a window, and so will half your readers!” I haven’t yet discerned whether that voice is coming from one of my editors, who has somehow managed to install a sinister micro-command module in the room where I write, or whether it’s the same voice which, when I’m cooking, always yammers, “You know, this would taste a hell of a lot better if you’d just throw it in the deep-fryer.”

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“I was looking right into Anne’s face, and doing so, I knew, and knew that she knew, that this was the moment the great current of the summer had been steadily moving toward all the time.” That’s from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, at the culmination of eight pages of sinuous sexual tension that has been building in a wonderfully lyrical account of a youthful summer romance. Basically, the book’s narrator is about to lose his virginity, and in this one sentence Warren captures all the sweetness and aching of youthful longing better than anything I’ve ever read. Even when I go back to it now I’m transported to one of those lonely summer nights when the whole world of experience seemed to lay just ahead, and every girl I cherished remained just beyond reach, yet there was also a palpable sense of potential, a realization that the era of fulfillment was nigh.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

This is going to be much lengthier than what you probably had in mind with that question, but Thomas Flanagan wrote an outstanding historical novel. The Year of the French, about the 1798 “rising” in Ireland. Within it was perhaps the best summation by imagery of an entire nation that I’ve ever come across, and I’ll share it with you in slightly truncated form (am I again violating copyright law? Well, at least this time it’s for a selfless cause):

“We are a land of ruins. Norman keeps and towers, and the queer round towers of which no man knows their antiquity, shattered manor houses of the Tudor times, the roofless abbeys and monasteries savaged by the men of Cromwell, their broken arches gaunt arms against the tumbling clouds, strongholds of O’Neills and O’Donnells, Burkes and Fitzgeralds, bashed and battered away, moss and ivy creeping over their stumps as they lie dreaming beneath the great sky of Ireland… As though in this land all, everything, has been sentenced from the beginning to break apart, fall into pieces, powerless against our harsh divinities of rain and wind and weed and tall grasses. All in ruin, the ruin of a world, sacked and burned and smashed, by Danes and Normans and Irish and English.”

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

I’ll say Jonathan Lethem, but I’ll say it with hesitation because he still has so many books yet to write, and to date has been a bit of a ventriloquist, channeling a lot of different voices (almost all of them wonderful to read, mind you). I also hesitate because most of my favorite stylists have either died – John Fowles comes to mind – or have wandered a bit from the path, such as LeCarre with his recent propensity to preach. I’ll also nominate a fellow who, with less timid editors, would perhaps be soaring in the grandest tradition of Southern baroque, and that would be Pat Conroy. But I’m guessing that due to his huge commercial popularity, his editors tend to cower and hold their blue pencils in abeyance, and as a result they often leave some of his more damaging excesses intact. Pare them away and you’ll discover a great deal of beauty, even for those who might find his work overly sentimental.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Arturo Perez-Reverte comes to mind. So does J.K. Rowling (ducks). But for a single book it would be hard to top Ian Rankin’s performance in Black and Blue.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

As much as it takes. With The Arms Maker of Berlin, that meant a full month of looking through declassified OSS records in the National Archives, plus two weeks of traveling in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin. But I was cheating a bit, too, because I’d lived in Berlin for three years back in the mid-90s, and had done loads of news reporting on lots of the issues of guilt, shame, and complicity that come into play in the book. So I like to think I went into it fairly well armed with insight.

Where did you get the idea for your main character?

I needed a digger, a seek of larger truths, but I didn’t want him to be a journalist, and I also wanted him to be a fellow who from time to time let himself fall far to deeply into the wormholes of his work, and the occupation of historian was just about the only one that fit.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

No. No pain at all. In fact, I regret to say that my childhood was blissfully boring and uncomplicated, because I am well aware that all those writers who lived through sheer torment and Hell, and years of maladjusted angst in the aftermath, certainly seem to have a far easier time attracting huge advances and massive publicity. I personally blame my level-headed parents for this tawdry state of affairs, and firmly believe that the long-overlooked issue of the neglect of writers from well-adjusted childhoods should be explored immediately and at great length, beginning with, say, a guest appearance on Oprah, in which the cover of my latest book would be featured prominently amidst great praise.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

The one I just mentioned sounds about right.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Ten languages so far, but hit or miss from one book to the next. Rumanian is probably the biggest surprise to date, although I was also a bit shocked when someone from an Italian edition asked for permission to cut one fifth of the text. It was the one time in my life when I was glad I couldn’t speak Italian, because I said yes.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

Not really entirely, since my wife’s job provides our health insurance and a salary of its own. But, yes, I quit my day job as a newspaper reporter after the third book, The Warlord’s Son. At the time it seemed like a huge gamble, but given what has become of the newspaper industry it’s now apparent that remaining on the payroll of the Baltimore Sun would have been far riskier.

How many books did you write before you were published?

My debut novel was my first manuscript, thank goodness. One of the few benefits of being a late starter, I suppose.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

I had the misfortune of having a reading/signing slotted for the same night and time as the first presidential debate during the 2004 campaign, in a very politically savvy neck of the woods in northern California. Even the staff of the bookstore had the debate running on a TV in a back room. Heck, I wanted to watch it, too. About five people showed up, and I seem to recall that even one of them asked a political question.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

A novel about the experiences of an Englishman swept up along with the Mongol hordes in the year 1226, an idea triggered by a throwaway line in a biography of Ghengis Khan which mentioned that, just before sacking Budapest, they sent an Englishman into the city to present their terms for surrender.