I’ve always considered myself lucky to be a writer. True, I work long hours…compared to the purely idle rich or to a top soccer player who puts in a tough 90-minute week. But essentially the burden on a writer is less the hours spent at writing – which ought to be fun – and more the occasional pondering about one’s self-worth, about one’s writing itself, and about one’s status in the author’s pantheon from piffling to powerful.

Which is why I was amused by the caption to The New York Times’s article this weekfeaturing crime writers who’re now being asked by publishers and agents to write short stories and extra features to help publicize their novels – or even to write a second novel a year. (In the print version, though not on the web) the caption told us that Lisa Scottoline works “a brutal writing schedule” which sees her tapping away from 9 a.m. “until Colbert” comes on at 11.30.

My great-grandfather had a brutal schedule working in a Welsh coal mine. The Chinese who make the little plastic thingamy bits of crap I toss out every day have a brutal schedule. A hooker has a brutal schedule. For your schedule to be brutal, your work also has to be brutal.

No writer has a brutal schedule. In fact, no one who works in an office has a brutal schedule. Long hours in an office are boring, but not brutal.

The Times article led me to consider the pressure on (and personality of) the mega-selling thriller writer type. I’ve bumped into a few of them at book fairs. I’ve found them to be mostly contented, charming and fun, and yet… they all seem to feel a good deal of pressure from agents and publishers. In the past (and still, no doubt) that pressure was limited to the desire of the agent and publisher that Ms. Megaseller would resist the temptation to write a standalone novel and come up with another in their hugely popular series. The writers in question never seemed keen to do yet another installment of “McIrishname and the Gimp,” or whatever their series was called. I found it more than mildly astonishing that even with millions in the bank, all these writers claimed to find it hard to resist the blandishments of their publishers.

As if the nearly bankrupt denizens of the publishing fraternity would dump Ms. Megaseller if she put McIrishname and the Gimp out to grass for 18 months, while she knocked out a stand-alone about a murder during the Westphalian pumpernickel crisis of 1384. (I’ve a mind to send a proposal on that to my agent…)

Equally: as if publishers might put aside their fear of a future of thin e-book margins and dump Ms. Megaseller if she didn’t write two novels in a year.

Now I’ve been known to do a bit of extra stuff for my good readers. I’ve made videos for my books. I’ve put out some short stories for Kindle. I’ve even recorded an album of original songs about my books. I’m willing to go that extra mile. But there’s a risk to producing more than…well, more than I produce.

Some time ago I asked my agent — while she was lunching me on sushi on Park Avenue during a three-week break in my brutal writing schedule – if she thought I should try to write two books a year. I pointed out that I was quite efficient and that I wrote quickly and didn’t really work very long hours. I could up the productivity, perhaps, if she thought it’d be good for my career. She told me I shouldn’t.

“Because one of the two novels a year might be crap?” I asked.

“Weeeeell, no,” she said. She’s very polite. She’s from the Midwest.

I twigged. “Ah, you’re worried BOTH of them might be crap.”

She nodded and pushed the sushi boat my way.

Writing too much during the course of a day drains the creative energy. Larry McMurtry has said you ought to stop before you’re played out, because otherwise you’ll be mentally too exhausted to pick up and continue the next day. I assume McMurty quits long before Colbert comes on. (I assume that, as a 76-year-old who lives near Wichita Falls, Texas, old Larry’s in bed before Colbert comes on.)

The message implicit in the Times’s quote from an Oregon lawyer who downloaded a short-story by Lee Child that was a teaser for a forthcoming novel (“I’ll give anything he writes a shot”) is that it doesn’t matter if a mega-seller writes crap. (Notice the appreciation and, yet, the lack of enthusiasm in that quote.) Plenty of people will still download it.

Michael Caine once said that he made three movies a year. A brutal schedule. “Two of them may be rubbish,” he said, “but one of them will be good, and that’s the one people will remember.” It won’t work that way for books. (Unless maybe you get a stable of little writer- chimps to bang them out for you, and even that doesn’t seem to work on a literary level, though they do sell, which proves my point. Anyhow that’s for another blog post.)

Meanwhile, I’m working on a short story about Caravaggio, which I intend to publish for digital download shortly before the July 1 UK publication of my novel about the great Italian artist “A Name in Blood”.

I assure you, it’s not crap.

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Don’t get me wrong, I am not making light of the hoarders themselves. Hoarding is an illness that can wreck lives and ruin relationships. Back when I used to work in mental health I once had a conversation that lasted a whole morning about one sheet of newspaper from the late 1970s with a hoarder whose house was almost uninhabitable. Only the kitchen table (which he slept under) was still clear. No, it’s the ‘fashion’ aspect that bothers me.

