Last week I talked about reality checking me about torture and secret prisons in Thailand, When Reality Checks You: Torture and Secret Prisons.

Writing fiction is connecting the imaginative and the real world in such a way that the fiction is as large and real as life. When contemporary affairs figure into the narrative, there is serious risk of the central events in the book being overtaken by actual events in the real world. In other words, you can end up with a premise that has been blown out of the water. A reader who follows the news will at that point stop reading what you’ve written. You’ve lost all credibility and the story falls apart.

Either what you imagined didn’t happen or happened in quite a different way than you supposed. I call this the risk of reality checking you; when that happens it is like a body check against the boards in hockey. Everyone groans from the pain inflicted.

Sometimes, though, you have the strange feeling that what you’ve written is an advance from the future and a news story confirms what you suspected was happening and no one wanted to publicly talk about (like secret prisons in Thailand).

Reality has checked me in a big way once before. In Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, the third Calvino novel, the premise was the recovery of a large cache of jewelry stolen by a Thai servant who worked in a Saudi Arabia palace. The jewelry heist had a lot of [people in???] prison in the early 1990s not to mention that it had a substantially adverse impact on international relations between Thailand and Saudi Arabia. In Zero Hour, I imagined a backstory that launched Calvino’s investigation into the missing jewels in Phnom Penh.

In the years since that book was first published (1994), I have had many readers ask how I know what happened to the missing jewels. Each time I explained that I had no idea what really happened to the missing jewels beyond the press speculation, and that Zero Hour was a work of fiction. That explanation cut no ice with the locals, who politely nodded, and said, “But how did you know what happened to the jewels.”

That was the first book that convinced me that wall between fictional and non-fictional worlds is less fixed in the minds of most people. Reality is often messy, incomplete, contradictory, and threaded with holes where information is twisted or missing. Fiction brings motive, meaning, rationality and closure. That’s why readers return time and time again to fiction. Events in the real world seem permanently hanging in shadows surrounded by smoke and noise.

So far the Missing Saudi Jewel caper remains shrouded in mystery. It remains to this day unresolved. If it is ever resolved, I suspect it will be quite different from the resolution I wrote about in Zero Hour.

I still get readers who after I explain that scenario in Zero Hour in Phnom Penh was fiction, reply, “Yes, but how did you know what happened to the Saudi jewels.”

Reality is a great teacher of humility. Stray too far away from the actual experiences of people, and you break the bond between author and reader; one that is built on trust. The author’s promise: trust me, this is a story that will provoke, entertain, and inform. Reality won’t kick the stool out from under you and leave you swinging slowly in the wind.

You can tell a great deal about a people from the conversations in language textbooks. After all, they aim to teach you the words people speak, but also the character of those teaching them and what it might be like to live in their society.

I first cottoned to this when I learned Spanish. My textbook included a basic conversation between a woman and her boyfriend. It went like this:

Maria: I love you! Do you love me?

Pablo: What is love, anyway?

Maria: I hate you!

See? Passionate, fiery Latins.

The same was true of Middle East languages. My Hebrew textbook featured highly critical know-it-alls (“Do you like this actress?” “I’m not crazy about her.”…. “How is the ice-cream here?” “It’s okay, but I know a better place for ice-cream.”) Thirteen years on, I have a more nuanced view of Israelis, but these conversations are still a good basic tool for understanding their deep sense of insecurity and need to assert themselves.

And the Palestinians? My first textbook of Levant Arabic featured conversations in which a fabled character named Jouha, known to be stupid, would end up being so stupid he came full circle and turned out to be cunning:

Neighbor: Jouha, can I borrow your donkey?

Jouha: I don’t have a donkey.

(Donkey brays inside Jouha’s house.)

Neighbor: You do have a donkey. I can hear it.

Jouha: What’s this? You don’t believe me, but you believe my donkey?

If you follow the peace process in the newspapers, surely there’ve been times when you’ve wondered if the Palestinians were being so absurd in their negotiations that they must have some secret, cunning plan up their sleeves? But they were just being dumb.

