Almost every writer of fiction that I know is haunted by an annual prize called the Bad Sex Award. It is given, as you can imagine, to the author who has written the worst, most cringe-making sex scene of the year. Past winners have included Rachel Johnson the sister of the Mayor of London, Boris. She took it all in good spirit and laughingly accepted her award with amused grace. But when the winner and his or her ‘winning entry’ is announced, and published in the press, it is a real shudder-fest. Words like ‘tumescent’ and ‘climax’, ‘throbbing’, ‘gasping’ and ‘member’. I can feel my skin crawl up my back as I type the damn things, much less say them!

It was therefore with some trepidation that earlier today I started on what is not my first sex scene, but the first one in this, my latest Çetin İkmen book. One of my continuing characters, who has a very chequered sex life, is embarking upon a whole new lot of steaminess with one of his past mistresses. It’s meant to be strong stuff. He’s a good looking guy with an eye for the ladies and she is a hot to trot cougar with a side-line is weird modern art. In addition, for my plot to work as it should, these two should be at it like bunnies. But here’s the rub…

I want to have them bouncing about like space hoppers (for those of you who remember such things) and gasping for air like beached fish, but I don’t want to use those words. I hate them, they’re as naff as hell and if I do use them then it’ll be the Bad Sex Award for me and I’ll never be able to hold my head up in the library ever again. As a result of this I have, so far, failed rather miserably in my having sex on paper mission. My first attempt involved my protagonists not really getting it together at all. Attempt number two ended up sounding like something out of some sort of manual and my third go found my couple grunting and groaning in a very indecorous fashion against a wall. I’ve looked back at my previous sex scenes which were actually really quite good (even if I say so myself!). But I don’t want to duplicate things from previous novels and so I can’t just copy those out verbatim.

I’ll have to get this right at some point but I think that for the moment I might just leave my couple in limbo and get on with other parts of the book. I think that maybe I need to forget about the Bad Sex Awards for a bit and maybe not have quite so many pain killers rattling about inside my body too. With luck the plaster cast will come off my leg next week and I’ll be able to walk without crutches, and heavy pain control again. Maybe then I’ll be able to get a bit fruity, in a good way, on paper.

There, that’s increased this week’s internet hits a thousand fold. Simple little word with great selling power. Just the faintest scent of it has customers queued up outside the fence wagging their tails in hope that they’ll have a glimpse of the hind end of a dirty idea. The worldwide addiction to a concept. Would ‘Sex and the City’ be the hit it is if it had been called “Middleaged Women Complaining about Stuff’? I don’t think so. Would we have tolerated the Sex Pistols if they’d been named Johnny and the Melodeers? Nope.  Sex, without any question, sells. Click it on Google. You automatically get five-hundred and twenty-five million hits. That’s three-hundred and ninety million more than ‘chocolate’ and five-hundred and twenty-four point six million more than ‘having a cold shower’. (Those of you at the back shouting, “Get a life, Cotterill” can sit back down and keep quiet. There’s a point. Wait… what was it again?

Oh, right. The point is that I’m thinking of putting the word SEX in the title of my next book. I have neither a story nor the rest of the title in mind just yet but I know that we’ll do really well if there’s a hint of the naughties hidden within its pages. Perhaps something like, “Sex Au Plaines des Jarres” or “Sex Below the Golden Triangle”. Either will elevate me onto some bestseller list somewhere because the world is obsessed with sex. Really. You’re all sex mad, either mad for it or mad against it. If John Terry had merely blasted a bloke in a pub with a sawn off shotgun the Football Association would have shaken its head and said, “Huh, that Terry, what a character, eh?” But he did something much worse. He had sex with the ex-girlfriend of his ex-teammate whilst married to someone else. I have to point out that the young woman in question was a very voluptuous lingerie model-type who had been known to frolic from paddock to paddock. England is up in arms. The FA (so named for obvious reasons) has decided that John boy may no longer captain his country in this year’s World Cup finals in South Africa. Do you know why that is? It’s because every man on the committee would loved to have spent just half an hour with the curvaceous beauty discussing off-side tactics and dead ball situations. They’re men. It’s the only thing on their minds. They all felt aggrieved that John boy had been found out because they were living their sex lives vicariously through him.

Tiger’s doing time in a sex addiction clinic. All his major sponsors have deserted him. Some members of parliament in Thailand have suggested he be stripped of his honorary citizenship. Why? Because he had sex with not one blond beauty, but a whole bevy of them, sometimes in tag teams, a dream fantasy that those Thai politicians have woken up sweating from in the middle of the night since their earliest youths.

