I am not a little sensitive. I pretend to have the skin of a rhino but, in truth, I have an Achilles heart. Poke at it with a blunt fingernail and I fall weeping onto the battleground. Bruise me not, I just write stories to give people the jollies. If they like them, that’s nice. But I don’t write the type of stories that will ever be debated in college creative writing classrooms nor will there be blood spilt over me in library reading groups. I don’t really offend or alienate people…or so I thought.

Then there came the lost people of Amazon. I was alerted late in life to the reader reviews of Amazon.com by a friend who is now an ex friend, and once or twice I browsed my books to see whether anyone had spent long enough in my stories to write a review of them. For the first couple of years I was pleasantly surprised. Readers liked me, I thought. It made me feel all warm and bubbly inside. But I recalled a conversation I’d once had with a seasoned writer who’d told me, “You’ll know you’ve become a success when people start being nasty about your books.” It didn’t make much sense to me at the time. But then, my first one-star review arrived on Amazon. After comparing me with a gasless car, it concluded with

“…Please don’t let your readers down again. try the book on someone you don’t know.and if they say BORING.take it back and try again.but try only people you don’t know.to tell you the trueth.IF YOU CARE.” (sic)

I was devastated. I had let my readers down. I didn’t care about them. I could feel vitriolic spittle on my face. I cried softly into my pillow that night and vowed never to write again. I was sure I was the only author ever to get a one-star review on Amazon. I was a disgrace. In a desperate search for fellow slush heap writers, I went back into the dark jungle of Amazon and I hunted for kindred spirits. The first I found was a barely known author

“If English is Dan Brown’s first language, then he has major problems, unless he is a 10 year old slow learner.”

Thank God. Dan can’t write either. I wondered how deep this seam of poor writing went and I was shocked to find how many so-called writers of classics were as clueless as me.

“Ha great book people! Oh wait note the hint of sarcasm. Harper Lee should be congratulated on making the worst book of all time. Every copy of this book should be burned and never allowed to be read again.”

I tell you, with a review like that, I’m glad I didn’t waste money on To Kill a Mockingbird. But it got worse. Evidently, Ulysees was awful too.

“New Rule: nobody needs to read James Joyce. He was not a good writer. He was all show-off and gimmick. There is no substance to his writing. It is a waste of time. It is pompous. It is boring. Accept reality people.”

And Gatsby

“Once I finished reading it, I threw it into the “poubelle”.

And Brave New World

“the plot was slow to pick up from the start [and, actually, it never did pick up] and very confusing. it was also a very dirty book.”

My word, so many bad books claiming to be literature. I was shocked. Thank goodness things had picked up in more recent times. I knew there wouldn’t be any criticism of our modern heroes. That is, of course, not counting Maya Angelou

“Had the author been white and not helped along by Ophra, this work would be largely unnoticed.”

And especially not Salman Rushdie

“The Iranians who were after Rushdie for writing this book could have carried out their death sentence by making him read his own novel over and over until he perished from boredom.”

But what about the best sellers? Did Kathy Reichs escape their barbs?

“Like Peggy Lee I kept wondering “is that all there is?” Sadly and disappointingly, like Gertrude Stein, I had to conclude: “There’s no there there.” Skip this one for sure.”

Awful indeed if Peggy and Gertrude have to join forces in their attack. Did JK make it out alive, I wonder?

“Harry Potter books are written by an actual practicing witch to indoctrinate our youth. These books contain accurate depictions of ritual magic and satanic doctrines. Those who say it’s “just fiction” need a reality check! Fiction is the best way to promote occult belief systems! (Just ask Walt Disney. His job as a 33rd degree Freemason was to condition American children to embrace occult themes in entertainment.)”

Surely our Stephen might have escaped the cruelty of the Amazon rev… no, guess not.

“I would rather eat my own mouldy and gangrenous leg and die slowly and miserably of superflu before reading any more of this descriptive drivel (I have stopped at page 372).”

I was overwhelmed by the inadequacies of our literary superheroes. But worse was to come. I discovered that not only were we expecting adults to read rubbish, we were also feeding it to a new generation, and it had spawned its own army of pre-teen Amazonians.

“…the thing I hate the most is this; How come they praise the pig for being special when the spider should be the one getting the attention?!?! Kids will hate this book, including me and the whole 5th grade.”

