The “Golden Age” of the detective story was the 1920s and 1930s. It was a turbulent period. In Britain, the General Strike. In the U.S., the Depression. Civil war in Spain, and in Germany the rise of the Nazis. Red scares everywhere, fascists too.

But the detective story was a solace to those who lived in such ugly times. In the model employed by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, the story ended with one criminal fingered by the detective. Everyone else turned out to be innocent. Order was restored. It was as if the writers were saying, Don’t worry about what you read in the newspapers; everything can be fixed and only a small minority are making the trouble.

In my Palestinian crime novels, the opposite is true. Everyone’s guilty. That’s the reality I found in Palestinian society, as disaster befell it in the last decade – an intifada, a civil war, and now a horrible stand-off between rival factions. Not any one person’s fault.

I believe that’s a better reflection of the world in which we live. My novels are entertainments, but they aren’t layered with the conservative perspective of the “Golden Age.” I don’t want readers to think that there’s nothing wrong out there, so long as the detective nabs the sole bad guy in the library.

Crime novels today are grittier than the work of Christie. They tend to be closer to the atmosphere of Raymond Chandler, who famously wrote that the Golden Age stories “really get me down.” But the Chandler ethos of a lone knight facing an utterly corrupt world is largely ignored.

That’s why there are so many novels these days about pedophiles and psychopaths. Such characters are beyond the pale of behavior in which we could imagine ourselves participating. To commit a crime in such novels is to mark oneself out as a deviant. As soon as the deviant is nabbed, the society can go back into its usual calm manner.

I think this is why Scandinavian crime novels have been so popular. Readers like the fact that, while the detective wrestles with the psycho, the society depicted is clearly not so very flawed. As soon as the psycho is nabbed, Sweden will return to its pleasant, polite way of life—something that’s easier to envisage than it would be in a novel set in, say, Bangkok. Even in his recent novel, “The Worried Man,” Henning Mankell describes his detective as being no more than “worried about the direction of Swedish society.”

Worried! Can you imagine Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, being no more than worried? He lives in a society that’s engulfed in disaster. He knows everything’s going to hell and he’s aware that nabbing a single bad guy won’t change that.

The golden age method ought to have been overtaken by reality in a post-Holocaust age. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, meaning that people don’t choose good or bad, they just go along. We’d like to see bad guys as pure evil, deciding firmly to commit horrible acts, while the truth of the Holocaust and many other dreadful events is that people are much more likely to operate in a kind of malleable denial.

It’s a vital insight. Yet so many crime novels are still written as though Hitler never happened—as if one wicked man can be blamed for what millions of others simply went along with. History makes it clear that every one of us is guilty; everyone needs to do a reckoning with their past. It can’t just be resolved by a cunning detective who spots a few clues and thus sets the world to rights.

This perspective is, I think, not only more realistic, but it’s also more respectful of the characters and the reader. If I were to suggest that a single detective could fix Palestinian society, I’d be saying that real Palestinians could do just that if they’d only speak up. I know it isn’t that easy.

That’s why in my books everyone’s guilty. In my third novel, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, I had in effect three endings. Omar thinks he’s found the culprit. Then in the next chapter, he sees that there was another dimension, with someone else responsible. Then in the final chapter, he sees even greater breadth to the deception and wrong-doing.

I did that partially to provide the twists that readers enjoy. But I also wanted to reflect the complexity of the Palestinian situation. It could, of course, just as easily be done in a novel set in Idaho, where no doubt there are contradictory dimensions to reality that I could only guess at. Just because US political commentators divide the country into Red and Blue states doesn’t mean places can be so easily categorized.

Some readers have told me that my novels are depressing or pessimistic. That shows that people come to crime novels—books about killing—to be uplifted, or to be shown that everything is right in the end. What these readers respond to is the sense in my books that once the bad guy is gone, everything remains in a dangerous state of turmoil. They find that depressing; I think it’s as enlivening as a dip in a freezing cold mountain stream, refreshing and letting you know what it is to feel the world around you.