Old Bill got himself a blowjob in the Oval Office. The male Republicans nudged each other and said, “Good on you, Bill” then attempted to impeach the poor bugger. You see the irony here? You can bomb the bejumpers out of Arabs and inflict no end of hardship on third world countries, but don’t you even think about engaging in the sexual act. The world’s so hung up about sex it’s failed to see it as the minor buzz that it is. It’s all in the packaging. Most of the people in the world secretly think they’re the only one on the planet who doesn’t have one endless orgasm after another. They believe those porn stars are actually enjoying twenty minutes of mechanical pumping and grinding and going “Oh yeah”. They’re actors. It’s horizontal jogging. The actual pleasure is over in seconds. You can all relax. It’s a minor stimulant right up there with a good bowel evacuation after a heavy meal or a hot bath on a cold day. In fact, the thought of it is far more intoxicating than the thing itself. Nobody’s realized that it’s the kissing and the cuddling and the feeling of being close to another person that’s the real intoxicant yet we’ve come to dismiss that as foreplay. We’re so busy unwrapping the gift that we throw away the gold leaf paper it’s shrouded in. The world remains cramped in the pain of its obsession, whether it be the obsessive dream of having it or the obsessive compulsion for condemning others for having it.

So, by putting the word SEX in my title I hope to plug in (tee hee) to the universal quest for that unfindable seam of pleasure. If people out there are dumb enough to flip out over a three-letter word, I’m certainly going to take advantage of them.

As we drove to the waterfall through the hardscrabble Rajasthani land, all scrub, desert, barren hills, the road passed through small villages. In between were stone fences snaking toward the distant hills.

My guide, Mr. Ajit, sat upfront with the driver, and as we came up on a mini-bus with a couple of men riding on top, he’d half turn in his seat, “That’s India.” A few minutes we tailgated a van packed with passengers, two men balanced on the back bumper, holding on for dear life. “That’s India,” Mr. Ajit said. The more squalid, inconvenient, and crazy, the happier it seemed to make Mr. Ajit. As it reinforced his view, that I was not receiving some burnished image of the true India.

On the journey, Mr. Ajit, I could feel, was in his element; he had caught that mystical stream that writers call the “flow” and he was gliding on a slipstream of memory, wonder, and confirmation. He wanted nothing more than to translate his real India to a foreigner.

The last few kilometers the road turned to packed rock and gravel, and finally ended as large slabs of jutting boulders and stone provided a natural barrier. We got out of the car and walked across the landscape of large boulders and stones, an ankle turning terrain, with the surfaces rubbed smooth and polished by the annual rainy season runoff. But this wasn’t monsoon. Not yet and as far as one could see, the land was parched, bone dry. Mr. Ajit explained that we were crossing a river bed. Neither word seemed to describe what was under foot. He led us to the end and we stared down gorge that fell 300 meters straight down. In the distance, Mr. Ajit pointed at a tiny ribbon of water that turned out, to the disappointment of my wife, the waterfall. “That’s India,” he said. It wasn’t much of a waterfall from where we stood. The volume of water against the giant rim suggested a natural equivalent to a leaky faucet. There was water. It was falling. But there wasn’t much of it. He promised that if we returned in the rainy season then the entire rim stretching hundreds of meters would form a single curtain of raging water. That, too, would have been the real India, he said.

The waterfall proved to be the jumping off point for the main adventure, ancient cave art paintings, which Mr. Ajit promised were at least 15,000 years old. He said as we walked through a field of stones, dust and scrub bush, on our right another smaller gorge with a railway track at the bottom, that he had discovered the paintings himself. He gave my wife another of his name cards. On the front was a stickman, tall, lanky, and well, stick like, drawn in red ink on the front. Yes, drawn. Not printed. Mr. Ajit drew a mini-painting on each of his business cards. Business in Rajastan was slow.

Mr. Ajit suddenly stopped and pointed at a footprint in the red dust. It had been left by a running shoe. “Belgian lady. I bring her here two days ago,” he said.

The journey to the place of descend to the cave where the art painting had been made took forty minutes by foot. Every ten minutes, Mr. Ajit rested, pointed at the path, and said, “Belgian lady. She saw cave paintings. Took many photographs.”

A writer tends to look for what isn’t there. The silences. What is absent.

The far we walked, the more tracks we found, and the more I noticed what wasn’t pressed in the dirt—evidence of the Belgian lady’s running shoes walking pressed in the red dust pointing in the opposite direction, heading back to the car. Mr. Ajit, when pressed, said, “We came back a different way.”