And worse,

“A bear that likes honey HUH!!!! What complete and utter trash. It would some up why he is so fat though. The writer should have his hands chopped off for the execution of this poor idea. His idea altogether should warrant him a jail sentence and they should throw away the key. Actually better not someone might find it and let him out better dissolve it in some acid. If the person who invented reading and writing read this he would be spinning in his grave with disgust.”

I guess he would. But, it was around here that I began to feel less guilty at abusing my role as a printface entertainer and a pang of sorrow hovered over me on behalf of the Lonesome Stars. Of course there are people who have to hate. If they aren’t miserable how can they ever be happy? They have an awful day at the end of an awful life and they spit it all out at some innocent book that didn’t really do any harm to anybody. We’re people too, dude. Thus did I see myself, not as a vilified writer, but as a counselor, a provider of much-needed therapy. Better they harangue me than resort to serial acts of carnage late at night. I looked up my own Lonesome Star on the Amazon site and found that he had an entire galaxy of single twinklers. In fact the only review he’d given with more than one star was to a Willie Nelson DVD. I’m very fond of Willie myself so I’m already beginning to bond with my attacker. And, in fairness, there was evidence of medication being administered in his review of Dr. Siri which might have been absent in this later review of the most recent James Bond adventure.

“So, i didn’t care for Faulds title or story.the drawing of Bond on the cover was done well.I think cover sale a book.the story makes the book.and the U.K. was totally wrong.and the new set of Fleming books coming in Aug.or Oct.this year are a complete let down…does some one realy think these think out?…Bond i hope the best for you…”

Sic

On Thanksgiving Day I had an accident. No one was hurt. No real damage done. It happened this way. I was at the Texas Lone Star Bar in Washington Square signing copies of The Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide and The Corruptionist. The Guide is a small book–same size as a Lonely Planet phrase book. Fits snuggly like a pack of cigarettes into a shirt pocket.

There was a large crowd in attendance. As one would expect as the bar offered a free Thanksgiving Day dinner. That brought in what is called by locals “The Balloon Chasers” – a group of expats who find free food joints by the balloons put outside to attract customers into the bar.

I sat at a bench in the corner. Books piled on the table. A reader from Hawaii asked me to sign books for him and to keep them for him as he wanted to drink and eat gravy without spilling any on the books. Good idea. I placed the books on the bench. As I was signing books, the pile of signed books somehow was knocked over on the bench. The Guide (remember fits into the shirt pocket size) was dislodged and fell into a crack between the bench and wall. The crack was large enough to swallow the book but too small to reach down and fish it out.

Old George’s driver (ex-driver, as Old George is deceased) was called upon to retrieve the missing book. He went off and returned with a long coil of wire. One of those makeshift lengths that looked suspiciously like what was used to unclog the toilets (another story). The ex-driver spent ten minutes fishing for the book with the coiled wire. In the process he started to dismantle the paneling. One strip at a time, exposing the bare concrete wall. By this time the assistant cook was on her back under the bench trying to pull the book out from the bottom end.

By this time there was quite a crowd gathered around the bench. Photographs were taken of the ex-driver and assistant cook as if they were part of a crime scene. Everyone was cheering them on. It soon became apparent that short of getting a jacket hammer to tear down the wall or a chain saw to dismember the bench that neither one would get to the book.

I finally intervened and asked them to leave the book in its dark resting place. Rumors have circulated for many years that Washington Square would be torn down by the rows of shabby shophouses and rebuilt into a glistening complex of chrome and steel condos and shopping malls. Sooner or later that will happen. When the wrecking ball strikes the Texas Lone Star Bar, a worker who is paid $6 a day will likely find the Vincent Calvino Reader’s Guide signed for Kevin, and either throw it back in the rubble or sell it on the street for $2.

Accidents are random. They shape how we remember things. And they influence the creation of stories upon which memories are built. For that Thanksgiving Day signing, a lot of people won’t remember the turkey or the signing, but they will remember the ex-driver and assistant cook, working together to dislodge a small book about a private eye who used to frequent the bar of lost things, lost causes and lost people.

I went back to the spot where I killed my first man yesterday. I killed him four years ago. I return every few months. Each time I arrive, it’s so peaceful I can’t believe anyone really died. But, even though I’m a writer of crime fiction, someone really did.

I walked across a dirt lot, puddled with the afternoon rain, past the empty reservoir at the head of the valley. Below me the village of Irtas drifted down toward the convent where they hold the annual lettuce festival. The buildings fingered the bare hillsides. Beyond the pines and a silent olive grove: the scene of the murder.