I don’t intend to leave readers feeling cosy. I want them to look at themselves and consider how they’d respond to such an extreme situation. We face so few extremes in our Western lives these days. It’s good to face such things, even if only in a fictional context.

On my book tours I often venture to places few others visit. There are book festivals in tiny provincial towns. Readings at bookshops in small rural villages. This week I spoke in a German town that many Germans are convinced doesn’t even exist.

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

I did a reading before a good crowd at the Beit Tikwa Synagogue. Which used to be a church until the congregation grew too small. (A year and a half ago, there was a protest against the conversion of a Christian place of worship to a Jewish one. The protest was lead by a fellow named Riefenstahl, nephew of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni, and frankly someone who ought to, shall we say, avoid Jewish issues, just as a matter of good taste.) Beit Tikwa is beautiful, as is Katharina Lustgarten, who organized and introduced my reading.

If a synagogue seems like a good use for an old church, a restaurant is even better. A one-time church in Bielefeld is now Gluekundseligkeit, a swanky Asian restaurant with a long bar down the aisle. In armchairs on the altar, you can drink wine where the pastor used to bless the holy wine. I had a very fine stewed duck.

I dined there with Andreas Schnadwinkel, a pal who writes for the Westfalenblatt newspaper, and Thomas Wolff, an imposing actor at Theater Bielefeld, who read from my work at the synagogue and at another reading in nearby Bad Oeynhausen the previous night.

Thomas and I repaired to the old part of town and a bar, where we chatted about the kinds of things only writers and actors would find interesting or useful (how to tap into spirit energies to create a character and to experience an emotion…) That central area also was quite lovely.

Then I was on to Cologne. On a local radio station, I mentioned during my interview that I had been to Bielefeld the previous day. “You know,” said the hostess, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

Maybe I was tricked.

Last week in this (cyber)space, I started to explain why I’ve turned to historical fiction, after previously writing a book of nonfiction and my four Palestinian crime novels. I wrote that historical fiction casts today’s deepest issues in an unexpected (historical) context and can therefore make us see them anew. It’s also a dramatic way of posing timeless questions, including the sacrifices that must be made for love.

Naturally I’ve been doing a lot of reading in historical fiction. It’s part of what made me want to write about Mozart and Caravaggio, rather than Caravaggio, my Palestinian sleuth. Mostly I find those historical works inspiring. From the class of Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel “A Place of Greater Safety” to the brilliant grittiness of “Libra,” Don Delillo’s Lee Harvey Oswald story.

But there are times when I see flaws in the way history is used by some writers in the genre. Instead of digging deep for the drama of a historical period, they go for the most obvious kind of drama.

Take Jews, for instance.

A few months ago, I was reading a rather flabby novel about the Great Siege of Malta in 1565. The arch-Catholic Knights of the Order of Saint John are engaged in a death struggle against the hordes of the Ottoman Sultan. Then suddenly into the midst of the book sails a subplot about crypto-Jews hiding in a cave on the island. They befriend a Maltese girl who, in turn, tries to persuade the Grand Master of the Knights to save the Jews. In reality, the Knights would’ve imprisoned the Jews and ransomed them to the Jewish community of Venice, but that isn’t what got on my nerves.

Rather it was that Jews make for an easy hit of emotion and drama for writers of historical fiction. Just as contemporary writers go for 9/11-related themes when they want to invest their bland narratives with broad, inspirational impact. It’s reaching for a topic that isn’t yours, that doesn’t touch you, just because it’ll make your work seem important and weighty. Instead of delving deeper into their spiritual reservoir, these historical novelists toss in a Jew, spin a few quotes from the Talmud, and face the Jews off against some averagely seething anti-Semite. Bingo, a plot with vim.

What’s more, the Jews of these novels are entirely flat. That’s because they aren’t there due to any burning connection felt by the author. They’re just plot twisters tossed in for cheap drama. In combination with today’s political correctness, that’s why the Jews in these historical novels come across as such absolute good guys. After hundreds of years of the reverse treatment, maybe it’s time Jews got an angelic rap. But they can’t all have been nice guys who only wanted to study the holy books and keep kosher, can they? Yet most contemporary historical fiction shows them that way. (I’ve lived in Jerusalem 14 years, and I’ve met a few who weren’t quite such prizes.)