To inspect the cave art, required that we lower ourselves down a crevice in the borders, narrow and cold, with the bottom five meters below. One stumble and it was the whole 300 meters. Like most things done the first time, it looked for forbidding that it actually was. Around the corner was the cave. At the far end the ceiling and cave wall were scorched black and the white chalky remains of a fire heaped on the stone floor. Mr. Ajit pointed at the wars, our eyes adjusted to the shaded walls, and the stickmen, stick animals and, just plain stick like objects, appeared. “That’s India,” he said, as if we were looking at men hanging off the back of a van.

The cartoon characters on the wall had weapons. But their anatomy wasn’t something that matched Grey’s. I had no way of knowing the age of the paintings. Reddish colored bows and arrows and deer with a huge rack of antlers, and giraffe creatures. They could have been drawn by a four year old. They looked suspiciously like the drawings on Mr. Ajit’s business cards. “This one is at least ten thousand years old,” he said, pointing at the deer. “And this man, is four thousand years old, and the giraffe, eight thousand.” Mr. Ajit was a man of round numbers and certainty. It seem churlish to question him especially since we needed him to guide us back up the crevice, through the stone fields, past the waterfall and back to the car. Skepticism is great for the city; but in the middle of nowhere in Rajastan, it isn’t necessarily your best friend.

On the return walk, Mr. Ajit found a new source of inspiration for his guided tour: animal droppings. He knelt on the ground, found a small stick, and poked at a small pile of dried shit. “Wolf shit,” Mr. Ajit said, quite proud of himself. “You see this white feathery hairs? Goat hair. Wolves eat goats. You see goat hair in their shit.”

My wife took a picture. Mr. Ajit, stick in hand, kneeling near the wolf shit.

That seemed to encourage him. Clearly he had picked up in the cave that we had some reservations about the source and dating of the cave paintings, and Mr. Ajit had decided as a matter of honor he needed a way to reclaim his creditability. The next pile of dropping was a couple of minutes away. “Goat shit,” said Mr. Ajit, stopping and pointing with his stick. My wife took more photographs of Mr. Ajit grinning beside the goat shit.

“Don’t see the Belgian woman’s running shoes,” I said.

“Many animals in Rajastan,” he said, as if to answer my question with a riddle.

We soldiered on across the rock field, I looking for the signs of the Belgian, Mr. Ajit and my wife, looking for the next pile of animal droppings. I heard them calling me as I had walked ahead thirty meters. I walked back, and Mr. Ajit, hands on his hips, looked proudly at a fairly large pile of small pellets of brown shit. “Antelope shit,” he said. “You know how antelope’s shit?”

“I have no idea.”

“Most people don’t. They shit together, like making a circle.” Mr. Ajit demonstrated by walking around the Antelope shit, stopping to make a mock bowl movement, walking around then repeating the half squat position. My wife continued to take photographs of Mr. Ajit and his demonstration of defecating antelopes.

We never found any returning footprints of the Belgian woman.

We saw vultures high in the sky over the gorge.

My wife and I walked hand in hand, Mr. Ajit a couple of meters ahead on shit patrol. “Do you think the cave art was real?” she asked me.

I thought as I saw Mr. Ajit wave at us ahead, it really didn’t much matter. This was the real India. “I can say this for Mr. Ajit, he knows his shit.”

Mr. Ajit was like many writers. You really couldn’t be certain how much they’d forged reality all that mattered what the writer had convinced you it was real. Mr. Ajit’s lesson had been a simple one. You don’t really need to know your shit—all you have to do is persuade others who know less than your that antelopes dance a ritual around a growing pile of droppings as man etches his memory of what is and what might be against the cold cave face.

Matt’s new Palestinian crime novel The Fourth Assassin
Released on 1st Feb 2010

This novel received a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, which wrote:

“The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees’s excellent fourth mystery (after 2009’s The Samaritan’s Secret). When Yussef’s son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala’s Brooklyn apartment, Yussef’s search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he’s not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders.”

Below Matt set forth his thoughts on The Fourth Assassin for his regular column at GlobalPost.

“Though we do so at our peril, overseas events are easy to ignore. We flip past the foreign pages of the newspaper. We might not even obtain a passport or travel further than Florida for vacation.

But if we ignore the world beyond our borders, one day that world will come to remind us that it’s there. That’s what happened on 9/11 and in the terror attacks in Madrid and London.

Readers of GlobalPost by definition understand this — it’s why they’ve come to a site which now covers the globe as almost no other U.S. news organization does. Many readers, however, don’t know what important world news they’re missing.

That’s why I decided to bring my fictional Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to the U.S. in my new novel, which is set in Brooklyn. To remind American readers that the Muslim world exists, and that Westerners need to understand how Muslims think. The politics of the Muslim world isn’t just restricted to the Middle East and Asia; it’s in our own towns.