A cabbage patch. In 2003, a young gunman from the Fatah faction of the PLO was creeping home to be with his family for the Ramadan breakfast. Just as darkness was falling. The very time I was there yesterday.

I imagined the trees closing above him, the dim glow of the fluorescent lights inside the house calling him. Then, if he noticed it, the red dot of a laser pointer, used by a local collaborator to alert the Israeli snipers on the hill above to their target. The crack of a distant rifle—the snipers would’ve been 800 metres away—and nothing, or at best a few struggling breaths.

His body was gone when I arrived there the day after his death. I stood in that spot with his wife and mother, as they told me about the moment when they heard the shot, saw the body in the twilight, recognized his clothing, touched his blood. They told me with such vivid detail I knew it had to be part of a novel—it was simply too vibrant, too full of the emotions of life in extreme circumstances, for me to limit it to my weekly report for Time Magazine.

So I made that death the first one in my debut crime novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM. When I re-read those pages, it always makes me want to drive the few miles from my home to this place on the southern tip of Bethlehem, drawn by the real death, the fictional death, my memories and my prose.

When it’s dank and raining and the same time of year as that first killing, the draw is too strong. So I stood in the olive grove watching the outside of the house across the cabbages.

I stared up at the hill where the Israelis had waited. I’ve been in situations as a journalist, where I’ve looked about and wondered if I was in someone’s sights. I knew that, now, there were no shooters around. Still I felt the dryness in my mouth that comes with pondering whether a man with his finger on the trigger will object to your taking a step into the open.

I edged backward, disturbing the rain from the branches of an olive tree. It always seemed to me most likely that the collaborator had waited here, watching. Angry, hating himself for what he had been trapped into doing, wondering if he’d get away this time or be caught and slaughtered in the street.

He might be dead by now. So many Palestinians, particularly those who collaborate or are suspected of collaborating with Israel, are.

But he’s also my collaborator. I don’t pretend to be free of the damage of the intifada that I covered as a journalist. I’m not Israeli or Palestinian. It doesn’t draw me back into its violent clutches as seems to be happening to them once more.

Still, when I wait among those olive trees, I’m somehow nervous and unsure of myself, like the collaborator who waited for his mark to emerge from the silent darkness. Though the target, the real man and the character in my book, is long dead, I find myself whispering to him: “Come on. Come on out of the trees. Let me see you.”

One day, I expect him to come.

I like my car. I know it’s unfashionable these days, but then I am a deeply unfashionable person. My car is a Subaru Impreza, it has a daft fin on the back, it is the ‘classic’ Subaru blue and looks like the sort of thing a 25 year old male petrol-head might have. In fact 25 year old male petrol-heads do frequently challenge me to races which I decline with another of my deeply unfashionable habits, letting loose a tirade of invective. But all that aside, my car is actually practical. Yeah, right, girl petrol-head! I hear you cry. But it is. My car is four wheel drive and, when you live up a mountain amid ceaseless rain as I do, you need that. Many are the times I’ve trundled across the high moors of Lancashire and Yorkshire in the snow, passing abandoned non-four wheel drive cars as I go. Smug? Me? Well, I was.

Yesterday I had an ‘incident’. I was on a narrow country road in the middle of nowhere when I met a little Mini coming in the opposite direction. Roads like this are lined, often on both sides, with dry stone walls which widen out periodically on one side or another into passing spaces. These allow cars to pass each other relatively easily and prevent reversing marathons that would tax even Lewis Hamilton. The driver of the Mini had a passing space less than two metres behind. The passing space on my side was probably about 30 metres down a steep hill. And so I sat and waited for the Mini to do the ‘right’ thing. Nothing happened. I looked into the other car and saw first terror and then anger on the drivers face. No way was that car going to budge! And so if I didn’t want to sit there for the rest of my life I would have to reverse down a very steep hill beside an extremely wonky and eccentric dry stone wall. There was no point in reasoning with the other driver as fury had set in now and I could see that this person had managed to get from fear of reversing to hatred of me in one easy bound. I admit, it made me furious. And so determined to prove to the Mini that I didn’t care how new, shiny and funky that car was, I remained the better driver, I reversed too quickly and, guess what? Yes, I scratched the side of my car. A characteristic tirade of invective ensued, at myself for being so stupid. The Mini whizzed past unscathed with its driver looking on at me with marked superiority. If I hadn’t thought I would be mown down like grass I might have stepped out in front of the Mini and pointed out that the scratch on my wing was not entirely my fault. But then what, I ask you, would my death have achieved?