If I’m honest, all through history, fashion has dictated the way human beings respond to misfortune. Back in mediaeval times people with scrofula and leprosy were high on the agenda. The latter needed running out of town as soon as possible while the former lived with the vague hope of touching a king and being cured. It was a sort of fame and was far more popular than just simply dying of starvation which was so common it hardly merited comment. In Victorian times it was all about consumption and dying rather prettily with a little rose shaped splash of blood on your pillow. So called ‘lunatics’ and those with syphilis were very unpopular (unless the syphilitic was royal of course) and it was really better to just top yourself than be so utterly unfashionable.

In recent years having some sort of truly ghastly and embarrassing complaint has been a sure fire way of grabbing those all important 15 minutes of fame. This is all quite aside from the crazed shenanigans of ‘reality’ nonsense like ‘Big Brother’. Something called ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ is the worst offender. This is a programme about a small team of doctors who roam the countryside looking for people to show them their anal fistulas, vast skin flaps and deformed knees. There is no lack of takers, let me tell you. Switch on the TV at about 8pm and there is a chance that you may well find yourself looking up the sort of arse that you’ve probably only ever seen before in a nightmare.

I tend to hide behind the sofa until I can locate the remote control to switch the TV off. I regress to my childhood when I used to hide from the Daleks in exactly the same way. But I am a rare bird. ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ is enormously popular serving as it does, the triple function of providing freakish entertainment, giving the rest of us that wonderful ‘thank God I’m not like THAT moment’ and underlining what we all know about how intimidating most doctors are. Why HAS that man lived with a vast cyst on his penis for the last 35 years? Because he is too ashamed to show his doctor who makes him feel like crap anyway because he is diabetic. Again, I’m not blaming either the people who appear in this programme or even those who watch it. It’s why it exists and its ‘fashion’ element that rankle.

And of course, to finally get to the point, fashion applies in the world of crime fiction too. It can cover location – at the moment it’s all about Scandinavia – types of crime and offender, police investigators versus PIs, women as opposed to men. It goes in cycles which are unpredictable and often unintelligible. Trying to second guess what might be the ‘next big thing’ in crime fiction is of course the Holy Grail of most mainstream publishers. But I have an idea.

Years ago I worked with an agoraphobic rent boy. He never went out, clients came to him. So if that is possible, how about a crime solving hoarder of Swedish origin? Effectively locked into his house of newspaper towers and rat gnawed pot noodle cartons, people shout their problems at him across a vast sea of precarious plastic bags and clothes from the early 1980s. Armed only with a broken Ikea chair leg, he battles both crime and his demons in what was once his kitchen, bringing Britain’s most appalling murderers to book using his keen sense of justice and the psychic power of thought.

I’d love to write that, I think it would sell like hot cakes. Sadly I don’t have time to do it at the moment. Being just ‘the thing’ i.e. a crime fiction writer, takes up all my time right now. But maybe one day. It’s that or ‘Embarrassing Bodies’ and I know which I’d prefer.

Some of us have been sick of it, and fail entirely to understand the appeal of the Titanic. All right, it was a big ship and it sank. A lot of people died of hypothermia as they bobbed in the Atlantic waiting to be rescued in their cork lifejackets. A great many mistakes were made at the time and since then a great deal of time and effort has gone into locating the wreck and filming every detail of the crumbling iron structure.

Fair enough, I can understand all that. The loss of the Titanic was a turning point for many aspects of safety at sea that had been severely lacking. Would it be uncharitable to suggest that the impetus for this came from the large percentage of the survivors were better-off first-class passengers who had influence and who were listened to once their ordeal was over?

Leafing through records of maritime disasters, the Titanic actually pales into relative insignificance in terms of numbers. The nastiest peacetime maritime loss of life was in 1987 when an overloaded ferry, Doña Paz, collided with oil tanker Vector 110 miles south of Manila and caught fire before sinking with the loss of more than 4000 lives.

But the largest losses of life at sea have been calculatedly deliberate. A few months apart, Soviet submarines sank the Goya with between 7000 and 8000 German troops and civilians on board, and the Wilhelm Gustloff, supposedly carrying more than 9000 civilians and soldiers trying to escape westwards from the advancing Red Army. It’s very difficult to understand the mindset of the men who gave the orders. Did the captains of the S-13 and the L-3 know that their targets were full of desperate, escaping civilians? Did they care? Were they proud of what they had done? Did they become Heroes of the Soviet Union?