It turns out Jouha’s stupid AND mean. Which would make him a pretty good member of the Palestinian negotiating team. Not that the Israeli negotiators don’t have more than a touch of Jouha in them…

In my Omar Yussef novels, I try to capture the rhythms of Arabic speech. I also translate directly a number of very formal Arabic phrases, rather than simply putting them in a transliterated italics as is often done with snatches of foreign dialogue. I believe it gives the flavor of speech, and also a sense of how people relate to each other in a traditional society.

For example, there’s nothing poetic about “Good morning,” and what’d be the point of just italicizing “Sabah al-kheyr”? But try this: “Morning of joy.” To which you respond: “Morning of light.” Now that’s beautiful. And it’s what Palestinians say to each other every day.

When my characters receive a cup of coffee—the ritual that accompanies every meeting in the Arab world—they say “May Allah bless your hands.” The person giving them the coffee responds, “Blessings.”

There are, of course, Arabic phrases like this for so many situations and they often convey something beyond the basic meaning of the phrase. For example, in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, my latest novel, a character tells a priest “Long life to you.” Omar and all the other characters present understand immediately that this means someone else has died. (The unspoken part of the phrase is, “…but eventually you’ll die like the guy whose death I’m going to tell you about.”)

How does this affect the plot or pacing of my books? Well, in some thrillers, a character can jump through a door and start berating everyone in sight, even beating them up. In Palestine, he has to—absolutely has to—wish them blessings from Allah and inquire after their health first.

If he didn’t, he’d be showing himself to be a really, really bad guy. And that would be giving away the ending.

A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog

How to win a free book.

The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.

I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.

The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.

The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.

Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com

“Just swipe before you go up, sir, if you don’t mind.”

I assumed this was some peculiar Yorkshire dialect I’d never master. He probably meant ‘wipe’. We’d just trudged from Harrogate station through the rain and my lace-up shoes for grown-ups (Unused for the previous year) were wet. I went to the doormat and shook myself. He remained at the desk holding a chunky Star Trek sidearm and a troubled expression. He still hadn’t given me my room key.

This was day one of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 2009 and I had my mission statement printed out in my back pocket. My publicity lady had held it before her face and read it to me in case it was too difficult for a boy from out-of-town to grasp.

“Colin,” she read. “What we expect you to do is stand in the bar, drink a lot from our tab and exchange pleasantries with as many authors and publishers as possible until the early hours of the morning. Try not to do or say anything embarrassing.” I’ve had some tough jobs in my life. I was once a window cleaner at the Sutton student nurses dormitory. But I knew this was going to be tough. They said they wanted me to fit. Be one of the literati. Blend in. But standing in the bar at the Harrogate festival not saying or doing anything embarrassing would surely make me stand out like a sore thumb. I’d been there before.

Of course, first things first. I still had to check in and something was undoubtedly amiss. It was our Jess who solved the mystery. Jess who recognized two words on Coronation Street as being English. Jess who was certain Val McDermid was a native speaker of Scandinavian. Jess might have linguistic problems but she’s fluent in IT and she picked up on the word ‘swipe’.

“They want a credit card,” she said.

Why didn’t he just say so? Problem solved.

“We don’t have one,” I told him.

“You don’t have a what?” said the bloody-cheeked manager.

“A credit card”, said I.

Of course I’d seen that expression before. A fleeting smile, a long probing stare with a silence background, a pitying frown. Even in the better hotels in Bangkok they’d perfected the self-same expression. It asked, who, of any worth, of any standing in society, DIDN’T have a credit card?

“Me!” I’d say.

“I can pay,” I’d say.

“I have a big bag full of money,” I’d say, only too aware that there are large chunks of the service industry who don’t know what money is. I once offered to hand over a thick wad of cash equal to the value of a rental car but they still refused to let me drive off with it. I am a monetarily handicapped person but I still reserve the right to do all my financial deals with actual cash if I so wish. Call me irresponsible.

The manager wasn’t prepared to grant me my rights without a fight. He was on the phone for a very long time and I don’t know who he finally got through to, but eventually he stood before me with his left ear in one hand and our key in the other. His head shook almost imperceptibly as if he was imagining what hellish damage we might do to his suite. We boarded the lift. One tiny step for a man without vinyl.