So now I’m in the hole for hundreds of pounds, it’s just before Christmas and I really didn’t need this.  My own fault in so many ways, yes, but not entirely. Here in the UK a lot of store is set these days by theory when people take their driving tests. As well as a practical driving test there is also a written theory examination too. Jolly good. But I do think that a few sessions of what I call ‘meatball’ driving would be an excellent idea as well. What do I mean by this? Well, driving some narrow, wall-lined country roads around flooding rivers, loose animals and massive gaggles of hill walkers for a start. Maybe a session negotiating around Marble Arch in central London (close your eyes and cross yourself). Or even better, a day on the roads of İstanbul. Drive from Atatürk Airport across the city to the first Bosphorus Bridge and then cross it into Asia. For anyone who knows the city, my sadism will be obvious. For anyone who doesn’t, think periods of gridlock punctuated by short bursts of Formula 1.

A few weeks ago I was at the crossroads. To my left was a blog-free life. No scrambling for interesting, cuttingly humorous topics to entertain the seven people who read these blogs religiously (in a pew dressed in a habit…boom, boom). To my right was what the Japanese call giri, a moral responsibility, a debt of obligation I owed my fellow blogmates not to be the only rat to flee a sinking ship. Ahead was…all right, perhaps it wasn’t a crossroads, it was a T junction and I only had the two directions to travel. And, I confess, I already had my cheese packed and I’d reallocated those valuable twenty minutes I spent on my weakly blob, to weeding the garden. But then Wan Wan (not her real name) came into my life.

Wan Wan (not her real name) is a young Taiwanese lady who quit her job at the South Taipei 7/11 sub-branch to become a ‘professional blogger’. I guffawed.

“Come on, darling,” I thought, condescendingly and with no thought to PC, “I’ve been blogging away here for four months and I haven’t made so much as a damp digestive biscuit. You might as well think about becoming a professional self-teeth flosser or a professional one-handed lint juggler. It doesn’t happen, lovey.”

Wan Wan (not her real name) cleared a million bucks last year. Since she started her blog five years ago she’s had 170 million hits on her website. (n.b. Normally I’d make up figures like that but clearly I have no need to do so in this case). In 2008 she was the fourth most Googled person in the universe including the non-planet formally known as Pluto. In fact, I’m sure that just by writing the name Wan Wan (not her real name) in this blog, we’ll have thousands of accidental and disappointed miss hits from single young misses in search of their heroin. According to my, now disconnected, Statcounter, my site www.colincotterill.com (free plug) was peaking at fourteen hits a day. Most of those didn’t even stick around long enough to enter the meaningful section where I expose my soul and display photographs of my bougainvilleas.

So, what does she write, this Madonna of the blogosphere? Political intrigue? Celebrity scandal? Naughty underwear confessions? No, she writes about being bored at work, at having to watch TV with her dog, at accidentally washing her face with toothpaste. She writes about stuff that doesn’t need writing about cause it’s stuff that those 170 million lonely people do every day. It’s obviously what the new generation wants; OWN LIFE + 1 millimeter. She’s confirmation that the world is a contentedly dull place.

By her own confession, she isn’t much of a writer but obviously nobody’s noticed. To divert our attention from this fact, she draws her own cartoons. These, I may add, are cartoons that make Doraemon look like a Rubens nude. Cartoons I could draw drunk with my left foot. And, as if that wasn’t annoying enough, despite the fact that all this nothing appears for free on her website, she’s sold more book versions of her blogs in Asia than Dan, JK, Stephen and me all rolled together (a not-too pleasant mental image). Four-hundred-thousand of her books have been sold in Thailand alone. Four hundred thousand of her books have been sold in Thailand alone. That wasn’t a misprint. I just didn’t believe it the first time I wrote it. They printed a thousand copies of my first novel and still have 920 stuck in their warehouse. Four-hundred-th… Shhheet.

So, my career path is clear. Left turn at the T junction. In my next weakly blob I shall dispense with the type of intellectual banter of which you have become a custard and I shall talk about how difficult it is to go to the bathroom neatly after you’ve had a mug of warm carrot juice for breakfast. I shall be empathetic, leave you with a lot of, “oh, yes, isn’t that the truth,” moments. And I shall round it all off with my own character, a loveable little tyke by the name of Phut Phut (not his real name). I’ll tickle your fancies with a little teaser at the end of this blob. And if you want to have a real frolicking good time while you’re waiting for the first adventures of Phut Phut, take a jolly romp through the website of the duchess of early-teen dementia. Look no further than http://www.wretch.cc/blog/cwwany.