The litany of troopships and hospital ships sunk by submarines is staggering, and as a former seafarer, I can appreciate the horror of knowing there’s no escape and it’s cold out there.

Incidentally, one of the intriguing ones in the dispiriting list of ships sunk is that of the Lancastria, a British troopship sunk off St Nazaire in the early stages of the Second World War. A designated war grave, it seems that around 7000 lives were lost, but official reports will not be released until 2040 – so something or someone important must have been on board for the authorities to want to keep it under lock and key for a century.

The one that really lays a stone on your heart is the Ukishima Maru, a Japanese troopship that sailed for the Korean port of Busan a matter of weeks before the end of the war carrying (officially) 4000 people, but the ship is thought to have been packed with many more Korean forced labourers and ‘comfort women’ when an explosion sank it off the Japanese coast. Official sources claimed the ship had struck an American mine. Both North and South Korea (in rare agreement on this one) have claimed the ship was scuttled intentionally and charges had been placed before the passengers embarked.

But back to the Titanic and the whirlwind of nostalgia that has surrounded it for the last few weeks. What was it about this ship that struck a chord? The sinking was unfortunate, to say the least. It happened just as the shipping was entering a new era of technology – as was the media, which made a feast of the tragedy, imprinting it indelibly on the public consciousness and sparking an outpouring of public sympathy for the many survivors who had been left destitute and the crews’ families who had been left breadwinnerless. It’s not mentioned all that often, but the Titanic’s owners discharged the crew on the date of the sinking and stopped paying them then and there.

The Titanic’s real legacy was that its loss led to the formulation of the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention that still tries to prevent this kind of thing happening again.

All the same, some of us are pretty tired of hearing about the Titanic by now and would be grateful if it could just have a discreet veil drawn over it at last. But no, now an Australian tycoon has announced that he’s contracted a Chinese shipyard to build an exact replica of the Titanic – except that it’s not. It’s actually going to be a floating modern-day Titanic theme park. Nowhere would you be able to build an iron ship these days, so it’ll have to be steel. Instead of coal-fired engines, there’s diesel, plus it’ll have a bulbous bow as well, an efficiency feature not part of the original Titanic.

In fact, this isn’t the first time this idea has been floated, as a South African tycoon wanted to build a replica at the original Harland & Wolff shipyard in Belfast – but the idea was finally scrapped.

One would presume, and hope, that the new Titanic II will have all the 21^st century’s electronic wizardry on board instead of a radio officer hunched over a morse key. And hopefully it won’t be so true to the original as to be short of lifeboats when it sets sail across the Atlantic in 2016. But the SOLAS convention requirements won’t allow that – something we can thank the original Titanic for.

In South Carolina

A driver went to the trouble to find a replica of testicles. He displayed them in the back of his truck. The sheriff’s deputy stopped him and gave him a ticket. The motorist is back in the news. He’s got a second ticket for the same ‘crime’. One more time and that is three strikes and he’s out. A life sentence in a South Carolina prison where a set of replica testicles might not work out all that well for him.

In Florida

A drunk driver had his truck pulled over early on a Thursday morning by the police. He’d been clocked doing 70 mph around midnight. His companion who was riding shotgun was a ‘small monkey’. The police seized the truck and monkey and arrested the driver who’d had a history of DUI arrests. No word on how much the monkey had drunk.

In Munich, Germany

A 17-year-old biker made a point of giving the finger to one of those CCTV cameras that monitor the traffic. Not once but 26 times. He cleverly covered his face and removed his license plate. The police laid a trap for him at the end of a tunnel and the biker confessed to crime of displaying his middle finger at the CCTV camera.

It wouldn’t be a good German crime story with out further evidence that comes from a strong scientific background and understanding of procedures, permits and technology. It turns out the biker had the wrong license for the bike he was caught in carrying out his crime. No middle finger usage endorsed on the license. And the police technical expert said the 125cc bike was ‘illegal’ based on his assessment, allowing the police to confiscate it. The biker was fined, points deducted and banned for 26 months from driving. One month for every time he flipped the bird.

In Shizuoka, Japan

A fifty-year-old policeman was arrested after he approached a 25-year-old woman in a restaurant.  He crept up on her and began to lick her hair. The cop was attached a forensic unit and had been on a medical leave. The authorities were certain when the cop would return to work, or what crime, if any, to charge the hair licking forensic cop.

