Christopher G. Moore’s Blog

Alcoholics write books, too.

Sometimes they write crime fiction. Sometimes they write literary works. No matter what form the novel takes, the real dark star is the bottle.

Think of Dr. Strangelove riding the bomb out of the bomb hatch and into oblivion. Substitute a bottle for a bomb and you find a metaphor that unites a number of books in this genre: The drunken hero/anti-hero. Drinking is not just a life style; it form, shapes, distorts the human condition. Like a moth to flame, we can’t take our eyes off the flutter of wings as they close in on the fire. What is not terribly surprising about these books is their semi-autographical nature. Where the drinking takes place the strip joints, bars, nightclubs, and back alleys also transports the reader into the environment where the drinking takes place. Not every writer who creates a drunk for a hero is an alcoholic. Though looking at the record, it would seem that such a writer is rare.

During the late 17th century during the Gin Craze about a third of the population of London was drunk. Some would say that those numbers have once again repeated themselves in English cities and towns. Drink was associated with “the principal cause of all the vice & debauchery committed among the inferior sort of people.”In literature, the hero is rarely a working-class drunk. More often than not he’s a professional: the heir of a rich father (Crumley), a diplomat (Lowry), or a lawyer (Philips). Though Bukowski and O’Brien have working class types at the center of their drunken hero.

I’ve been reading James Crumley’s

Dancing Bear. His private investigator, Milodragovitch or Milo, moves between a snort of coke and gulping down shots of schnapps. He battles his addiction to booze and drugs as he solves crimes. Sometimes a case of drugs falls into his lap and he struggles between the desire to consume the whole lot and selling the cache. Milo also uses the magic dust with women in the books. Crumley captures the utter despair, loneliness and ennui of a private investigator. As one Amazon reviewer put it, this series is beyond noir, and enters a new level where the darkness of the void emits no light. His turf is the Pacific Northwest. Think Montana and Washington States, the back roads, the small towns, petty jealous over women and money. 

Milo also appears in Crumley’s The Wrong Case. From what I’ve read (I haven’t started this book yet) it is the best of Milo novels. I look forward to reading and reporting on it. 

I wonder if Crumley’s book were an inspiration behind the drunken, crooked lawyer in Scott Philips’ The Ice Harvest Charlie Arglist, a small town lawyer, spends Christmas Eve hitting the bottle and making the rounds of bars and family to say goodbye before leaving town.

John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas features the ultimate drunk. A self-destructive hero in a complicated relationship resorts to the bottle rather than pills or a handgun to destroy himself. Ben, who has found booze as a way to keep him planted in the eternal “now”, teams with a hooker escaping from her pimp. It is often a moving relationship but what they share will save neither person. They settle in for the long, inevitable ride to the bottom. I remember O’Brien’s father who, in an interview, sat that Leaving Las Vegas was a long suicide note left by his son. No question that the book documents one man’s mission to use booze as his exit plan from life. 

Charles Bukowski’s Barfly is another book where the central character goes on a three-day drinking binge. A first edition of the 1984 hardback will set you back $360.00.The classic novel of despair with a central character whose life revolves around the bottle is Malcolm Lowry’s

Under the Volcano. 

Lowry’s masterpiece, which takes place on one day in Mexico. It is not any day. We are introduced to the central character, drink in hand, watching a parade of villagers in Quauhnahuac on All Soul’s Day. The day of the dead is a perfect introduction to Geoffrey Firmin, a former British diplomat. He is rumbling around a foreign country trying to make sense of his failed marriage. A year after the divorce, his ex-wife returns in attempt to rescue the consul. But the booze has cast a power over him that she can’t break; it is the crutch for all that has gone wrong in his marriage and life. Unlike the other novels discussed this one is literary in every sense of the word from symbolism, myths and allusions. It is about the inner workings of the mind of alcoholic. Like O’Brien, Lowry was also a drunk, and died in British Columbia in what was likely a suicide (booze and pills).