We changed and headed for the Crown Hotel where we would undoubtedly forget our credit debacle amidst the revelry of awards night and the grand welcome party. We passed the bar where authors had already begun to act and speak in an embarrassing manner. I picked out a spot beside a sturdy pillar from which to launch my own unique blend of foolishness in an hour or so.

But first, to the reception desk to register. My name was not on the list. Word must have spread that I was an unreconstructed hippy with no respect for banking. But with no registration I didn’t exist and there would be no complementary tickets or, more importantly, no free drinks. We stood to one side watching the happy fans parade into the dining hall. Through the imposing wooden doors I caught a glimpse of thousand of full Old Peculier bottles massed together like penguins. I could see the disturbingly attractive eastern European waitresses flit from person to person with tasty snacks and bottles of wine. But Oliver Twist and Mrs. Oliver Twist stood stuck outside and the last of the guests disappeared through the doors and there was no hope for us.

(Will Col and Jess find a way into the ball? Will our intrepid author have his opportunity to act disgracefully? Tune in next week for part two of our story. Or not. Up to you)

So there I was, in Mardin – a veritable Verona of the east, my dears – my head full of Aramaic chants, my over-wrought mind tortured by nocturnal clicking noises in my hotel room. In fact the clicking wasn’t the only problem I was having after dark. Other noises had joined the clicking; scratching, scrabbling and snuffling. Over-tired, my first fear was that I had somehow been invaded by rats. My second idea was even stranger.

Ever since I had seen the cloth painting of the deity known as the Sharmeran in the Syrian church of Mar Benham, I had been anxious to find out more about it. The image was everywhere; in shops, museums, restaurants, at the entrances to people’s houses. My friends and I wandered down to the bazaar where, yet again, we met the Sharmeran in pictures, on glass and on many and various copper artefacts. I bought my Sharmeran on a beaten copper plate from a smith with the blackest teeth I have ever seen. Like a lot of Mardin folk, the smith was a devotee of the local mirra coffee – a dark roasted, slowly brewed beverage which has the consistency of tar. It’s a heady old drink is mirra and one which I suspect may have an alternative use as a heart defibrillator. But I took a cup when the smith offered me one and then sat down to look at the sheet of paper he had give me with the plate. It was the story of the Sharmeran.

In the dark time before Islam, there was a gentle young man who lived in the mountains. Bullied by the more macho boys in his village, he ran away to hide in the caves that dot the mountains enclosing the Mesopotamian Plain. After a while however the boy became lost. Then, to make matters worse he found that he was surrounded by thousands of snakes. Convinced he was about to die, he had given up hope when suddenly a very strange figure appeared. With the head of a woman, the body of a snake and feet fashioned from the heads of vipers, the Sharmeran told the boy that she would lead him safely out of the cave provided he didn’t tell anyone about her. The boy agreed. But he was only human and when he heard that the Sultan of the Plain was offering half his kingdom and the hand of his beautiful daughter in exchange for knowledge about the Sharmeran’s whereabouts, he jumped at the chance. The Sultan was sick and, according to his Vizir, eating the meat of the Sharmeran would cure him. So the Sultan’s men went into the mountains and, although they did not kill the Sharmeran, they managed to take enough of her flesh to carry back to their master. After eating the Sharmeran’s flesh the Sultan did indeed recover and the young boy married his daughter and took over half of his kingdom. But the Sharmeran had been betrayed. Faithless humanity had betrayed her kindness and abused her magical properties. And yet in concert with Mother Goddesses the world over, her mercy and her kindness are without limit. To this day she protects humanity against the bite of snakes and her image is reproduced and honoured everywhere.

I thought about the Sharmeran a lot over the next few days. She was after all spoken of with reverence by everyone – Muslim, Christian and Jew. I detected an affection that seemed to be very similar to the kind of esteem in which Christians hold the Virgin Mary. A suffering female who protects mankind, be it from a wrathful God or the bite of a snake. I looked at my copper plate and began to wonder how the Sharmeran might have moved. I will ponder such imponderables at times. Further I wondered what kind of sound the viper heads made as they moved along the ground. Did they shuffle along like over-stuffed slippers? Did they slip and slide like wet fish? More to the point from my perspective, did they snuffle, scratch and scrabble? Did they click!?