Pathum Thani, Thailand

One difficulty of being an identical twin is if your criminally inclined brother commits a criminal act, flees the scene and leaves you to take the heat as the witnesses identify you as the bad guy. Back in November 2010, Anek Ounwong had a fight with a group of teenagers and he used a grass cutter in what sounds like a bonsai attack on them. Anek, as often happens in these circumstances, didn’t stick around and headed for the hills. Last week he went home to find that his brother had received a four-year prison term of the grass cutter attack. The brother had tried to explain to the police that it wasn’t him. The police refused to buy his “I am a twin and my evil brother did it” story as did the trial and appellate courts. Now Anek is back in town, he’s gone to the police and confessed he was the attacker.

What was the reaction of the police? “It’s out of our hands. We can do nothing.” But the police suggested a course of action. Anek might want to petition the prosecutor’s office or the courts and explain to them what had happened.

As cases are known to move through the Thai criminal justice at a vast speed, it takes about four years before there is a final outcome—just the right amount of time for the innocent brother to get out of prison. Then the prosecutor can launch a new criminal case against the twin who committed the crime.  I doubt Anek will be able to claim credit for the time served by his brother. Though he might try. No doubt the authorities will adjust criminal statistics on assaults with a glass cutter which might well half the number of cases for 2010.

What these and many similar cases show is the role of bad luck, bad companions, bad brother, and hair licking police in the day-to-day criminal cases that happen right around the world.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest novel is Faking It in Bangkok.

I thought it was a harmless pastime––writing crime fiction, bringing crime novels into the house. My wife was a devotee of Jane Austen and of the more intelligent end of chick lit. I figured she was immune.

But, no. Crime fiction is catching. (And there’s a lot of it about.) Now my dearest has published her own ventures into the world of crime fiction. Naturally they’re fabulous because (as her email address describes her) she’s Fabulous Jasmine Schwartz.

I don’t feel guilty about infecting her. It isn’t like passing on a cold or herpes or worthless mortgages at a Triple-A rating.

Still I’ve shown her the path toward authordom. No doubt she figured if I could do it, then the Fabulous Jasmine Schwartz certainly could. And she could. And has.

To her additional advantage, she has seen some of the drawbacks of the author’s world through my experiences. The two days of travel to speak before seven people in Sevilla (but then I got to see Sevilla on someone else’s dime). The occasional publisher who turns out to be an idiot. The occasional publisher who turns out to be a nasty bastard. The acquaintances who, meaning well, say they look forward to when I quit crime fiction and write a “real novel.” The food at the Limmud conference in Chesterfield, Derbyshire. The neglect, oh, the neglect and loneliness of life at the computer keyboard figuring out how to kill someone and wondering whether enough people will read it to pay you to live on and kill yet more characters.

But I’ve seen Jasmine relish the same things I love about crime fiction too. The puzzling out of plot. The crafting of characters and sentences and descriptions. Telling people who think crime fiction isn’t “real” fiction that they can keep their Ian McEwan and their Philip Roth––give me Ellroy and Camilleri any day over those wet drones.

Jasmine has created “Bridget Jones with guns and dead bodies.” Her novels are the hilariously titled “Farbissen” and “Fakakt.” So that I don’t send you rushing for the Yiddish dictionary, Farbissen means bitter and Fakakt means …screwed. (I’m being polite. Actually the Yiddish sense of both these titles is much more Farbissen and Fakakt than they sound in English.) They’re wonderful crime novels and hilarious, pointed evocations of the neuroses of a fashion-obsessed Jewish lady. And I recommend them highly.

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One of my friends, Alison Joseph writes a fantastic crime series set in south London featuring a crime solving nun called Sister Agnes. Check them out they’re brilliant. But Agnes is very modern, she doesn’t wear a habit, gets little in the way of silence and she is very involved in life. Some modern women, apparently, don’t want much of that.

So why do more women now want to become full-on nuns? To address first of all my ‘suspicions about religion’ I would probably say that in times of hardship people do turn to the divine. We’re in a recession, jobs are scarce, there is a lot of uncertainty about and some parts of the world are so very scary you can’t even think about them without breaking into a sweat. Take this one, about Egypt, for instance from the Turkish daily ‘Hurriyet’ on April 26^th – the title of the article is ‘Sex with the Dead’ and it’s about a draft law the Egyptian parliament want to present which will allow men to have sex with their dead wives. Up to six hours after death apparently intercourse will be permissible under so called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ legislation. Beyond scary I trust you will agree. But also with mass communication so quick and so detailed these days, news stories like this are instantly accessible to everyone on the planet. Scaring the shit out of us.