Hollywood is fascinated by the drunk, whether it is comedy or despair, it is not difficult to find films with the self-destructive drunk in a final tango with death.. Both Ice Harvest (John Cusack) and Leaving Las Vegas (Nick Cage) were made into major feature films. Under the Volcano was also made into a film. Albert Finney starred in the film version of Under the Volcano. And there is Mickey Rourke in Barfly. But so far they’ve not discovered James Crumley’s Milo.

The Timesonline has an interview/profile about Elizabeth George, an American, who has written a series of crime novels set in England. Her latest is Careless in Red.

“George is an Anglophile crime writer from California; Thomas Lynley, her detective hero, is an English aristocrat with posh friends and a titled wife whom the author killed off in the 13th book to cries of anguish and outrage from her readers. Her stories are all set in regionally distinctive bits of Britain such as Yorkshire or Cornwall…”

Marcel Berlins, the Times crime fiction critic, has written “She is an exasperating writer, insists on perpetuating a police procedure that hasn’t existed for decades, is not good on social mores and her dialogue often reveals a tin ear.”

I have not read any of George’s novels but would do so with an open mind. Perhaps the most important promise that a crime fiction writer makes on behalf of his/her foreign hero is that he is a genuine product of his environment. Of course, in England or any other place there is a broad range of characters sharing the same habitat. But if the hero has attitudes, values, or opinions that fall outside of this range, then the writer owes an obligation to explain how and why this happened.

I am not certain how important the authenticity of such crime fiction is to most readers or indeed to their publishers. How many American or Canadian readers would spot cultural mistakes in a novel set in North Korea, Tibet, Iceland, Gaza, China, or Thailand? Yet there are crime novels set in these places and often the writer isn’t a native of that country nor has the writer spent a significant about of time living in the place, fitting into the community, learning the language, studying the history. Mostly the mistakes that I find (I can speak only about Thailand based novels) are subtle mistakes about the personal relationship of the characters.

It may be a blank stare, or a silence that can only come from understanding how people in a foreign land respond to an act or event or situation in which they find themselves. To be a hero, by definition, means the central character understands the people where he is carrying out heroic acts. Yes, misunderstanding occur, and often frequently among people of the same culture, but even misunderstandings and they are resulted are grounded in their culture.

There are authors who are foreign to the land about which they write but their characters are locals and do not live in that place. That is the most difficult to successfully pull off. They must re-create that which is real but lack the day-to-day contact with the reality of which they write. The writer, in that case, must be equal parts linguist, behavioral scientist, anthropologists, and sociologist. A background in ethnography is also helpful. The other group contains foreigners to the land but who live day-to-day in the area about which they write. Colin Cotteril is a good example of the latter. His next book is out on 1st August. Colin knows Laos; he’s worked and lived in Laos, and until recently lived a few hours from the border. You can be certain he’s got the cultural details correct.

It may be that readers lost in a good story, strong characterization that is well plotted could care less about the finer points of the culture where the story is set. My feeling is that a reader would like something else. They want to feel confident that given all of the above are five-star in quality; the author has delivered narrative faithful to the culture where the hero operates. Fidelity to culture is no small thing. It should be demanded; it should be valued. Because most readers have never been to these places, or if they have, it has been for a holiday. They deserve more than a holiday tour of the culture. They deserve a genuine guide to the back streets.

Writers differ on their approach to creating fictional characters. In crime fiction, the background and relationship of the characters fuels motivation, colors narrative, and propels the story forward. In order to make the novel realistic, the characters must think, act, believe and circulate in ways that are credible to the culture where the story is set. Before I start a novel, I write a brief history for each characters, including age, education, marital status, family background, employment history, and his/her emotional range: what makes him/her feel fear, hatred, passion, anger, etc. All of this proves useful when it comes time for writing the novel. I feel that I have a reasonable understanding of what the characters are capable of doing, believing, plotting or planning. My characters range across nationalities: Americans, English, Spanish, Italian Thais, Chinese, Burmese, and Khmer. On the surface they often share many superficial attributes; but underneath, where the cultural wiring is laid down, they are often surprisingly different in expectation, values, and customs.

Before you set crime fiction in another culture, there are issues that need to be addressed as you go about defining the personality and options available. One of the first questions to ask: When fiction is set in another culture what impact does the culture, language and history play inside a contemporary story?