I’ve written a historical novel set in Vienna in 1791 which will be out next year. It’s about Mozart. There are no Jews in it. I’m completing the manuscript of another Jewless historical novel even as I write these lines. It’s about Caravaggio. Believe me, I could’ve taken the easy way out and dropped in a suffering Jew—after so many years in Jerusalem I know a few things about Judaism and the sufferings of the Jews who live here today. But it shouldn’t be hard work to find drama in wild historical times, often with more depth, once you look beyond the obvious torment of the Jews.

I like to make it hard for myself. That’s also what makes it real.

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that makes it lesser than “literary” fiction.

Chandler knew what he was talking about. His great noir novels, such as “The Big Sleep” and “The Long Goodbye,” are must-reads for anyone who wants to know how to build a sentence and a voice, how to create an image that won’t fade a few pages on, how to make people want to read it all over again. His contemporaries in the “literary” field who were more favored by the highbrow critics of his time are these days consigned to the dustbin of college literature courses. (If you don’t believe me, tell me when was the last time you reached for a volume by Upton Sinclair or Pearl Buck?)

But historical fiction is back. Ever since “The Name of the Rose” (published in English in 1983), the genre has accrued greater legitimacy. Last year’s Booker Prize went to a historical novel (“Wolf Hall”) and this year’s looks likely to go to “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” (do an internet search for its author David Mitchell and “genius,” and you’ll see why.)

Even poor old Alexandre Dumas and the swashbuckler have been returned from their long-ago burial under a mound of critical invective. In the last decade or so, Dumas has found his way into the title of a novel by Arturo Perez-Reverte, one of the most notable historical novelists of our time. Perez-Reverte can buckle a swash in the form of his Dumas-derived Captain Alatriste series, but he also has enough modern perversity for one of his novels to have been adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. (That novel, “The Club Dumas,” even included a reference to Eco, “the professor from Bologna,” in a nod to his role in legitimizing the genre.)

Crime readers who want something with a bit of a cosmopolitan, intellectual slant often go for the World War II-period mysteries of Alan Furst. There have been other successful evocations of old Vienna in the books of J. Sydney Jones, and likewise for New York with Caleb Carr. My blogmate Barbara Nadel alternates between contemporary Turkey and historical London to great effect.

Each of these books, in their way, does what historical fiction alone can do. They take contemporary issues, place them in a historical context and thus let us see them anew. One of the best novels of the last two decades was Barry Unsworth’s heartbreaking evocation of the slave trade in “Sacred Hunger.” You’ll never see race and class the same way once you’ve read that book.

That’s partially why I’ve turned to historical fiction for the books I’m working on right now. Earlier this year my fourth Palestinian crime novel came out. Before I return to my West Bank sleuth Omar Yussef, I’m going historical.

My New York editor is working on MOZART’S LAST ARIA now. It’ll be out in the UK in late winter, in the US in early fall. I’m writing a novel now about the last years of Caravaggio’s life. Both take a real historical mystery as their starting point. But I also think they’ll tell us a great deal about what it is to live the life of an artist, and more than that they’ll focus on the nature of love. That’s something that isn’t limited to any historical period.

Rock musicians like to note that, had they not discovered their talents for destroying ear-drums, they’d have been criminals. It adds some edge to their pampered personae. Here’s my claim to edge: had I not been a writer, I’d have been locked up long ago, but not in a jail. Or at least I’d be sedated.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

In fact, when he wasn’t working, Caravaggio was liable to get into tavern brawls and raging arguments with everyone around him. That suggests I’m not alone in my frenetic between-drafts mental state. It’s a good job I can’t carry a rapier around Jerusalem.