For a lot of us the solution to having visions of necrophilia in our heads is to take the odd toot of absinthe and hide under the duvet, shaking. But for some, God is the answer and quite honestly if it makes the pain go away I have great difficulty arguing with it as a solution. Being a full-on nun means you get away from the media. You go into your enclosed order, you put your habit on, you pray, indulge in a lot of silence and grow vegetables. It’s a perfectly sane reaction to a world gone totally bonkers and, agnostic though I am, I can applaud it.

But there’s more to this new ‘nunning’ than just fear of insane legislation, recession and joblessness. I think that a considerable number of people are getting pissed off with things we’re all supposed to like too. And that chimes with me also.

A couple of months ago, on one of my forays around the East End of London I found myself in the new Westfield Shopping Centre in Stratford. Looking as if it has just landed from space, this new temple to consumerism stands right next to the Olympic site. There’s everything you’d ever want in there: handbags, shoes, lattes, cupcakes, trainers, jewellery, gifts, cards, little models of guardian angels, macaroons, books about people called ‘Amy’ and ‘Joey’ who appear apparently, in a TV show called The Only Way is Essex. I don’t think that you can get Botox injections in there but you can get facials, eyebrow threading and have your hair done. You could, if you’d be happy sleeping on a marble cube outside Marks and Spencer’s, live in Westfield. I’ve seen the toilets, they’re very nice and clean and you could even wash your clothes out in the sinks. But would you want to?

Going by the number of people I saw in there, transfixed into passive, zombie-like states by brand names and ‘seasonal’ colours, I imagine that there could be quite a fight over that marble cube. But I think there could also be many who would rather die than even consider it. Some faces I saw in Westfield were full not of wonder, but of horror. God almighty, they seem to be thinking, what the fuck am I doing here?

In the past, words like ‘materialism’ have been bandied about with impunity – often and famously by hippies. Quite honestly I resent being told that my occasional forays into cheap clothes shops makes me a materialist. I just prefer not to look like an unmade bed from time to time. But the sandal wearing sages are not all wrong and I would be the first to admit it. Materialism in recent years has gone completely rhino. If you haven’t got the latest boots you feel duty bound to cry yourself to sleep in a frenzy of hard done by misery. Ones pubis has to be covered in glitter and crystals to have any sort of credibility and even animals have to be designer handbag friendly (see Paris Hilton and her Chihuahua). It’s enough to make you want to hide away and just ignore it all – or become a nun.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d not dissing real commitment and vocation here and I’m not saying that women are turning to the cloister just to get three meals a day, a bed without bugs and freedom from Ugg boots. What I am saying is that what they’re doing is complex and, to my way of thinking, on some level, understandable too. It isn’t for me – not for the rest of my life – although I have to say a nice weekend retreat away from the TV the computer and the unholy madness of the news would be great. But good luck to those women who have ‘taken the veil’ and thank you for praying for the rest of us, we need it.

In Thailand, there are multiple examples of someone with political and social influence getting away with murder. There were witnesses. The act was caught on CCTV cameras. But the evidence is lost along the way. Nothing comes of the case. After a few months, it disappears from the newspapers, from the public mind, lost from collective memory. Time erases the crime. In the real world, our memories can only have so much overload before they no longer function.

The victim’s family in such cases is lost in the void. There is no public accountability, no explanation, no reconciliation of the rules of the system. In the real world, none of that matters a great deal. Power accumulates. Power is the gravity that shapes, bends the rules to fit the interest of the powerful.

A few days ago in Cambodia an environmentalist was shot dead as he sought to lead a couple of reporters into a forest where illegal logging was apparently going on. He was shot dead by a soldier guarding against troublemakers like Chut Wutty, who led a Natural Resources Protection Group. He sought truth and justice. In the real world, people on the side of truth and justice get into conflicts with powerful people. Push becomes a shove, and a shove moves to the next stage of a gun. “Above the law” means the death of this kind is unlikely to lead to arrest of the gun. Who it turns out was a soldier who was said later to have shot himself (twice) in the chest with his own AK47.

Chut Wutty is an example of someone who confronted powerful interest. In this part of the world, that confrontation is more likely than not going to end badly and when the gun smoke clears, there will be a body of the man seeking truth and justice. In the real world, there will be an “investigation” and no evidence will be found linking anyone powerful to the crime. There will be no trial. Only a dead gunman who killed himself.

China is in the spotlight for the impunity of Bo Xilai, ex-political heavy weight, who by press accounts waged a reign of terror against “enemies” in his city of Chongqing, which has a population of 30 million people. Bo Xilai’s wife is charged with murdering by poison British national Michael Heywood. She showed up shortly afterwards dressed in a Chinese Army general’s uniform.