Something fundamental is changing in the hive mind. The thousands of human hives have been subject to globalization. These cultural, language and faith colonies are interconnected in ways unimaginable a hundred years ago.

It is not just the way we communicate. It is more the desire of people who are born, educated, work and die inside their cultural hive to see the influence they have to reshape the content and means of delivery of such communication. The hive is glued together by language, culture and religion. Most of our lives we see ourselves as individuals; we see others the same way. But there is a collective life just below the surface That life that lurks rising up here and there like a submarine surveying the angry seas.

When tourists visit a foreign land they see the outlines of the collective in the churches, mosques, museums, palaces, and government buildings. Those are the artifacts of the hive’s past. Within the these places are the collective life which remains largely out of sight as the tourist is cut off by language, custom, tradition and ethnicity. Tourists by their very nature are “strangers” or “outsiders” and while the locals are happy to provide hotels, restaurants and attractions to take their money, they know such people can bring a threat to the hive. Every hive has a list of taboos—things you can’t discuss or talk about in public—and each hive has guardians that vet public discussions. These guardians, who patrol the public communication lines, are generally distrustful of new ideas, ways of thinking, critical opinions or different values about authority, power, justice, fairness and wealth. Each hive creates a mentality that it is exceptional and unique. Survival depends on protecting such a delusion. Writers, the best ones, are delusion busters. In parts of the world such writers are murdered, imprisoned or thrown into prison. It is the way a human hive works.

No hive is stable, unchangeable over time. The balance between the place of the individual and the role of the collective ebbs and flows, shifts, transforms and this can cause disturbance. Internal disagreement about the structures and values of the hive can break out into open rebellion, revolution, insurgency or civil war. We are cooperative by nature but also disagree as to the terms exacted for cooperation when they become a burden. I suspect that our private and collective selves are different expressions flowing from same pathways. It is the personal mixture of private and collective selves that merge to create consciousness and identity. What looks like a patchwork of overhead Bangkok telephone and electric wires on Sukhumvit Road from the outside from the inside feels like one smooth, single transmission cable.

For authors of novels, this possibility of change has great implications. Our task has been to recreate the emotional temperature inside the various chambers and follow around the players to see who does what to whom and for what reason and what consequences follow. In books we work the hive’s definition of hell and characters caught in the clutches of such belief. Writers dramatize these fears using belief in ghosts to ever lasting punishment to illuminate life inside the hive. Our books are snared in these belief systems that create consensus and keep hive members in line. Also we like the rebels. Those who refuse to consent to the beliefs and suffer the consequences. Because to question the guardians of the hive takes courage. Most of us aren’t that brave.

We engage readers emotionally. That is our power and our limitation. Others would argue books provide escape. Fantasy packaged to waste hours otherwise spent in boredom. I am of the school that you read (or write) a book because you want to know something beyond the surface of life. In this world, there is no time for escape into fantasy; there is too much to find out about the edge between fact and fiction. A novel is a good place to explore that borderline.

The hives depends upon communication links and communicators who use the links. Books, movies, music, newspaper, gossip, idle chatter created a community. You can have face-to-face story telling. The oral tradition. Or you can use modern technology for the hole in one: you narrate face to face story telling and then use modern technology to transmit it to thousands or millions of strangers. Those stranger read the face to face story and believe that it says something about the characters, their motives, intentions and has causal connections that make for the scaffolding of a story. What is built inside the cultural hive comes out through the process of story telling. It is rarely on the surface as a cultural artifact. As most story tellers are talking about their own history, through their own language, and finding and sharing a common identification of values, history and ethnicity.

We have a need for face-to-face interaction with others. We are foremost social beings; the kind of creatures that are happiest inside the hive. One of the worst forms of punishment in ancient times was banishment or exile. In current times, it would be solitary confinement. Books reach out and bring the others into the mental life of the reader. It is a simulation of the face-to-face interaction that the reader is looking to find.