With so much talk about the Sharmeran, with her image in my face 24/7, was I in fact starting to hear her outside my room? Clicking, shuffling and scrabbling along? Well, of course I wasn’t (or was I?) but my mind was clearly turning in that direction and I must admit that the idea of being ‘haunted’ by the Sharmeran did give me a sense of security. Mardin is after all a city that, in the summer months, is plagued by snakes. It is easy to see how the necessity for the Sharmeran evolved and why. It also made me think about ancient religion and how pervasive aspects of those old beliefs are. Sadly a few days later I discovered also how fragile such remnants of the past can be.

A fellow traveller, a Canadian guy, had just arrived in Turkey from northern Iraq. While in that troubled country he had made friends with a group of Yezidi people, Kurds who revere a deity called the Peacock Angel. Many other groups across the middle east falsely accuse these people of being devil worshippers. Their world view, as far as I can tell, seems to be somewhat Gnostic in nature. God soars far and away above earth which would seem to be controlled by beings that are sometimes benign and sometimes quite hostile and in need of propitiation. My new friend hadn’t been in Turkey for more than a day when we heard that a group of Yezidis had been massacred over in Iraq. Who had killed them, was not known, but why they had died was sadly apparent. Being different, old time believers had sealed their fate. What’s the saying now? ‘The kind is dead, long live the king!’ Maybe we need to make sure that we have at least a few photographs of the old king before we burn his body and murder his servants. Something like a copper plate carrying the image of a being with the head of a woman and the body of a snake will do. Put it by your front door and you’ll never be bothered by vipers again. Let’s hear it once again for the old time religion!

Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.

But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.

There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.

The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.

So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.

Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.

On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.

But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.

It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Yasser Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) *Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?*

If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.

Or is that just fiction, too?

Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.

Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.

Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.

I set my latest İkmen book in the south eastern Turkish city of Mardin for reasons that go beyond the picturesque. Not that just the look of the place isn’t enough. A city of vast honey coloured mansions, of churches and mosques of breathtaking beauty, Mardin dominates the flat Mesopotamian Plain from the vast rock of Mazi Mountain upon which it stands. Even on a dull day you can see the Syrian border. It’s fabulous. It’s also multicultural. Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Syrian Christians as well as small Jewish and Armenian minorities all rub along and communicate in a variety of languages and dialects. I actually went to the city with the intention of attending Easter service at the Syrian Orthodox church of Mar Behnam, one of the oldest and most active churches in the city. Syrian Orthodoxy is amongst the most ancient of Christian denominations and their services are conducted almost entirely in the language of the archaic middle east, Aramaic. It was quite an experience. It also, if indirectly, led to my coming into contact with some religious groups I had not taken into account.

Like a lot of eastern Orthodox services, the Syrian Easter liturgy started early. Barely conscious after not much sleep in a hotel room seemingly plagued by unintelligible clicking sounds, I stood with the Syrian women while the priest intoned prayers in Aramaic. This went on for a very long time and was only finally broken by a sudden diversion into Turkish when the priest blessed the republic, its government and president. This roused me somewhat and was also a precursor to a lot of activity. Two choirs, one male, one female, chanted unaccompanied by any instruments while the priest processed the church carrying a golden cross which was wrapped in a long, thin piece of red material. As it passed, worshippers reached out to touch it or in some cases kiss the cross. The red cloth I surmised represented Christ’s blood. What however made the most impact upon me was the emotion that was displayed by the worshippers. As the sound of women ululating echoed around the ancient building like a message from a past hardly discernible in the west, people cried, clung to each other for support and fell to their knees. Now I have seen film of people speaking in tongues and fainting to the floor in the vast evangelical churches in the United States. I’ve always, maybe because I am a wishy-washy agnostic liberal, been faintly horrified by such displays. In Mar Behnam in Mardin at Easter I was not. Maybe because I knew the ceremony I was witnessing was so old, or perhaps it was that the strength of the emotions I saw seemed to me so visceral, I felt my own eyes sting with tears. All I can say is that I don’t know how long the ceremony went on for after that because by that time I was completely caught up in it. How one can be totally absorbed into a rite one does not truly understand in a language one doesn’t know at all, I do not know. But that was what happened. At the end of the service I exchanged handshakes and Easter greetings with complete strangers who treated me like one of their own. Then when everyone else went outside to partake of the Easter buffet the church had laid on out in the garden, I stayed in the church taking in what remained of that amazingly emotional resonance I had experienced earlier.