In the real world, the most powerful people in Asia have political power. This is the get-out-of-jail-free card for them, their family, friends and associates. But what Bo Xilai’s downfall—a huge political event in China—illustrates is that a man may be powerful but there may be more powerful men above him. It appears that Bo Xilai wired taped the phone of President Hu Jintao who was in Chongqing. No doubt he only wanted to know what good things the president was saying about him. Unlike American banks, Bo Xilai wasn’t too big to fail. The Communist Party pulled the plug and Bo Xilai, a feared, ever powerful force who ruled with an iron-fist, is now on the sidelines. In the real world, the powerful fall only when they double cross someone more powerful than they are.

This year the Chinese government will spend around $110 billion on domestic security—the surveillance and information technology system don’t come cheap. Regional leaders like Bo Xilai had access to such systems. That allowed him and other powerful regional leaders to keep watch on the Chinese counterparts to Chut Wutty. In the real world, people who seek to remedy injustice need to be watched. And as we can see in the case of China, some significant cash is put into high systems to scan the citizens for such troublemakers.

When a forty-year-old blind Chinese lawyer named Chen Guangcheng escaped from house arrest, he found a way into the American Embassy in Beijing. His fate is still unresolved. One thing is clear. The impunity game once it is thrust into the international spotlight, the authorities scramble for cover, citing the usual reason: it is a matter of internal interest and outsiders shouldn’t poke their nose in domestic affairs. The powerful don’t like other powerful people looking down at them. That causes loss of face.

Chen’s “crime” was making noises about forced abortions and the like and the powerful wanted to turn down the volume by putting him and his family under house arrest—after having already served over four years in jail for “damaging property and organising a mob to disturb traffic.” His other crimes included: organizing a petition to eliminate taxes on disable farmers, signatures on a petition to close down a polluting paper factory, and a successful law suit to force Beijing’s subway operator to allow the blind to use the subway for free.

Clearly Chen was a world class troublemaker for the powerful. They did what powerful people who are above the law do, they take the person out of circulation. No more official charges for him? No problem, just put him and his family under house arrest. Have a squad of armed men circle the houseand beat upthe man, his wife and kid because in the real world, you can.

Chen complained of mistreatment at the hands of authorities, and that included abuse of his wife and six-year-old daughter.

What has Chen asked? Basically he’s asked the government officials not to be above the law. The Toronto Star quotes Chen, “I also ask that the Chinese government safeguard the dignity of law and the interests of the people, as well as guarantee the safety of my family members.”

The breaking news is Chen checked out of the American Embassy in Beijing and into a hospital—out of his own volition or so the American officials say. The American Embassy is gaining the reputation of a half-way house from embattled police chiefs to blind activist lawyers. They get shelter, food, some counseling before being sent back to the street. The Americans apparently received the assurance from Chinese authorities that Chen would be treated like “an ordinary citizen.” That shouldn’t be a hard promise to keep because that was exactly how he was treated. Ordinary citizens are below the law; those in power above the law, and they get to find a middle ground in the foyer of the American Embassy. You just know that ain’t going to work the way they think it will.

Here’s the executive summary. Chut Wutty is dead in Cambodia. Blind lawyer Chen Guangcheng who was hiding out in the American Embassy in Beijing, has decamped to a hospital where he will be treated as an ordinary citizen. And strict criminal libel lawyers in Thailand prevent naming the powerful killers who walk the streets of major cities in Thailand. That’s another thing worth mentioning. Speech in the above-the-law jurisdiction is inevitably censored to make certain ordinary citizens don’t start asking awkward questions about truth and justice.

Because in the real world, those above the law, remain above the law, and those who seek truth and justice will wind up in an early grave, house arrest, or the Chinese transitional guest room in the American Embassy with a map of China and suggestions of where they might next want to live.

If you live in a country where the rule of law applies to the powerful, then you should light a little candle tonight and, despite all of the misfortunes of class, race and inequality, count yourself lucky that as an ordinary citizen you can raise your voice and ask for justice. You can go public with your grievances, proposals for change, no matter that others disagree with you, and you can go home, turn on the TV and not worry that the government won’t send men around to beat up your wife and kid. Or put a bullet through your head.

Because if you lived in the real world that most people occupy, you’d understand just how dangerous truth and justice can be and the costs fall like a ton of bricks on the person making such a noise.

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www.cgmoore.com

Christopher G. Moore’s latest novel is The Wisdom of Beer.