In “The Fourth Assassin,” Omar Yussef comes to New York for a U.N. conference. He visits the Bay Ridge neighborhood of Brooklyn, which these days is becoming known as “Little Palestine” because of the steady influx of immigrants from the West Bank.

Little Palestine isn’t a community of Palestinian intellectual emigres of the kind that emerged in most major Western capitals during the 1970s. It’s a new wave of mostly young men who come to drive taxis and work several jobs, until they can afford to bring their families over to join them. Theirs is the typical American immigrant story, in fact. Except for the FBI investigations.

After 9/11, the FBI cottoned to the fact that there were Palestinians in Bay Ridge. According to community leaders and Brooklyn media, agents went into Little Palestine, recruiting their own operatives and coming away with alleged links between prominent local Palestinians and violent groups back home, such as Hamas.

The Bureau didn’t uncover any broad conspiracy in Little Palestine. But its actions added to the tension between New Yorkers and local Arabs after the attack on the Twin Towers. That’s the situation into which I wanted to place Omar Yussef, a Muslim with an often unconventional political take. Mutual distrust makes for a good crime novel. It also happens to be real.

The conflict between the West and the Muslim world today is much like the Cold War of decades past. I’d wager that few people read the nonfiction written about the confrontation with the Soviet Union any more. But some of the best fiction about that time, say John Le Carre’s Smiley novels or books like Martin Cruz Smith’s “Gorky Park” which went deep into Russian society during those years, still speak to us even though that battle is long finished.

That’s because those books examine a time of conflict in a timeless way. By humanizing all the participants in the conflict, those novels go beyond nonfiction and give us a window into the minds of those people who’d otherwise seem to us inhuman enemies. I hope “The Fourth Assassin” does that, too.

When Omar arrives in Bay Ridge, he finds a headless body in his son’s bed. The gruesome discovery leads him to uncover a suicidal assassination plot that seems to involve some of his former pupils in his school in Bethlehem. One of the suspects: his own son.

Much of what goes on in the novel stays within the Palestinian community, most of which came from the village of Beit Hanina on the border between Jerusalem and Ramallah. These immigrants fled the violence of the intifada and, over the last decade, moved into a neighborhood that had traditionally been Norwegian and Irish.

These days Little Palestine is dotted with basement mosques, Arab restaurants and boutiques selling slinky headscarves for religious Muslim women who want to observe the signs of their faith while also highlighting their beauty.

But the novel also takes Omar to Atlantic Avenue and Coney Island — iconic areas of Brooklyn we might be more accustomed to seeing in traditional thrillers, though they now have strong Arab presences. I put those locations into my novel so that readers would understand that the politics of the Middle East can’t be isolated. You can take the N train from Times Square and get off in Palestine.

I hope “The Fourth Assassin” will help readers understand that.”

This is a wonderful series by a talented author who has first hand knowledge of the culture and language in one of the more dangerous parts of the world. Buy The Fourth Assassin.

I was going to write about our ex-Prime Minister, Tony Blair’s, appearance at the inquiry into the Iraq War last Friday, but I’ve changed my mind. As we all now know, he was his typical ‘Tony’ self with his ‘I did what I thought was right’ cant and his self satisfied ‘God is on my side’ shtick. Yes, but what about what everyone else felt was right, Tony? What about your criminal lack of knowledge about the middle east? Mr Blair it appears did not know that because Saddam Hussein was basically a secular, Ba’athist dictator he was highly unlikely to have too much to do with ultra-religious al Qaeda. And to make matters worse it would appear that our current Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, was rather more worried about the future of his own job than about the many deaths that may occur in Iraq when Blair was canvassing his cabinet for their opinions. I despair. So thank heavens, I say, for The Green Fairy.

No this isn’t a bottle of well known washing up liquid that is apparently very kind to my hands, but rather it is a place that as yet, only exists in my head and to which I openly retreat. The Green Fairy is an imaginary absinthe bar that I hope, one day, may become a reality. It’s on the northern shore of the River Thames and is in an old building somewhere between the London districts of North Woolwich and Limehouse. It’s a brick built structure that nevertheless has a large wooden platform out the back overhanging the river. Inside the floors are bare, covered with just a layer of sawdust and the bar is made of old, highly polished mahogany. The Green Fairy is lit by gas lamps and its walls are covered with gilt framed mirrors and posters advertising music hall performances, arsenic based beauty products and tobacco.