It plays a hugely important role is the simple answer.

Philip Carl Salzman’s Culture and Conflict in the Middle East is a brilliant case study of how culture defines and shapes the concept of “friends” and “enemies.” Those two categories are at the heart of much crime fiction. Take for example, the Western point of view that when harm is done to another, the authorities immediately become engaged in bringing the individual who caused the harm to justice. But in the Middle East, there is a history of “self-help” and this means the right to act isn’t limited to agencies of government but that all people and all parties are equally responsible to act.

As a novelist, if you read one book this year, read this one.

In many crime fiction novels, the chase is on for the authorities to find and arrest a killer. Characters involved in the chase include the usual suspects: police officers, private eyes, judges, court officials, prosecutors, and lawyers. The infrastructure of justice is fairly predictable and uniform in this fashion in the West. A murder happens and we know the kind of people who will emerge to work on the crime scene. But these rules, concepts and perceptions come from and are about the Western point of view. Culture is the best guide to what is a crime, who is a victim, and how injury is redressed. The way these issues are viewed and resolved are far from universal.

Salzman’s shows that in the Middle East: “The most basic principle was to side with the genealogically closer against the genealogically more distant.” In other words, when Joe shoots Sam, the question is not whether Joe had cause (self-defense for example) or Sam provoked Joe (sleeping with his wife for example). The basic question is Joe’s clan and Sam’s clan, and which of those two clans you are closer. If they are members of the same clan, then loyalty is further refined to subgroups: e.g., a sub-clan, band, or to a family. Once the genealogy between the contestants is sorted out, then everyone is required to act as one collective to avenge the wrong against their member. Salzman also tells us that these collectivities, “from small to large, (are) defined by descent through the male line.”

The overriding moral principle in a clan-based society is “all for one and one for all.” Every member has a moral obligation, which defines his sense of honor, by taking vengeance on the party who caused the harm or injury to a member of his group. You might think that means one group takes revenge by hunting down the person who committed the wrong. That is possible. But it is also permissible to take revenge by going after any member of the wrong doers group, even though that person individually is innocent of any wrongdoing. It is a culture of one group against another group. Loyalty and honor take meaning from the support of one group against an opposition group. And members of the group aren’t held together by ideas of rule of law, justice, respect for courts and the like; they are held together by claims of lineage.

Such a system pretty much guarantees a state of perpetual warfare. And of course the loyalties are contingent and are liable to shift dramatically over time. As an outside threats an area, two groups at each other’s throats, come together (as their lineage is closer) to repel the invader, and after that is accomplished may well go back to slaughtering each other.

Salzman concludes, “The reason that modern Middle Eastern societies have been uniformly unproductive, oppressive, and full of conflict is due in large part to their particularist cultural orientation. The contrast in productivity and human rights with Euro-American and Asian societies with universalist orientations is very marked indeed.”

I would disagree with his last statement. It is overly broad and doesn’t match the historical record. For example, John Keegan’s A History of Warfare, writes how the clan system on Easter Island, where the founding chief’s descendants divided into two clans. The original settlement dated from 1000 AD and reached 7,000 people. By the time the Dutch landed on Easter Island in 1772 only 111 people were left, living in caves, exhausted from perpetual warfare, having lost their traditions and culture, lived a brutish, diseased ridden life. This descend into cultural hell was a result, at least in large part, from a political/legal system based on a clan structure.

Much of Salzman’s observations about importance of lineage as a means to define clan membership, the definitions of loyalty and honor, indeed would apply to many places in Asia. Lineage does matter greatly. It may be through the male line, or through being class mates at a university or academy, where group loyalty is carefully cultivated for the future benefit of the members of the group.

In writing crime fiction set in Asia, these difference are important in the way a story unfolds, the way the local characters view a crime, and to the ultimate resolution (and to those who do the resolving). When a novelist is parachuted into a region where he or she does not have a grasp of the underlying social infrastructure, mistakes are often made. If the novel is published in the West, and read by people in the West, then it is quite possible that such distortions are overlooked. But when people in the East read such a book, they immediately see the flaws and the credibility of the story and writer are destroyed. The story, from an Eastern point of view, becomes unbelievable as the characters, as portrayed are acting without honor and loyalty.