Then there are authors like Rees, Cotterill, Nadal and myself who inhabit a foreign (to us) landscape and are writing books about the face-to-face interaction that happens in very difficult and different circumstances than the ones we’ve been raised to deal with. I can’t speak for the other bloggers, but I wasn’t raised with an eye in mind to prepare me to write about countries in Southeast Asia. Reality check of many books shows, at least to those who know, the writer only has a superficial understanding of the hive mentality where he or she has set the book. They’ve scratched the surface. But they haven’t gone into the backrooms where the guardians live and work.

People are becoming more immobile, more stationary; heads stuck in front of a screen for many hours more than anyone would care to admit. It makes what we do all the more odd. The irony of the Internet is that while in terms of screen time they have never been so worldly but in terms of non-screen time people are becoming more insular and isolated from larger communities. The death of newspapers and foreign bureaus has contributed to the blackout; the same with TV coverage as the major networks and government stations have cut back on foreign correspondents, a dying breed if there ever was one. It is beginning more difficult to find out what goes inside the collective mind of people inside other cultures. Authors who have embedded themselves in such hives are a continuing communication link to the collective mentality, and the view from inside the hive becomes more important over time. Because that is where the true differences in values, perceptions, ideals, and goals are manufactured and delivered to the next generation.

Novelists aren’t journalists. Research for a novel isn’t the same as researching a journalistic article.

I’d have thought that was too obvious to need stating. But then I became a published novelist, and I realized that people thought the two things were rather the same.

I was a journalist for almost 20 years before my first novel was published. THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is a crime novel set in Bethlehem during the intifada, and I’d spent over a decade covering the Palestinians by the time the book came out in 2007. No need for new research there.

Much of the next two books, A GRAVE IN GAZA and THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, were based on stories I had covered as a journalist. Though I returned to the places many times before I wrote the books, these visits were mainly to record details of place, smell and weather. It wasn’t to interview people, as a journalist must.

That’s because I wanted the books to have their basis less in the political moment at which I had covered those stories, and more in the emotional response I had observed in other people and in myself as those events unfolded.

Things were different when I came to research my new novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published in February.

THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is set in Brooklyn, New York, where there’s a growing community of Palestinian immigrants. I lived in New York in the 1990s, when I covered Wall Street for some US newspapers and magazines. I was a Greenwich Village type, with forays to Soho, Tribeca and the Lower East Side. I used to go months without leaving Manhattan. Brooklyn wasn’t exactly one of my regular haunts. So last year I went out to Bay Ridge, where most Palestinians live, and met a couple of people. I toured the neighborhood with a kid in his late teens and learned about the gang culture.

I specifically didn’t want to do what a journalist does. I didn’t want to sit down and pull out my notepad, though I can see why novelists may feel the urge to do so. I wanted to walk the streets as my detective Omar Yussef would – a little alienated, not knowing quite where I was, out of place. I know Omar Yussef – the real man and his fictional manifestation – well enough to make my way through Bay Ridge as though he were with me.

During my visit to New York, I stopped in at the home of some friends who had been correspondents for a US newspaper in Jerusalem. One of them said: “So who’re you talking to in Brooklyn?”

It was a journalist’s question—who you’re talking to will determine the depth of information you garner and therefore will signal the worth of your article. I felt a stab of defensiveness. It was as though she had accused me of not doing my job. Of course, I wasn’t doing my job, because I no longer had a job. Journalism was my job. Now I’m a novelist. Most definitely not a job.

But the twinge I felt at her query alerted me to the difference in my new “métier” (let’s see how many ways I can find to avoid referring to my writing as a “job”).

I recently finished writing the manuscript of a novel about Mozart. When I began it, various friends suggested I talk to “experts” on the subject. I didn’t. Because they weren’t experts on what I was writing about. They were experts on the known facts about Mozart. Well, I can read as well as they can.

What I needed were musicians, who could tell me how they get inside a Mozart piece, how they plot out their performance emotionally. I needed friends in Vienna who could take me to little-known places that would give me the atmosphere of the eighteenth century in that city. I needed to learn to play the piano, to feel the extent of Mozart’s genius and to be moved with (rather than just “by”) his music.

A journalist collates the impressions and assertions of others. As a novelist, I’m focused on my own impressions. If there’s anything to be asserted in my books, it ought not to be a digest of someone else’s thoughts.

I’m starting this process again. The novel I’m researching now will be set in Italy in 1600 and will be about an artist. I’m off to Rome in a few weeks, and already friends are asking me which experts I’m intending to interview. I may talk to some art historians, but they won’t be the most important factor in my research. That’ll come when I put some oil on canvas.