All types of absinthe from all over the world will be sold at The Green Fairy. The emerald green of the bottles will glow in the gas-light as well as in the reflections from the river. Gin and whiskey will also be available for those not wedded to the tipple of Toulouse Lautrec. But most of the customers will take absinthe and many will chew on fat cigars or pluck cigarettes from small, silver cases as they lounge outside on the wooden platform over the moonlit London mud. And there will be entertainments! In an upstairs room a Phantasmagoria magic lantern show will shock and horrify ladies of a nervous or superstitious disposition while their husbands marvel at the lifelike waxworks of murderers in the small museum of curiosities next door to the bar. Magicians will come and go from time to time, demonstrating illusions such as that of the disembodied head of ancient Egypt. It will be wonderful and inside my head, it already is. I hope that one day I can make it a reality.

But in the meantime I am glad to be able to go to The Green Fairy in my head. Yes, it is escaping into a Victorian age I cannot possibly remember or really appreciate. But sometimes I just have to get away from WMDs, from the threat of nuclear destruction, from listening to morally redundant people banging on about how ‘evil’ it is to smoke or drink or eat chocolate fudge. Tony Blair cracked down upon dissent and upon what he thought was ‘bad’ about this country as hard as Margaret Thatcher had done in the 1980’s. What he has created is a guilty, sad and often joyless place where everyone is afraid of everyone else. Some people drink themselves into oblivion in front of the TV, others keep their heads down and just focus on preserving their jobs and funding their families (we all do this to some extent, myself included). But I also go to The Green Fairy too. It’s fun, it’s carefree and no-one will ever judge you in there (we throw out judgemental types!). Pop in, any time.

Inspired by the fluffy teen photo the Moore bloke posted on his blob last week, I decided to cast my mind back to a time when innocence and ignorance were my companions and I still had dreams of being a train driver (actually I still have that dream on occasions but now people throw themselves in front of the train.) .

It’s hard to believe it now, given the swarthy Amazon I’ve become, but that scrawny, effete little twerp in the photo (Front row left, grinning like a ballerina on heroin.) is me. Yes, it came as a shock to me too when it arrived by email last year. We have images of ourselves as children and, in my mind, I was a tough hombre in primary school. I sat in the back row with Davo and Swanny and flicked ink balls at Jane Sullivan. I never answered any questions unless I was being sarcastic and I spent as much time in detention as I did in class. I was the football, athletics and cricket champion and I broke every bone in my body before I was eleven. At least that’s how I remembered myself.

Through one of those naff sites that allow you to contact schoolmates you would have maintained contact with if you’d been at all fond of in the first place, I saw the name of Mr. Chandler, my grade five and six teacher. By my calculations he was either 223 years old or emailing from the grave. Mr. Chandler had been my hero. He was a rugby player and got his photo in the Wimbledon Borough News from time to time. It was probably due to Mr. Chandler that I gave up my hopes of driving trains and set my sights on being a teacher and playing rugby for England.

I wrote to Mr. C and, to my delight, he wrote back. He wasn’t dead. He’d migrated to Australia, as had I, and he’d taught for many years and retired to gardening, as had I. He married a pretty wife, as did I, and had two grown up children, as…as far as I know…had I not. But, very much unlike me, he had an incredible memory. Not only did he recall the names of every kid in his class, he could tell you most of the things we did and said during his first two years as a teacher. Odd then that he should remember me so poorly.

According to Mr. C, I was. “…very easy to teach, one of the brightest boys in the class with a great sense of humour, any father would be proud to have you as a son.” Excuse me, I always get a lump in my throat when I read that line. I sent it to my dad and he said, “Yeah, right. He didn’t have to live with you.” Mr. C sent me photos of the sports teams. Shock there too. I was always the one fully dressed off to one side. Something about me being ‘the scorer’, as in ‘the one who hangs the metal numbers on the score board.’ I did make the swimming team but I think that’s because we lived beside the swimming baths and I spent much of my childhood up to my chin in chlorine which explains how I retained my youthful appearance.

But, looking at the photo and learning that I wasn’t at all a tough guy, explains why I was such a target for dirty-old-men. On my paper round of a morning I was approached by a steady stream of flashers and candy-offerers and lip-lickers. I was offered so much money to go into the woods that I could have built up a sizeable bank account before I hit high school. It’s a wonder I wasn’t bundled into a van and whisked away to have my forever young skeleton discovered, thirty years later, in the soundproof cellar of a retired Catholic priest. I was paedophile fodder: a soft-skinned, talks-to-anyone, pretty ten year old wimp.