Fareed Zakaria, who is Editor of Newsweek International, has written an essay, The Future of American Power: How America Can Survive the Rise of the Rest, which was adapted from his book The Post-American World *appears in Foreign Affairs that is relevant to the discussion:

“Being on top for so long has its downsides. The U.S. market has been so large that Americans have assumed that the rest of the world would take the trouble to understand it and them. They have not had to reciprocate by learning foreign languages, cultures, or markets. Now, that could leave the United States at a competitive disadvantage. Take the spread of English worldwide as a metaphor. Americans have delighted in this process because it makes it so much easier for them to travel and do business abroad. But it also gives the locals an understanding of and access to two markets and cultures. They can speak English but also Mandarin or Hindi or Portuguese. They can penetrate the U.S. market but also the internal Chinese, Indian, or Brazilian one. Americans, by contrast, have never developed the ability to move into other people’s worlds.”

The question Fareed Zakaria raises is a challenge for writers. If you are writing about another culture, do you have an understanding of the culture and can you translate that understanding to a Western audience? No one expects Indiana Jones to bring any cultural understanding to the screen, but readers of serious crime fiction do have an expectation that the world they are being presented is ordered largely along the lines that track reality. Next time you pick up a novel set in Asia or the Middle East, ask yourself how faithful has the author been in creating a story that takes into account the culture of the characters and how that culture defines their attitude, dreams, and actions.

Crime fiction, film and art connect both City of Angels.
At the hip.
And at areas above the hip.
In August, the crime thriller starring Nicholas Cage, Bangkok Dangerous will open worldwide.

Set designer Jim Newport (who did a brilliant job on Bangkok Dangerous) and has been nominated in the past for an Emmy, recently launched in Bangkok his novel “Chasing Jimi” and I attended the launch party, where Jim read from his book.

Chasing Jimi combines fact and fiction about one year – 1967 – in the life of Jimi Hendrix, taking readers into a world of double-dealing music producers (was there ever any other kind?) and Hendrix’s relationship with other artists of the time. The novel follows Newport’s own interest in 60s music. After his reading, Jim put on the sunglasses and switched to his alter-ego, Jimmy Fame and entertained the audience with a number of Blues songs. Newport is currently in Los Angeles, but upon his return he will be taking his Jimmy Fame act, with Dr. Blues and the Mercy Street Blues Band on a tour in Thailand to promote Chasing Jimi.

Another LA/Bangkok connection is Chris Coles, artist and filmmaker, who has painted a series of unforgettable images of Bangkok nightlife. You can check out Chris Coles’ website for hundreds of provocative images of Bangkok scenes. No other artist has devoted a career to capturing the mood, atmosphere, and feeling of Bangkok. Here’s a painting of a patron at Bangkok’s nightspot the Q-bar.

The British edition of The Risk of Infidelity Index is now out in Great Britain. You can buy it at Amazon for £7.79.
Or better yet do go your bookstore and pay £12.99. Bookstore owners deserve to make a living like anyone else. And God knows that Amazon is rich enough.

I am pleased with the cover design. The designer captured the noir spirit I seek to create in the Calvino series. Great cover, compelling story, an internationally published crime fiction series, so what happens next should be easy, right?

Not really. What if nothing happens next? It is a sinking feeling to be 6 time zones away from the book that has been published. You want to be there doing something. But what can be done at a distance?

A lot of Cambridge boats have sunk in the annual race on the Cherwell since I was a student in England. Assuming that with global warming, there still is a Cherwell River deep enough to race boats.

The question I face, is no different than any other new authors to a marketplace, is whether readers in Great Britain will buy my book. Few people would have heard of the Vincent Calvino series. British travelers to Thailand might have run across my books in Bangkok. But even they wouldn’t know the book is out in England. Unless, of course, someone told them. But my dream of a flashing arrow sign over the stack of RISK nicely laid out on the new arrivals table at Blackwell’s isn’t likely to happen any time soon.