I used to think that perhaps I just wasn’t that nice. My theory was that when I’m writing, or when I’m on a book tour talking about my books, I’m a very pleasant fellow, but take away the dope, as it were, of creative writing and I turn into the clenched up ball of resentments and violence that I used to be as a teenager.

I don’t think that any more. I’ve done enough meditation and other self-examinations (I won’t go into them here, but they’d all sound very new agey, I expect; never mind, they’ve been great for me) to know that the “real” me only emerges during periods when I’m working. My concentration at those times is deep. It’s as though I’m listening to my self, without judgment, just as one does in meditation.

When I’m not working, it’s harder to hear the voice of my self. I’m more likely to pick up other sounds, the psychological noise pollution that comes with minor confrontations on the road, annoying emails, vague slights from acquaintances.

So this time I’m writing a play about Gaza, before I go back to my Caravaggio novel. You might think Gaza isn’t a place to find peace, but I’ve always enjoyed a deep concentration whenever I’ve been there. To bring that concentration together with the tranquility of creativity ought to keep me sane until it’s time to get back to my novel.

Either that, or the next time I post to this blog it’ll be from a jail somewhere…

I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower, so far…)

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be called “West Bank Story,” of course, and will be the tale of the rivalry between two gangs, one Fatah and the other Hamas. I’ve already scored a couple of the numbers (“Aisha, I just met the mother of a girl named Aisha” and “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and…I’d best not talk about it because the Hamas guys won’t like it.”)

I do have quite a track record at developing disastrous failed concepts for musicals. I’ve been driving my wife crazy with these ideas for years. This is inspired by the large number of distinguished writers who’ve penned opera librettos and discovered that writer-turned-lyricists have a special graveyard all their own in Hell. Vikram Seth, Russell Hoban and, most recently, Ian McEwan have turned their hand to it. None of them seem to be rivals to Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s greatest librettist, no matter how hard they’ve tried.

Which is why I’ve always thought it’s a better idea to write a failed musical. After all, did you ever see a musical that didn’t seem like it would’ve been better left in the librettist’s bottom draw – or in this case, his blog? Believe me, I know: I saw “Falsettos” on Broadway.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working on failed musicals which fall into the category first popularized by the Buddy Holly biosical (biography-musical, new word all my own) “Buddy” and recently by Green Day’s “American Idiot,” in which music people already love is jammed into a ridiculous storyline. (Ridiculous storylines are de rigeur in the Middle East, so maybe the Palestinian musical isn’t so silly…)

That brought me the following list of future Tony Award Winners:

BLOOD ON THE CHANTILLY LACE: A detective discovers that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died when their plane came down only because gangsters wanted to rub out the third, largely unremembered passenger, The Big Bopper.

FUGUE! The life of J.S. Bach, fun-loving father of 20 and writer of the scariest piece of music ever (Toccata and Fugure in D minor for organ).

I’M A BELIEVER: The songs of The Monkees performed in Gregorian plainchant by monks.

SPINA BIFIDA BLUES: The last days of Hank Williams, alcoholic country music star suffering chronic pain from an undiagnosed spinal complaint.

NIXON/KING: Taking a cue from Frost/Nixon, we go inside the famous White House meeting between Tricky Dick and The King. Elvis offers to serve as an undercover DEA agent. Nixon spins his favorite discs. Mayhem ensues…

GAY EDGAR HOOVER: To a score of great disco hits, the cross-dressing FBI chief sniffs out commies.

Rather than just plough ahead with all of these, I’d prefer you to let me know which you’d choose. Or tell me what other subjects would be the least appropriate for a musical and we’ll see if we can get it rolling.

In Israel, the Jews control the banks! They fill all the top positions in the media! They are behind all the major political powerbrokers! They even print the money!

Someone should look into this, Oliver, because I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and I know you’ll agree. I think you’re the man to expose it.

You said in an interview published this weekend that Hitler was “a Frankenstein,” and then went on to add that the Dr. Frankenstein who created him was an amalgam of U.S., British and German industrialists. You added that the Nazis killed more Russians than Jews and opined that, in spite of this, we tend to think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing. (You said something else about having “walked in Hitler’s shoes…” but let’s just put that aside for now.)