I did eventually play rugby and break every bone in my body as I’d dreamed. I became a physical education teacher and started to put on some bulk and grew a beard and the perverts left me alone. It wasn’t till thirty years later that I went after them, probably hoping to fulfill all those subliminal Death Wish revenge fantasies that had lain simmering in my inner id. But after four years of child protection I hadn’t made much of a dent in the paedo-population and I didn’t feel much better at all. There was a way, however. I wrote my first book, “The Night Bastard”. And you wouldn’t believe how many perverts I abused in that book. It was a too-long, depressing door stop of a novel and, perhaps wisely, nobody bought it, but I tell you, I’ve felt so much better since I got it all out of my system. In my next book there’s a chapter called, “The Therapeutic Effects of Dying Horribly”. But the therapeutic effects of killing people are even more energizing. If there’s someone you hate, don’t go to the trouble of draping a room in splash proof plastic and wrapping their naked bodies in shrink wrap, and disposing of the parts in the bay. Do what you like to them in a book. It’s much more satisfying.

The Edge has asked many experts, scholars, artists, and thinkers to address the question: HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

The upshot of the many different takes on the question comes down to a discussion of the nature of thinking, the processes involved, the evolution of the brain, the relationship of neurons. Basically, the most honest correspondents conclude that we are in still in the dark ages when it comes to the way or ways we think.

My escape to India to work on a novel raises another question: How is the Internet Changing where you think?

Before the Internet the idea of “where” perhaps had less importance. Globalization has expanded and flattened our notions of “where” as most places become interchangeable as the moving wall of information resurfaces their culture, language, social, economic and political life. Places like China continue to erect digital dikes to stem the tide. They like their “where” as it is. They don’t want the way of thinking to seam through the great wall and flood the minds of citizens with strange, subversive ideas that might undermine authority.

I am mindful that not all places where Internet access is limited or restricted are a good place to escape. Going from a sea of free flowing information to a desert where the cup of information is handed out to the masses like bums in a soup kitchen is too great a stretch.

A writer needs a “where” that falls between these extremes. A place where the citizens haven’t yet been swallowed up and changed in the process by the information harvesting. That’s why I chose India. Access is possible if you are in need of a fix. But you can find places where access is difficult or nearly impossible. When I write, I want to be around people who still occupy the world of printed books and words that come from the pages of magazines, newspapers and broadsheets. They absorb information in the old way.

This “where” still demands an attention and concentration that is quickly leaving the building in the larger world. Surrounded by Internet deprived people is like time-traveling to the past. Their world is largely the same as the world of our ancestors. This was a world where books delivered to the reading class ideas, information, insight, and exotic beliefs. They were studied and discussed and passed along.

The idea of “Where” also raises much larger questions.

For that the Power of Ten is a useful way of thinking to illustrate the degree of our ignorance. The Known Universe is an object lesson in humility for a discussion of thinking and where thinking is done.

A question frequently asked at crime fiction conferences is, what distinguishes writers from non-writers? Answers to this are many and various but one that has always struck me as a little bit odd is the notion that writers have the ability of get inside the heads of other people. I’ve never really bought into this. Not totally. We’ve all read books where the author does indeed appear to get under the skin of his or her characters. I certainly have also read books where this doesn’t happen, sometimes for very good philosophical and stylistic reasons. Dislocation can be a good thing.

Although I can now walk with crutches on flat surfaces, I am still not allowed to let my broken leg bear weight on staircases. Bad news in a ‘normal’ house, a nightmare in my huge, Lancastrian mill workers house. Basically there are 4 floors of big, weirdly shaped rooms plus peculiar half landings and extensions that veer off in all sorts of unexpected directions. From the outside this place looks like an ordinary Victorian terrace, inside it is Dr Who’s TARDIS – with extra stairs. What this means for the broken limbed is that climbing stairs happens either via crawling or shuffling up and down on my now quite sore backside. Getting to the extension where the bathrooms reside involves shuffling up a flight of stairs, crawling across a half landing, then up a further two stairs and into the hall outside the bath and shower rooms. I usually find myself on all fours at the end of all this, often staring into the inscrutable face of my cat who likes to lay about on that landing.

I rarely, in the normal course of events, come as close to Lily the cat’s face as I do when hauling myself into my bathroom extension. She is an ultra Persian which means that her face is very flat and probably, as a result of this, even more inscrutable than that of a ‘normal’ cat. Up close I find her stillness and the steadiness of he gaze fascinating. God knows I have enough to do, even with my broken leg, but I find that I am still fascinated by Lily and could spend a lot more time than I do looking at her. I find I want to know what she’s thinking. I realise it is a doomed enterprise. We belong to different species and even if we didn’t, could I really even begin to speculate about what Lily is thinking? Can any of us ever know what is going on in the mind of another? I don’t think so.