Where to start? What to do? A photograph of Tony Blair strolling along the tarmac with a copy of RISK in hand might help bring attention of the media. But he’d have to explain that book to Cherie. He’s probably the wrong choice. There is Boris. He’s safely elected as Mayor of London. From what I’ve read about him, he’s the kind of lad that would like Vincent Calvino’s adventures. Though I suspect he’s getting a cartload of books dumped on his doorstep every day. I didn’t say the idea was original. All it requires is a bit of luck.

Gordon Brown, is, I understand, and avid reader. He should be on the shortlist. But, then his popularity collapse might be bad for the book. One should always choose a winner in this business. Brown’s star isn’t looking all that bright. There must be some backbencher, someone if the House of Lords who would suit.

While I am waiting for my piece of luck to appear and lift RISK to the attention of British reader, I have a couple of thoughts.

In publishing a precondition to a bit of luck happening requires potential readers need to know that RISK is available. That is a modern challenge as getting reviewed is only slightly less difficult than getting published in the first place. If any reader would care to share an idea on how to get the word out in Britain, please email me. Maybe the name of the right member of the House of Lords would do the trick.

I am not bothered if the person makes a living in TV or sports. These public figures have millions of people who follow their every move, what they wear, drive, eat, and read. I’ve been assured at least a few of them actually read books. But there are dangers here as well. Like Brown, they may be on their way out and at this distance, I’d be the last to know I’d backed someone who was just cut from squad at Manchester City. Just send along the names of the up and comers. I need all the help finding that spot of luck somewhere on that emerald island I once called home.

I have finished reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Here Comes Everybody and would like to my comments on the book.

Shirky examines the dynamic of social communities that have arisen as a result of the Internet and assesses the possible long-term consequences they represent to corporations and governments. The usual way of doing business or governing a country is about to change in significant ways. I’ll start with two examples used by the author: Wikipedia and Linxus. The conventional way of producing an encyclopedia or software is for a company to find the resources to fund the highly skilled employees who are assigned specific tasks. That means allocating capital to pay for the office space, equipment, salaries, benefits and other cost of doing business, on the basis the product or service sold by the corporation will return sufficient revenues to pay all of the overheads and still return a profit.

In the world of Wikipedia, for example, no one is assigned a subject or topic. There is no overhead. But there are thousands upon thousands of people who volunteer their time. That’s a core point of these (often unstable and temporary) new social communities. These communities are voluntary associations of like minded individuals. No one pays them. Some like Wikipedia are more stable than others, which appear overnight and disappear as quickly. No one expects the members of these communities to turn up for work. Most members have only a slight contribution to make, but since there are so many of these volunteers, the cumulative effect of even slight individual contributions, when combined, is substantial.

Another central point of Shirky’s social communities is that failure incurs no institutional cost. No overhead, no salaries, no company cars, computers, office equipment or benefits. That is a hugely salient as we are accustomed to a world where corporations and other institutions are conservative in their choices, and it is assumed the management’s role is to avoid failure. Departments have internal risks analysis that makes certain what choices are made have a good chance of success. Microsoft Corporation, with its legions of highly paid software engineers, can only tolerate so much failure before it would implode. Wikipedia and Linxus, on the other hand, thrive because any mistake or failure by one can be quickly correct by one of the thousands of others.

Part of the secret of how these communities’ works is assessing the contribution of those who volunteer. From the view point of the participants, the new social communities are governed not be a bell curve or the average workload, talent or expertise of the employees. Remember employees aren’t volunteers. They sell their time to the company in return for an implicit promise to assist in the success of the employer. Wikipedia, and Linxus, on the other hand, are governed by a Power Law. You may scratch your head and ask, what is a Power Law? Shirky provides a good example. Bill Gates walks into a bar in Seattle frequented by ordinary office workers and orders a drink. If you interviewed everyone in the bar and wrote down their net worth and added in Bill’s, the average person in the bar would be a multi-millionaire. Of course, we know that is because of the huge weight of Bill Gates’ wealth and his wealth makes the idea of “average” wealth in the bar meaningless.