I don’t expect to show anyone the results of my daubings (just as I don’t want anyone except my two-year-old son to listen to my rotten piano playing). But the sensation of working with paint is going to be much more important than hearing someone’s assessment of how it was for someone else long dead to muck about with oils.

Sometimes we can all descend into darkness. If, like me, you are subject to bouts of depression anyway, this is all the more profound. And let’s face it, things have not been good. Here in the UK we’ve had heated and distressing debate about whether our troops should or should not remain in Afghanistan and what that might mean for the Afghan people. In America, they’ve had the terrible Fort Hood shootings, all sorts of madness continues to happen off the coast of Somalia and, of course, the debate about whether or not Iran should have nuclear power rumbles on. I don’t know the rights and wrongs of any of this but what I am very aware of is our need, as human beings, to be able to get up in the morning with a modicum of hope.

This week beginning 9th November is significant for two reasons. Firstly the 9th itself is the 20th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall. On the 9th November 1989 the East German government stated that all citizens of the GDR could, from that day on, cross over to West Berlin. This declaration came after weeks and weeks of protest by the people of the GDR and, as soon as it was issued, they and many West Germans, rushed to the wall. Scenes of great joy as German hugged German took place on top of the wall and it was at this point that unification became a possibility. At a stroke, years of tyranny and oppression came to an end.

The second notable date this week is the 10th November. This date marks the 71st anniversary of the death of one of the most influential and enlightened politicians of the 20th century, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Not only was Turkey’s first republican president one of the few intelligent military strategists (on any side) of the First World War, he was also a person of vision and humanity. It was Atatürk who, after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the wake of World War 1, roused the Turks to fight for their independence against the occupying forces of Britain, France and Greece. Victorious in what is called the War of Independence, he then set out to modernise the country and equip it to compete and survive in the modern world. He devised and implemented a Roman style alphabet to make the Turkish language more accessible, he introduced primary education for all children, he emancipated women and he pursued a not always easy foreign policy of non-intervention. Atatürk’s great maxim, ‘Peace at home and peace in the world’ summed up his belief that war, unless pursued because one is attacked, is a crime. After doing all this as well as setting up numerous cultural, historical and technological projects Atatürk died on the 10th November 1938 aged only 57. But his legacy continues. I have been in Turkey many times on the 10th November when at 9.05am, the exact moment of his death, the whole nation grinds to a halt as everyone remembers him and silently honours who he was and what he did.

These two events have much in common in that they both represent triumph over adversity and in the face of over-whelming odds. The people of the GDR had had enough of that wall and so, the repressive state not withstanding, they got rid of it. Atatürk took a country defeated in war and changed it into a nation with pride in itself and hope for the future. In the year when an African-American man swept to power in the USA on the back of a slogan which told people that ‘Yes, we can!’ perhaps we should all just take a moment to, if necessary, manufacture some hope. Because yes, we can, if we do really want to.

A few thoughts about ‘the blurb’. Firstly, it’s a very cool word. It belongs more in nonsense rhymes between slithy toves and mome raths than on a book cover. “I blurbed my mucalodian verytidiously.” Yes, that’s where it belongs.

But, despite its coolness, the blurb can be a deceitful tove. Here follows an exposé of the naughty blurb and its role in publishing. For those of you who have a sensitive disposition and hold a firm belief that crime writers should never themselves commit crimes, I suggest you look away from the screen now. Here goes;

It isn’t unthinkable for a writer to write a blurb for a book he or she hasn’t read. Admit it. you’re taken aback. Well, if you think that was an eye opener, try this one on for size;

It isn’t unthinkable for a writer to ask another writer what he or she would like written in his or her blurb.

Writer A. “Ooh, I don’t know. Something about how I’ve reached new levels of sophistication? That this is the book that will put me on the world literature map? You know?”

Writer B. “Any sex in it?”

Writer A. “Yeah, lots.”

Writer B. “So, how about, ‘An erotic tour de force.’?”

Writer A. “Yeah, I like that. Thanks. I owe you one.”