But to turn back to writing and what may contribute to the making of a writer, the conclusion I have come to is that it is the desire to explore the worlds of others that is the key. I want to speculate upon Lily’s thoughts. I want to talk to and observe people and build up pictures of how their lives might have been and what their thoughts may be like. That said, I do not think that this desire is peculiar just to writers and other artists. Enquiring minds came in all shapes and sizes and with all sorts of enthusiasms – artistic, scientific, practical.

What makes writers different from non-writers? Maybe nothing, maybe magic, maybe everything. Maybe it just comes down to having a desire to be a writer – and of course, a pen (or laptop).

Here follows a true story about Niloc Lirettoc, a virtually unheard of Icelandic crime writer. One day, whilst scratching out a living writing internet copy for that well-loved Icelandic beverage, Alocacoc, Niloc had a sudden unexpected burst of inspiration for a crime series set in Tasmania. Tasmania was one of the few remaining unmined seams in the tunnel-riddled landscape of Icelandic crime fiction. In order to find a publisher for his first book Niloc cast his net wide in search of an agent. He was surprised to have a dozen responses to his email and he landed the biggest mackerel of them all. Lars was a clever agent, an agent with a history and a reputation and he found a small but loveable publisher that was willing to take a chance with Niloc’s novels. They sold eleven or twelve copies a month, which in Iceland was like topping the best seller list. Niloc was able to buy a new bicycle and live comfortably in a small whaling community on the coast of Greenland.

With the help of a business associate of the agent, Niloc’s books were eventually translated into Mauritian Creole, Fijian, Hmong, and Scottish but did not do so well in those places because nobody was particularly interested in Tasmania. His agent kept reminding Niloc that although he wasn’t that good a writer he was still making a better living than most Icelandic writers who had to supplement their humble literary incomes by breeding reindeer for the busy Christmas period. To give Niloc confidence, his agent opened a bottle of Aquavit to toast the signing of every new book deal. The agent could very well afford to do this as he and his business associate were reaping 85% of Niloc’s income. This, combined with Iceland’s fiendish bank charges and tax requirements meant that Niloc was earning .02% of his potential and he realized that he wasn’t really that well off at all. One nasty skating accident and he’d be buggered. So, he decided to thank his agent and discontinue their alliance. Perhaps he could struggle along on his own. He did, however, suggest that they could ‘remain friends’.

The agent reminded Niloc that without the substantial representation he’d been receiving Niloc would still be living off free Alocacoc samples and cheese crisps. He also mentioned, not for the first time, that Niloc owed everything to his discovery by the agent as he actually had no talent of his own. Niloc nodded his agreement. If such a respected agent said such a thing then it must have been true. But, regardless, he went on his own way.

A year passed and in spite of the fact that Niloc’s agent still represented most of Niloc’s books, not one new overseas contract was signed. Niloc had to assume it was because he really had no talent as coincidences like that only happened in bad Icelandic crime novels. Obviously it had only been thanks to intensive bullying from the agency that Niloc had been able to publish his books anywhere. Niloc reluctantly won a prestigious literary award in Reykjavík. He tried to explain during his acceptance speech that he really owed everything to his agent who had made him. But they gave it to Niloc anyway and he decided it would be a nice gesture to send it to the agent as a token of his gratitude. But all the agent’s communications with Niloc were rerouted through the agent’s office manager. The agent still wasn’t talking to him. The last direct contact Niloc had had was when the agent mentioned that the agency had decided to stop helping Niloc with any taxation matters even on books they still represented. Niloc had nodded his agreement – albeit over the telephone – and apologized again for causing the agent so many problems. Such is the ice-cool temperament of the Icelandic crime novelist.

But Niloc had become troubled. He was fearful now that other business dealings might lead to the same unpleasantness. He became paranoid about what effect he might have on the hearts of other professionals. He really wanted to cancel his morning milk delivery, for example, but was afraid it would upset the milkman. He could visualize frozen half-and-half cartons flying through his window in the early hours. When the summer came, he wanted to have his reindeer shed repainted but he was fearful that the painter might consider it a slight against his previous work which was looking moderately patchy. In short, Niloc’s life took a distinctively paranoid detour. He refused to go to restaurants, sign for mail deliveries or use public transport. His fear of upsetting other professional workers overrode his need for basic services. If an important agent could be so fragile, what hope was there for a painter or a postman or a …? The girls at the Stalactite Massage A-gogo delegated one of their senior Lapp dancers to visit Niloc in his frozen coast retreat.

“We miss you, Niloc,” she said. “Or rather, we miss your financial input which was keeping up the gas heater payments. What has happened to you? You used to be so full of gusto.”