In the context of Wikipedia and Linxus this means a very few people (out of thousands or even hundreds of thousands) who have the equivalent of intellectual wealth that matches Bill Gates’ financial wealth, volunteer to do most of the work. They do this not for a corporation which will enrich its management and shareholders; they do it for the community of which they are part of, a large collective that is a shared enterprise.

The question is whether any of these matters apply when talking about members of the crime fiction community? The answer is there is more than one such community. Publishers and agents, for example, have their own interests, ones that surely overlap, but nonetheless would be cohesive enough to form a community. The publishing community, like the Microsoft Corporation example, is based on the system where failure carries a penalty. A book that fails will cost the publisher money. Publishing a book carries a risk. In the new online social communities, books can be “published” and downloaded. There isn’t any financial penalty attached to the failure of such a book. One would expect to find more fiction and non-fiction in the marketplace, and, at the same time, applying the power law formula, only a tiny fraction of those books would be widely read.

Other social communities have formed online which focus on crime fiction. I am a member of Crime Space which has over a thousand members, including authors and readers, who share information, provide advice, and create a forum for discussion. It is a gathering place for people around the world to find others who share their interest. As one would expect, something like a Power Law applies to this community as well. Not everyone makes the same contribution (I am a good example of a laggard). Some members are pitching their books. Some are looking for an agent. Others are talking about problems in the publishing industry, or their own difficulty to getting published. But Crime Space doesn’t have a fixed agenda, there is no real way to judge whether it is successful, and as with any self-contained community, there are a few high-energy leaders and a lot of followers with the odd bit of information to offer.

Shirky suggests that in the future Amazon may become the dominant force in publishing through its BookSurge unit. Under this model, there is no cost for Amazon to offer a book that doesn’t sell. And when a book does sell, a copy of the ordered book can be printed on demand. In this brave new world, there is no filtering system to guarantee that publishing industry workers found that it was worthy of publication. What is offered is an unfiltered book. No agent, no editor, no editorial board meeting intervened to lend support. BookSurge is a publish and then filter system. It leaves to the readers to become their own filter in much the same way that music has been heading, publishing books in the new social setting will be gauged to match the interests and taste of a specific community at which the book is aimed. Crime fiction authors won’t look to a community devoted to quantum theory analysis as their audience (of course, someone is bound to try).

If Amazon gets it right –and that remains an open question – any community will find the chance to embrace a book that appeals to them, can get a copy printed, and sent directly to their house or office with a few keystrokes and a credit card. If the Amazon offers tens of thousands of titles, but 99% sell only five copies each, it won’t matter. Remember? There is no cost for failure in this model. And there is a profit even on five copies of a title being sold. And the 1% that sells in massive quantities brings in massive profits – as there is little or no overhead (at least in comparison with the existing publishing model). The competition to find, create and capture a community will be the new publishing battle ground. As many of these communities are inherently unstable it may be like trying to catch a falling star. 99% of authors will be spending as much time trolling for and talking to members inside such communities. Writing for communities will mean books become narrowly, tightly designed to appeal to a niche audience. The other 1% of authors who are celebrities will have communities forming around them. The fan sites for Hollywood stars, musicians and authors are already well-developed machines, often without much direct attention or assistance from the celebrity.

I would recommend Here Comes Everybody who want a thought provoking discussion of what the future of these new social communities represent to the future of way of doing business and running of government institutions, such as police forces.

W.H. Auden wrote in The Guilty Vicarage, Notes on the detective story by an Addict, which appeared Harper’s in May 1948: “Actually, whatever he may say, I think Mr. Chandler is interested in writing, not detective stories, but serious studies of a criminal milieu, the Great Wrong Place, and his powerful but extremely depressing hooks should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.”

The murder, for Auden, should take place in the Great Good Place, and, his view, that meant the countryside. Preferably the English countryside. Should the author intend to write a detective story rather than aspire to something closer to art, and then his murder victim should ideally turn up in the local vicar’s garden.