I walked around. I saw the skull of the saint after whom the church is named, Mar Behnam in a niche to the right of the altar. I examined the many cloth pictures, the Syrian Orthodox equivalent of the Russian or Greek ikon, that adorned both the altar itself and much of the wall space. Painted using natural dyes and adorned with sequins, glitter and sometimes small fragments of other fabrics too, these things illustrate the life of Christ and of the many Syrian saints. Some were alarming, depicting the righteous in the throes of their often ghastly martyrdoms. The one that impressed me the most however wasn’t of a person, holy or otherwise. It was a creature. With the head of a woman and the body of a snake, the being I later learned was called the Sharmeran was a somewhat left field image, I felt, for a Christian place of worship. In that I was both right and wrong. Over the course of the next week I was to come into contact with beliefs far older than the Church or Mar Behnam or its ancient rites. I was also possibly on the verge of some sort of breakthrough with regard to that irritating clicking sound in my hotel room too. But more of that, next week…

Once in a blue moon, reality confirms your fictional character and his story. How often this happens is anyone’s guess. But it happened to me over the weekend.

On 19th July 2009 The Washington Post broke a story about CIA secret prisons in Thailand. Paying Back Jack, my latest Vincent Calvino novel, which will be released in the USA in November and the UK in December, has a backstory concerning such a secret prison in Bangkok. Casey is the fictional character who has been involved in what is called enhanced interrogation. What used to be called torture until it was decided that caused ordinary people to flinch.

Reading The Washington Post story, it was as if one of the real life actors in the interrogations was speaking as Casey in my book. “The thing that will make him talk,” the participant recalled Mitchell saying, “is fear.”

In Paying Back Jack, Casey has made a career of understanding a man’s fear. He talks about torture in a secret Bangkok CIA facility, “In my line of work you search through another man’s secret life to find the things he can’t admit to himself. That’s the place that he’s most easily killed.”

I’ve never met Mitchell or anyone (that I was aware of) connected with the secret prisons. When you live in a place like Bangkok long enough, a place where almost anything is possible, your mind finds the patterns in the system, and imagination takes over to link the dots. When reality checks the novel you wrote a year before the news story breaks, you’ve received something that you wish for: an insight into the zeitgeist and a fair representation of how this shapes our lives.

“Who’s that?”

It was murky dark in the basement of that barely happening nightclub in central London. Even in shadows you got the feeling that there were a lot of nervous people: fish so far out of water you could have seen their gills healing shut. If you could have seen anything, that is. But it wasn’t the lack of light that made me ask. It was the fact I wouldn’t have known who he was even in broad daylight. I suppose I could have Google-imaged them all before I left home, played ‘match the author to their publicity photos’ all evening. But I’d noticed in the past that unless the actual person was airbrushed, Photoshopped and posed, they bore scant similarity to their alter egos on the book jackets. So that really wouldn’t have helped.

My publicity lady told me who he was.

“Is he famous?” I asked.

It appeared he was and she chuckled ‘cause she knew I was joking.

I wasn’t.

I don’t read a lot and I prefer my authors faceless. As soon as you have a visual, it affects how you read them, you know? ‘He’s too fat/young/old/pompous to have written a book I can enjoy’. ‘She thinks she’s too good for my sort. Look at her, so smug in her pearls and Margaret Thatcher hair do.’  