It was then that Niloc realized that his gusto was gone. He had lost sight of that obvious divide between family and friends and hired staff. What used to be business wrangling was now psychological torture. What used to be a clear partition was now a foggy, horizon. Even though he wasn’t exactly clear what a mojo was, he knew he’d lost it. Niloc continued to win awards but his heart was no longer in it. At every reception he had images of his agent sobbing in a dark corner, his life ruined by an ungrateful Icelandic writer who didn’t realize how much love had gone into him. Niloc stopped going out in public, stopped eating, and, as a natural conclusion, stopped breathing. The cold end to a cold-hearted man.

And the moral is: Don’t piss off your agent.

WASHED UP; PII. Evidence that people in Bangkok only have one leg.

Since 1985 I’ve had 21 novels published. That seems a lot. But it would be two years work for someone like Georges Simenon. According to Wikipedia (you see I had to check back online) “Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day. His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms.”

Georges Simenon died of natural causes in September 1989.

Twenty years ago at the time of his death I was working on several books in my two bedroom slum apartment in Bangkok. One of the books later became A Killing Smile. That same year I also wrote the first Calvino novel titled Spirit House. I also wrote a non-fiction book titled Heart Talk. These books were written in a one-year period.

They were written before the Internet came into my life and put its fangs into the vein where time runs and has started to suck me dry. Bangkok in 1989 was cut off from the rest of the world. No cell phones, cable TV, Internet. It was closer to the 19th century than 2010. I suspect if the Internet had been developed in 1950 that Georges Simenon would have written around 22 books rather than 200.

Like many writers these days he would have found his waking conscious hours held hostage in the twilight life: not quite dead; not quite alive screen life, where we search and search, find things, forget them, search again, until someone calls us for dinner or bed.

Simenon’s death is the dividing line between all the authors who came before him and all the ones who follow. Indeed we may be the last authors who wrote in a world that Simenon occupied. Orwell’s and Greene’s world. One that has all but vanished in the last twenty years. Now everyone is an author. They equally inhabit the authors’ global zombie state, a gateway which all are welcome, and once inside, it is very difficult to disengage. Because all that cool information of how to get published, how to write a best seller, how to find the right agent, what is the right advance, what ebooks will do to publishing, what piracy will do to publishing—all of this and much much more is waiting just a click away.

Let me confess. I am weak. I could just turn off the Mozilla and FireFox. I’ve tried that. I am certain you’ve tried that. And we both know it doesn’t work. Because there may be something that I feel that I am missing. An email. Some piece of information which like a string I can add to the huge ball of collected but unsorted strings that form the mountain size ball of string lodged in my brain.

I have found what may be a solution to my dilemma. I am escaping for two weeks to India.

I am staying in a remote place in Rasjastan where I was warned there is only basic Internet (dial up). No Internet in the hotel where I am staying for two weeks. It has electricity though, so I can use my laptop for writing rather than surfing. I am not going to tell you were in India. You would blog about it. Then someone else would find out about it, blog and put up photographs, and before you know it, the place would be, well overrun and that would be the end of things.

We need secret places. Places which are only accessible to us. Sharing is a good thing; but too much sharing is a bad thing.

This is an experiment. If it works, then I will likely keep it a trade secret. That to find the peace and solitude that permits the undistracted attention to focus on characters and narrative over the landscape of a 100,000 words is the goal. If this works out, I will go back every year to write the new book.

Until the hotel I’ve discovered decides to install access to the Internet to attract more tourists. Apparently tourists demand this facility or they won’t go. They can’t tolerate a moment of disconnection with the information vampire called the Internet. I won’t go back then. I’ll have to find (using the Internet in Bangkok) an even more remote place, and hope that the idea of remoteness continues for a couple of more decades.

What the future holds no one can say with certainty. But that doesn’t stop me from making a prediction. Authors are the first to flee to hidden location to find the mental space to work. How long will it be that readers of book-length fiction will follow? Readers, like writer, also will join the quest for a quiet, remote place where they can read what demands their attention. In the future it will become increasingly difficult to disconnect from the hive brain. We can do it with travel and with books. But the space for both is disappearing like rainforest. What Simenon and others have offered is on the endangered list. The way we’ve written, the way we’ve found audiences and the way they’ve found us may soon become extinct.

September 1989 was the date when these things gathered steam. As with all beginnings, we wait for the middle and the end. And we hope that when the end comes that something of the way we imagined life will remain in some small part of the hive to come. An archive of the way our minds embraced complicated stories and characters and the way those thoughts, emotions and ideas entered into our lives and hearts.