I decided to call the project Poisonville, after the mispronounced location of Dashiell Hammett’s first novel “Red Harvest.” (The place was really called Personville, but Hammett’s Op learns that people call it Poisonville for a reason.)

You can listen to the songs free on my website (http://www.mattrees.net/poisonville/). I hope you’ll share them. I’ve found it inspiring to work on these songs. You’ll see the styles vary from industrial to rock to funk to the sound of hoboes in a speakeasy, as well as my impersonations of Leonard Cohen and Lou Reed.

Here’s the idea behind Poisonville:

I’ve been in bands for many years, playing various instruments. But I have a newish baby and I don’t want to stay out late performing, because I need all the sleep I can get! So I created a studio – I call it Big Pink Oboe Studio. Not because I play the oboe. The pink oboe is an old Spike Milligan euphemism for an excitable part of the male anatomy. I also revived my old stage persona: when I was in an alternative band in New York in the 1990s, I was Napoleon Blownapart. (The band was Money Shot, which those of you with any knowledge of porno parlance will understand and also gives you and idea of the sort of gig we used to do.) The name gets me into the right head for music.

And so into the studio I went, writing songs about my own books and songs about books I love (by Hammett and Chandler). I perform most of the instruments, with a little help from The Talented David Brinn (which is the stage name of my pal David Brinn, in case you’re wondering) and The Lovely Jasmine Schwartz (which is the name in her passport, you should know.)

I’ve also written songs with a couple of crime authors: Jasmine Schwartz, whose fabulous Neurotic Detective series will be out in a few months, and Helen Fitzgerald, the sexy Australian writer of the sexiest crime novels around. See her site You can hear these writers reading a line or two from their books during the course of the songs.

Jasmine and Helen both wrote lyrics about their books, which I set to music. I’m intending to do the same thing with some other favorite writers of mine, including my Reality Check blogmates, in the coming months.

If you think there are crime writers I ought to get on board (because they’ve written books that’d work well in a musical setting), let me know.

You’ve probably stolen music on the web, even if the music wasn’t about crime. Poisonville’s crime fiction music is your chance to listen free – without being a criminal.

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Now don’t get me wrong, romance is really not where I’m at at all and so it has to be pretty special and a bit quirky to grab my attention. But I have really enjoyed ‘Middle Watch’ by Loretta Proctor – largely because of its unusual setting – in the world of lighthouses and their keepers. When I was a kid I was fascinated by lighthouses. Although I am as old as teak, manned lighthouses were being phased out when I was a child even though we were still taught about them at school. We were also still shown pictures of farms that featured working horses. The first time I went to the countryside I was ever so disappointed. No-one had prepared me for the horror that was my first tractor.

‘Middle Watch’ is set mainly in the 1950s when lighthouse keepers were still sent to some of the wildest and most remote corners of the UK to live for months on end with only two other men for company. The job was hard, dangerous and you had to be very good at running up and down stairs. It could also be, according to Loretta Proctor, oddly addictive too. Of course sometimes it was lethal – a fact that was gruesomely illustrated by the case of the Smalls Lighthouse, in Pembrokeshire, Wales at the end of the 18^th century. Back then lighthouses where only manned by a team of two. In this instance the men in question were called Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith. It was known that the two men didn’t get on, so when Griffith died in a freak accident, Howell became obsessed with the idea that he might be accused of his murder. In order, he thought, to prove he hadn’t killed Griffith, he decided to keep his body as evidence. But he still had months left to be on Smalls and so of course, after a while, the body began to smell. To help with this problem, Howell built a makeshift coffin and put it on a shelf outside the light. But the high winds blew the coffin apart leaving Griffith’s rotting corpse to hang in front of the lighthouse, one skeletal hand, apparently moving as if beckoning. By the time Howell was relieved he’d, not surprisingly, lost his mind. But from then on it became law (1801) that lighthouses could only be manned by 3 keepers at the very least. So ‘Middle Watch’ – a romance with a definite dangerous element.

The other book I’ve been tearing through is ‘The Sugar Girls’ by Duncan Barrett and Nuala Calvi. This details the lives of women who worked at the old Tate and Lyle sugar factory in Silvertown, London in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. This is home territory for me as I grew up, like most sons and daughters of the London Borough of Newham, hearing stories about what happened when the factory was hit by a bomb in the Blitz. Rivers of hot molten sugar ran in the streets and down into the drains. Kids like my dad at the time chipped it off the pavements and roads once it had cooled and stuffed it into their hungry mouths. For them it was as if all their sweet fantasies had come true at once.