But my publicity lady proceeded to lead me around by the arm and reface all the authors lurking there in our disco basement. Some I recognized. I’d seen the names on Best Seller shelves at airports. Some names I’d seen on a list. It was a short list and my own name was on it, too. I’d assumed it was a mistake. My name comes immediately between Patricia Cornwell and Robert Crais and I imagined I’d been short listed for a CWA Dagger in the Library award – a mere whisper below a Nobel prize – due to some outsourcing clerical error. But my joint philosophies are, 1. Ride it till they catch you, and, 2. Any excuse for a piss up.

I got into conversations with journalists who obviously shared my mantra. I pretended to be a nightclubber who’d wandered downstairs in search of a WC. It helped that I was wearing my £49 Marks and Spencer sand-coloured blazer which glowed John Travolta white under the strobes. The crime hacks told me how confident this and that author was about, ‘This year being the one’. I asked about that fellow…What was his name? Clitteral, Colatterill? But they looked blank and admitted there were one or two unknowns on the list this year.

The CEO of my publishing house was ferrying drinks back and forth from the bar as fast as he could carry them. We were humbled by his unbridled philanthropy until we learned that it was all free. The young Turks who’d taken over the CWA were doing everything right. Night clubs. TV deals. Sponsorships. Knowing which authors were deceased before inviting them up to give a few words. But open bars lead to bad habits and by the time Mark Billingham started his stand-up key-note address, I’d completely forgotten my ‘Just in case’ thank you speech. It came back to me with the canapés the next morning but that was too late. It would have been hilarious and about eight minutes too long. Eight minutes is a long time to die. So it was just as well I didn’t use it. Plus, as soon as you give a pat, clever, word perfect speech, the audience automatically thinks that you’re a cocky bastard, or that there’s been a leak.

Despite what they’ll have you believe, all the nominees prepare a short, ‘Oh, what a shock!’ few words. They practice them in front of the bathroom mirror. Go over them for hours until they sound unrehearsed. I had a good one the previous year when I didn’t win the Duncan Laurie. It was so good I almost elbowed poor Frances Fyfield off the stage and grabbed for the mike. I mean damn it, I’d even rented a tux for the day. There’s nothing sadder than a loser in a penguin suit with an unexploded thank-you speech in his pocket.

So, this time they weren’t going to have the satisfaction of humiliating me. I’d written a long and funny loser address to read at the ‘also ran’ session down the pub after. It made fun of the winner. ‘Who needs award ceremonies?’ ‘I’d take a good mince pie over a silver dagger any day.’ ‘And, anyway. What am I doing here? I’m not a crime writer, gosh darn it. I’m a yarn spinner. A literary adventurist. Don’t insult me by pigeonholing me as another writer of detective novels. I’m not having it. Just not…’

And as the London Pride sinks me slowly in the West and my sand-coloured Marks and Spencer jacket finds itself being dragged ignominiously along the damp London pavement, the last remnant of my bravado crumbles and I burst into tears beneath a Metropolitan Police CCTV camera watched by a lonely woman PC with greasy hair. I had been so close to glory. Yet so far. Another year. Another heartbreak.

Then it was all ruined. Something went wrong…or right. The pretty lady on the stage leaned too closely into the microphone and somewhere inside her heavy breath were the words,

“And the winner of this year’s Crime Writer’s Association Dagger in the Library award is…”

Our fellow blogger Colin Cotterill won the British Crime Writers’ Association 2009 prize “Dagger in the Library.” The award is an important one as it is based on the author’s body of work. Colin also faced some stiff competition. Below is from the CWA website announcing the awards.

Well done, Colin.

The CWA Dagger in the Library

Colin Cotterill has won this year’s CWA Dagger in the Library, which carries a prize of £1500 to the author, plus £300 to a participating library’s readers’ group.

This annual award is given to “the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to library users”; authors are nominated by UK libraries and Readers’ Groups and judged by a panel of librarians. In making the award to Colin, the judges said An unusual hero in an unusual setting. Quirky, funny and very appealing. His books are a truly beautiful read.

Previous winners have included Stuart McBride, Craig Russell and Alexander McCall Smith. The £1500 prize is sponsored by the publishers Random House.

More information, including details of the other five shortlisted authors, on the Dagger in the Library page

Link:  http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2009/index.html