On the one hand, Oliver, you’re an oaf who has had to apologize for his “clumsy association” about the Holocaust. Well, the art world needs oafs from time to time. Because on the other hand, Oliver, we all ought to remember that reality is much more sophisticated than the explanations of history which are handed down to us, honed and narrowed until they read very simplistically, ignoring inconvenient facts and allowing people to shout down those who point out such facts.

I agree with you that the historical reality of Nazism was more complex than the cartoon version beyond which political correctness doesn’t allow us to stray. I differ with you in that I don’t think “the most powerful lobby in Washington” (translation for those who don’t speak Stonish: “Jews”) are responsible.

How do I know? Well, the Palestinians do the same thing with their history and it isn’t because they’re so powerful in Washington, is it? (Otherwise, why did you, Oliver, make a documentary in which you ran around Ramallah trying to get five minutes with Yasser Arafat, who’d obviously never seen “The Doors” and didn’t seem very interested in you.)

Like anyone else’s explanation of history and nationhood, the popular Palestinian version of how they came to be who they are is a self-serving fiction. That’s what the detective hero of my Palestinian crime novels, Omar Yussef, aims to deflate, and that’s why I made him a history teacher who’d have the knowledge to see through contemporary political myths. Israel’s founding myths also (I’m sure you’ve read Israeli academics Benny Morris and Zeev Sternhell, so you’ll know what I mean) are at least 65 percent B.S. and much trickery with smoke and mirrors.

Just to prove finally that this is neither a Jewish technique nor a Middle Eastern problem, get this: even the Welsh are in on this sort of thing. My own people invented an entirely new history for themselves in the mid-nineteenth century. They had a perfectly interesting real history, but a famous old mythmaker from Glamorgan decided to pump up the druidical elements (all smoke and no mirrors). He added choral competitions and had little girls dress up as jolly witches on the national saint’s day. Bingo, a nation colorful nation with a strong sense of identity.

I once met a rabbi who said, “You’re from Wales? Not much history of pogroms there. But then, not many Jews either.” He’d obviously forgotten about the ransacking of Jewish shops by striking miners in 1911. Evidently, though he was deeply paranoid, he wasn’t quite paranoid enough.

Unlike you, Oliver. I don’t doubt you’ll be convinced that the conspiracy has come down on you and forced you to issue an apology, as you did through your spokesman at Rubenstein Communications in New York.

Wait. Rubenstein Communications? Oliver, are you part of the conspiracy, too? Thinking conspiratorially, I might say that you stuck out your neck knowing that it’d be chopped off by the people who, as you point out, “fucked up United States foreign policy for years.” Was that your plan to get publicity for your “Wall Street” sequel which is out next month?

If so, I’d better cancel this memo.

A book takes a long time to write, and then it takes a while to sell. And another while to sell in another country, and another after that. So a writer’s smile spreads across time.

My long-term grin widened this weekend, when I signed with my UK publisher for my next two books. Not only because Atlantic, the excellent publisher which has brought out all four of my Palestinian crime novels, bought my next books. But because Atlantic is launching a very exciting new imprint called Corvus.

The new imprint is headed by Nicolas and Anthony Cheetham, a father and son team who made Quercus such an important imprint. They’ve taken on my next book MOZART’S LAST ARIA, which is already completed and being edited in New York by the delightful Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins, and the novel I’m currently writing, which has the working title CARAVAGGIO ON FIRE. It’s about the Italian artist who, incidentally, is thought to have died 400 years ago on Sunday.

Writers will know what I mean when I say that signing the contract is a wonderful marker, but also similar to many other things in a writer’s life – it seems like a big milestone, but no one’s around to witness it except you, so you have to go inside yourself to enjoy the moment.

It’s what I felt when my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM was published in the US on Feb. 1 2007. I stood at my computer on that day, wondering if something was supposed to happen. Was the phone supposed to ring? Was I to receive congratulatory emails from friends? Queries from journalists? Well, nothing much happened that morning. I looked out across the valley toward Bethlehem, congratulated myself, and got on with writing the next book in the series.