However by far and away the most famous stories about Tate and Lyle were about the girls who worked there. Compared to most east end employers Tate’s paid well and so the Tate and Lyle girls were famous for their sharp dressing, their make up and posh hair-dos. The company had an excellent sports and social club as well as on site medical facilities and even a dedicated convalescent home for employees in Weston-super-Mare. So the Tate and Lyle girls, although they had to work hard, were very fortunate too. Glamorous and often fiercely ambitious they played hard too and men were irresistibly drawn to them. My father, just a child, was terrified of them. They had confidence, cheek and they could give as good as they got. ‘The Sugar Girls’ details the lives of just a few sugar girls and is both a great history of a long gone way of life as well as an account of the struggles inherent in the lives of east end women. For me it was like going home.

However, having dipped my toe in the fresh water of non crime fiction literature, I now find that I am gagging to get back to it again. But then that’s the thing about crime, it’s always with us.

He was impeached in a long process that saw a parade of some truly bizarre characters called to the witness stand. People like David Oddsson, also a former prime minister and colourful behind-the-scenes kingmaker, all had their day in court, willingly or otherwise.

Nobody is really happy with the not-one-way-or-the-other verdict of the five judges who deliberated for weeks before coming to a decision to acquit on four of five charges, convicting the former PM on a relatively minor count and declining to impose any penalty. He won’t be doing time or paying any fines. It’s a slap on the wrist, although there’s doubtless a lot of hurt pride there.

At the time the announcement was made that Geir Haarde was to be impeached, essentially for incompetence, it seemed very strange that three other key figures, the ministers for foreign affairs, finance and business affairs, were not in the dock with him – that would have maybe upset the political apple cart a little too far. The other three are all still active in public life in one way or another, while Geir H was a busted flush the second he announced that his administration was at an end.

What has set the cat among the pigeons is the Geir Haarde’s furious reaction after the verdict. He has lambasted the judges and sneered at the verdict as being laughable and ridiculous, effectively resorting to ad hominem attacks on the judges who acquitted him of any serious charges, accusing them of being politically influenced and dredging up accusations about the present government and political sins committed a quarter of a century ago – in which case he could be skating on thin ice as there’s plenty more history of the non-ancient variety that wouldn’t stand scrutiny well.

There’s not a shred of remorse to be seen from the man who presided over the crash, although, to be fair, he was merely at the helm of a ship that was already set to hit the rocks. As an economist himself, he must have known there was precious little he could have done about it other than sit tight and wait for it to happen. The report commissioned by the Special Prosecutor’s office and published last year (in many volumes – the paper version of it comes in a cardboard box) had already made it plain enough that by mid-2006 the financial crisis was already too far gone to be avoided and there were no options open to the government to avert disaster.

It has taken two years and presumably that’s two years of stress and anxiety for the man. But this guy is a public figure, not Joe Public. The taxpayer is forking out the equivalent of €150,000 towards his legal costs, so a little dignity on Geir’s part wouldn’t have gone amiss instead of furiously blaming everyone but himself. But that’s the mantra that was heard throughout his trial. ‘I didn’t know.. I couldn’t do anything… It was [someone else’s] fault…’

There has been a load of shuffling of feet in embarrassment since his angry outbursts. Even his own people, the right-wing Independence Party, who might otherwise have made some capital out of his acquittal/conviction, have avoided doing so.

Although Geir Haarde was a member of the government that although it didn’t engineer the Crash, it allowed the environment to grow for the Crash to happen. He was part of the government that snuggled up to deregulation and privatisation, and the attitudes and methods of Geir H’s administration were effectively those of the previous ones under which he had learned the political chops that have now given him a criminal record.

It doesn’t look pretty. The present government is coming unstuck in a big way and could hardly be less popular. There are new parties emerging that may or may not make a dent when the next elections roll around. There’s going to be a lot of hair-pulling and face-scratching. A lot of shit is going to be thrown and some of it will stick, and it’s going to be fascinating in a gruesome, train-crash sort of way as the old guard comes back to power; the only question being how strong a presence they will have.

It’s politics as a grisly spectator sport. It’s just a shame that edged weapons aren’t allowed. But before that, the Presidential debacle will be taking place as a prelude to the big fight itself.

But on the upside, the Church of Iceland’s new bishop has been announced. Being about as non-religious as you can get, normally I wouldn’t have given the news a second thought. But it’s encouraging that the post has gone to a woman for the first time. If the politicians can’t get past the red mist and see that times need to change, maybe the church can.