I recently read Matt Beynon Rees’ The Collaborator of Bethlehem, an Omar Yussef Mystery, which, on Auden’s terms isn’t a detective story but a novel that seeks to break open a window into the realm of political and social reality of the modern West Bank. In recent years, it has become more common to find “detectives” working foreign landscapes. Rees’ novels are an addition to this growing trend. There two basic templates for this crime fiction penned by authors who are from different backgrounds that the one they’ve chosen to set their books. Rees is English and writes about the Middle East where he was former Jerusalem Bureau Chief for Time. Working on the ground as a journalist opens many worlds, especially for a foreigner who is less bound by the traditional protocols that restrain or otherwise limit access.

International private eye literature has two main branches. In the first, the detective is a foreigner from the outside (such as an America P.I. in Vincent Calvino series) or he is a local working in his home milieu. In Rees’ books the investigator is a schoolteacher who is also a sleuth. The one minor foreign character in The Collaborator is an American school administrator, is something of a stereotype for the gullible, insensitive and innocent American abroad. He comes to pieces in the end. The bargain with the reader in such fiction is that the author is able to create what Auden rightly calls the “criminal milieu.”

For an author who arrives well into adulthood in a foreign culture, the ability to accomplish that literary mission is, to say the least, difficult and filled with pratfalls (and pitfalls). I found that Rees in The Collaborator has done a good job of recreating the sounds, smells, and atmosphere of Gaza. The basic story is George Saba, an old student of Omar Yussef returns to Bethlehem after a long absence of living in Latin America. He finds his former teacher, who is mentally and physically far beyond his 56 years, happy to welcome him back. George had returned, along with his family, to be with his aged father. Not long after his arrival, he has a run in with organized gunman, who are alternatively enriching themselves at the expense of beaten down Arab population and running suicide or ambush mission targeting the Israelis. George Saba pulled an old gun on the two gangsters on the roof of his building and ordered them down. They went; but they remembered. When one of the terrorists in the armed gang is killed in an Israeli ambush, the ex-student is accused of collaboration and imprisoned. There is a kangaroo court that will go along. Omar Yussef, despite huge personal risk to himself and his family, takes it upon himself to find the real collaborator. His old university friend, the head of the police, Khamis Zeydan, is a finely drawn character, conflicted, and caught between forces he can only barely balance, his idealism shattered, and finding refuge into the bottle.

I can recommend The Collaborator of Bethlehem, an Omar Yussef Mystery,. It is richly textured, evocative noir fiction.

My reservation, again takes me back to Auden and the detective writers search for criminal milieu. While Rees does an admirable job in portraying the relationships in Arab culture, there was a slight gap that appeared as I read the book. It would be impossible to set a detective story in the Middle East without a fundamental understanding of the relationship between an individual, his family, his clan, his section of the tribe, and the tribe. This is like a Russia doll that all fits together. I found, at times, that Omar Yussef, was less concerned about the effect of his actions on his clan. By putting himself in conflict with the terrorists, who risked not only himself and his family, but also expanding the zone of danger to his clan. It is a one for all kind of culture. And the injury to one is an injury to the group, and revenge can be taken against any other member of the clan even though that person wasn’t personally responsible for the harm. In fairness to Rees, he makes the main villains men without very strong affiliations. In a way, this is an easy out. It may have made a more insightful (and perhaps more realistic) view into the milieu had of the villains been a member of a rival clan. That would have made Omar Yussef immensely more complicated.

Try and imagine the numbers involved in a mass death. What does 80,000 dead in Burma mean? Can anyone imagine the magnitude of the loss?

Here is Chris Carlson’s photograph taken at an Obama rally held in Portland, Oregon. There are about 75,000 people in that crowd and looking around the edges of the photo, others may have been cropped out.

Photo: Chris Carlson/Associated Press

Now imagine those 80,000 Burmese, if you had gathered them the day before the cyclone took their lives at a final rally, and the picture would have looked something like this one. Such a scale of death is hard to comprehend. None of us is wired to think in such large numbers before falling off into abstraction. For a moment, think about the two million more Burmese who are without shelter and food. The people who attended the Obama rally weren’t not abstractions; neither are the Burmese people. These are people just like you.