That’s how it is with contracts. I know — I’ve been lucky enough to sign a lot of them. My first novel came out last week in Greece, and has been published in 20 different languages and even more countries than that.

So this weekend I was at my agent’s office. My two-year-old son went outside with one of my agents to water the garden. My agent’s assistant chatted with me while I initialed and signed the contracts, but we talked about her plans, because despite the sense you might get from my blog I usually prefer not to talk about my accomplishments. The phone kept ringing for my agent, distracting everyone.

As with anything else in writing, I smiled and reminded myself of something my good friend Thomas M. Kostigen said more than a decade back when I was visiting him in Los Angeles. Tom, who’s now one of the foremost environmental writers in the U.S. and quite an adventurer, too, had just completed work as a screenwriter on a movie called “After Sex” (Brooke Shields fans will know it as the one with the girls’ golf weekend; Tom makes a cameo appearance, as it were, in a smashed photograph as Brooke’s ex). Tom had done 60 rewrites at the request of the director, the producer, the stars and so on. “You just have to enjoy the process. If all you want,” he said, “is to be the guy who says he wrote a movie to impress people, it isn’t going to be worth it.” I’ve never heard a better explanation of the difference between a real writer and someone who thinks it’d be cool to be a writer.

When a writer can maintain that attitude, everything – even the silence all around when the contract is being signed and mailed back to a distant publisher – looks positive. And that is the only way to get yourself up and to get yourself writing the next day.

World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.

Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with articles in which journalists extrapolated from aspects of the play and team-make up of various countries to draw lessons about the politics and sociology of those same nations.

Thus we learned that the Germans were successful not because their coach is a very smart tactician, but because they were multiethnic. We found that England’s loss was rooted in the shameless cash-fest of their football league, rather than the coach’s inability to counter German tactics and the evidence that the team’s players (who’re also pretty multiethnic) are simply a notch dumber than those of many other countries. Finally we thrilled to discover that there’s hope for the future of Spain, even if the country’s high court ruled this week that Catalans can’t refer to themselves as a “nation.” There were Catalans on the team that won in the final, the newspaper wrote, and so everything in Espana is /chévere/ (as the Spanish say when they’re feeling good) after all.

Naturally all this is the result of feeble journalistic maneuvering and the need to come up with enough “theme” stories to keep editors from questioning the expense of sending a reporter to South Africa to write about things which are free on everybody’s television set.

The popularity of international crime fiction, however, has been in its ability to provide a window into a society in an entertaining format. Like football. Only real (even if it is fiction.)

The strangeness of World Cup journalism is evident in the piece written by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen about the breakdown of the French team (which refused to train because the players, who cheated their way to the finals according to the Irish, decided the coach was a bum.) Cohen wrote that he had never had to repress such rage at a press conference as he did at the one given by the French coach. A few weeks previously, Cohen had been in the Middle East, where surely things ought to get one raging just a little more than a bust up between millionaire sportsmen. But it was the football that brought out the beast in him.

There you have the root of it. A situation of utter meaninglessness – a statement by the coach of a team that’s on its way out of a tournament that, in essence, is pretty meaningless even to the winners a few days after the final is played – riles up a journalist more than a conflict in which violence and suffering continue every day.

Maybe the French coach should’ve said, “hey, nobody died.”

But there’s something about sport which suggests dieing. People like the gladiatorial aspect of it, the sense that defeat represents something almost geopolitical. Sport, after all, is merely our way of practicing for the day when we all have to start really killing each other in earnest.

Which is why people ought to fill the post-World Cup gap left by sports journalistic hype and televised hours of dull build-up play in the midfield with crime fiction set in foreign locations. Crime fiction gives you life as lived by others, usually in extreme circumstances (after all, murder may be the only thing more extreme than the emotions experienced by a sports fan as he watches his national team scream at the referee.)

For example, if you read the mysteries of Manuel Vazquez Montalban, they’ll demonstrate all the cleverness of his fellow Barcelona boys Xavi and Iniesta in the Spanish midfield. And they’ll be a lot more edifying than the second-rate football you might have to watch until the World Cup comes back in four years.

**A footnote: a reader commented on one of my blog posts that it was missing my usual reference to “my Palestinian crime novels.” He complained that this denied him his “bingo” moment, as he evidently only reads my blog to spot my instances of self-promotion. This footnote is merely to point out that before I wrote MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS I was in Gaza once to write about the entry of Palestine into the Fifa world of soccer nations. I didn’t include this in MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS yet, though I do have an idea for a villain based on the national team’s goalie, who was nicknamed The Fly and whom I believe would make an excellent cat-burgler for one of MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS. I end it here, saying to reader “Dai Laffin,” count the references, there are three, “Dearie Me,” “Cup o’tea,” “Monkey on a tree.”

***A final footnote: apologies to anyone whose grandma never took them to a bingo hall and therefore doesn’t know why I wrote “Dearie me,” etc. They rhyme with “three” and it spices up the game when the bingo caller doesn’t just read off a list of numbers…Well, it spices it up a bit.

When you sit on a stage to do a book reading or to discuss writing with other authors, you might think it natural to slip into a script. Improvisation might make you look hesitant in comparison with the polished stories you’ve told many times before. But you’d be surprised – well, I’m surprised – at how often I find myself receiving the gift of insight from readers in the audience or other participants in a panel discussion.

That’s what happened this week when I was invited to the Goethe-Institut in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh neighborhood to talk about writing in the city with two other locally based writers.

I realized why I don’t write about Jerusalem. Even though I live there. Live here, I mean.

Ann-Kathrin Seidel, the German journalist who organized the evening, asked the other two participants why they write about Jerusalem, though they don’t live there. Both of them have lived long periods of time in Jerusalem, but now live in Tel Aviv. Both said that life in Jerusalem was so intense, they needed just a little space in order to have the energy to write about the place. (Tel Aviv is only one hour’s drive away, so it is, truly, just a little space.)

Gil Yaron, a doctor and a journalist who has authored an excellent book called “Jerusalem: a Political-Historical City Guide,” writes about Israel and the Palestinians from his home in Tel Aviv. Miriam Woelke writes from there no less then five blogs about life in the ultra-Orthodox community – she’s ultra-Orthodox herself though, unlike almost every other woman in that world, she wasn’t wearing a puffy shirt and voluminous skirt. She had on an orange t-shirt and baggy Capri pants. Both write in English and German, having grown up in Germany.

At first I thought Ann-Kathrin’s question didn’t apply to me. After all, I live in Jerusalem. I have long resisted the temptation to trundle down to the coast to where the restaurants are better and the people less aggressive. I’ve thought about living there, but I admit that as a native of a hilly country, I can’t live anywhere completely flat. I’m always lost in Tel Aviv, even though there’s barely a street there I haven’t been down over the years. No slopes from which to orient myself. (It could be that’s why I always know where I am in Dehaisha Refugee Camp, which is on a hill so steep that it almost seems upside down…Maybe there’s another reason why it seems upside down, but that’s for another blog post…)

I thought there were many reasons I haven’t written a novel about Jerusalem. That I see the place every day and it becomes harder truly to see it, for example. But Gil and Miriam made me see something deeper.

People often ask me if I live in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem, or one of the Palestinian towns where my books are set (Nablus, Bethlehem, Gaza). I tell them that I find it too exhausting to be in those places for very long, and so I don’t live there. Exhausting because my senses are so creatively active the whole time I’m there. The smell of spices and donkey crap, the light that reflects so brightly off the limestone, the dusty wind, the sense of history in the old casbah and the ancient churches.

When I return to the West Jerusalem neighborhood where I live, it’s as though I’ve visited another continent. I can allow my creativity to stabilize, let myself make some sense of what I’ve seen and felt. Only then can I write about it.

It may sound like going to a Metallica gig to get some peace and quiet, but it’s true: Jerusalem is my refuge.