Find a way to help.

 
Dali, Yunnan Province, May 2008

Dali and Lijiang have two things in common. They are in a physically beautiful part of China and both were destroyed by earthquakes in 1996 and subsequently rebuilt. Resident foreigners are less frequent than in Southeast Asia. Foreign tourists are also something of rarity in this part of China. English is not widely spoken, and communication can be a challenge. In Thailand, language can be an issue for non-Thai speakers, especially outside of Bangkok. Kunming is about the same size and I found very few people at hotels, restaurants, tourists destinations that could speak any English.

Lijiang, Yunnan Province, May 2008

The expats I talked to were young Canadian, American, Irish and British, often with a Chinese girlfriend or wife. All of them were undergoing the anxiety over renewing their visas. The Chinese government cracked down on the issuance of visas. To renew a visa to China requires the foreigner to return to his or her own country and apply at the Chinese Embassy for a new visa. But the embassy will only grant a 30-day visa. For people living on a limited budget it isn’t practical to flight back to London, Vancouver, or New York to apply for a Chinese visa. Their alternative plan was to head for somewhere in Southeast Asia until after the Olympics. The feeling is the Chinese will resume liberal visa granting policy once the Olympics have ended.

Expats play an important role in the Calvino series. Going to China allow me to tap into a new generation of young men and women who have left their countries behind, either for a temporary period or permanently. And with each new generation comes variations of stories one has heard for many years. The isolation from friends and family, the uncertainty of status, the inability to get work permits, but at the same time they celebrate a kind of free spirit and idealism. While their contemporaries are in shopping malls and offices back home, they are finding a way to learn a new language, culture and gaining in experience about life that would otherwise be missed. Or finding the right combination of exercise and spirituality.

It was on the road to Yunnan that I found a back story that will go into the new Calvino novel, PAYING BACK JACK.

In Dali, it was the Bad Monkey where expats gathered. A Montreal guitar player was at the bar talking about an audition at another restaurant on Foreigner’s Street, a street which by the way has now been largely taken over by Chinese merchants. The foreigners are one street over, having followed the Bad Monkey crowd a few years ago. Restaurants on Dali streets offered a wide variety of local vegetables.

In Lijiang Mama Naxi’ Guesthouse was a gathering point for travelers. Mama provided an information hub, a place to check email, and have a huge communal meal with fellow travelers for an inexpensive price. If one could choose one person to govern the world, Mama Naxi would be on the short list.

It was the Naxi (an ethnic minority group number about 250,000) that welcomed Kubla Khan in the 13th century and provided his army with scouts for the attack on Dali. I spent time out in the villages talking basically to old people. An old woman who was 82 and had lost 4 out of 5 children and a retired village leader who had two wives and talked about upcountry people buying wives with horses in the 1930s.

It is difficult to find English language books in China. The bookstores are few and mostly sell Chinese books. It is rare to find English language novels. I did find what appeared to be a pirated copy of a Chinese edition of Jerry Hopkin’s No Way Out of here Alive, the Jim Morrison biography. An unhappy bookstore employee was upset that I tried to take a photo of Jerry’s book.

The Spanish Edition of Spirit House is titled Kickboxing en Nirvana.

Kickboxing en Nirvana will be released on Thursday 15th May. This is edition is 368 pages and is sold for EURO 18. Why the title change for this edition? The Spanish publishers,EDICIONES PAIDOS IBERICA, S.A.were concerned that Spirit House was too close to Isabel Allende’s House of Spirits

The cover art for the Atlantic Books edition ISBN 9781843547914 (UK edition) of Spirit House is provocative and moody. The UK release date is 1st July 2008. This edition is also available in Australia from Penguin on 29 September 2008.

The Grove Press edition (US edition) creates a template for the Calvino series in the trade paperback editions. Notice the amazon.com image is different from the final cover art. I am learning that it takes a considerable amount of effort and co-ordination for many people in the publishing house to get the right cover. I’ve had the good fortune of a publisher in both the USA and the UK to invite my opinion on both covers and to participate in decisions about the cover art. The US edition is available on 13 July 2008.