In their defense, writers are sucked into the mire of deceit just as a blackmail victim is hit with more and more outrageous demands. Once the candid photos of you, Father O’Mally and the goat are locked up in the safe, you’re an eternal victim. It all begins simply enough. You get a delivery of a manuscript from the bubbly publicist of a ‘young and exciting’ new writer. She ‘just loves’ your books and wondered whether you might have time to read this story and provide a blurb. You read it; a mythical tale of criminal detection and love in the realm of the Acluvian Weredragon. It’s crap. You want to write, “This author makes me wish I could spell ‘awful’ with an extra ‘w’.” But she’s young and exciting and…well, whose first book wasn’t awwful in its own swweet way? So, you blurb with something non-committal like, “This book was really long and I think most clever readers will find something in there somewhere that they can understand.”

And the book is miraculously published and there’s your blurb on the front cover; “This book is REALLY …CLEVER. (Colin Cotterill). And yes, you didn’t exactly say that but look, there’s your name on the front of a book. Free advertising. And you know readers will say, “Hmm! He’s written a blurb. He must be somebody.” Because nobody actually knows about the great blurb scam. So, more books arrive from more exciting young writers and you blurb them, not for the writer’s benefit, but for your own. You make up cute blurbs that don’t betray your true taste.

“This book was like Viagra. It kept me up all night.” And you become such a consummate blurbist that eventually, that dreaded day arrives. You get a parcel from the neither young nor exciting author you had a few beers with at the Harrogate Festival, and he asks you for a blurb for his latest. You know him. He’s really big in Norfolk. He’s hanging around in the same lower corridors of The List as you. You can’t, in all decency, refuse him. Word would leak out. You’d get a reputation for being a snob. Nobody would buy you beers at the next festival. So you do him one. Then you send him one of yours to do. And there you are in the mire. Stuck! Manuscripts arrive by the truckload. If you read them all you wouldn’t have time to evacuate your bowels of a morning. So, you flip through a few pages, breath in the essence of the story and select a clever blurb from your stock list.

Wait, now I think of it, none of the above is true. I make stuff up. I mean, Holy Noodles, if it were true you’d never believe another blurb. You’d never trust the word of your favourite writer again. I’d be blacklisted in the industry and never sell another book. So, fear not, it’s all crap.

“Cotterill has the uncanny ability to lead readers up the garden path knowing full well the path will have vanished behind them. An autoerotic tour-de-force.” (William Shakespeare)

Matt’s latest blog titled Jerusalem’s a zoo got me thinking about what a great metaphor a zoo becomes when one examines the animal being watched and the animal watching. In The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Richard Dawkin talks about the concept of “Flight Distance.” It is a well-known concept for those who study animal behavior in the wild. Flight distance measures the distance, say a wolf would allow a human being to approach before taking flight. Compared to feral dogs the wolf takes off at a much farther distance. And a domestic dog rather than taking flight might wag its tail and lick your hand.

Of course if an animal is in a zoo cage, flight distance become irrelevant; there is no place to run. The enclosure is protected by the bars, moat, fence or other barriers to separate the creature from higher primates like ourselves. From ancient China to modern times governments and kingdoms have built walls to keep out the possible predator, the other that might cause them harm. In this case, the predator or other is another group of human beings. Of course, when man builds such walls we effectively construct our own cages. The irony is often lost on those seeking protection that by building such contentment structures; we are putting ourselves a kind of zoo.

Flight distance is also experienced by expats. Strangers who come from a different culture cause anxiety. That anxiety is often mutual. Though expats are tolerated for a variety of reasons involving class, money and education. Knock out those social and economic props and you have a person who isn’t an expat but an illegal immigrant. See how the illegal immigrant is treated in America, England, Spain, Italy, Denmark (the list goes on and on), compared with the expat. Perhaps the difference is somewhere between a wolf and feral dog.

Then there are the ethnic tribes living inside the same borders or along the same borders. Flight distance ebbs and flows between these ethnic groups and politicians measure the emotions of the day in making their policy.

Both sides—the local and the outsider—feel the stirrings of the ancient flight hormones racing through their blood stream. We automatically place some distance to separate ourselves from anyone who signal even a marginal threat. Why take the chance is the little voice playing inside the head. On the Skytrain in Bangkok, I’ve seen seats empty on either side of a foreigner as the Thai commuters prefer to stand in the crowded aisle than sit next to a non-Thai. In the 1980s in New York City, you saw three or four teenagers walking toward you in downtown Manhattan and you crossed over to the other side, or turned down another street.

We find ways to put distance between those who are different. We wish to avoid them. In part the educational system encourages each national group to feel exceptional and to view others as less worthy, important, or, in extreme cases, human. This works well in war. Hatred and the fired up passion fueled by nationalism and ethnic identity allows commanders to override the flight distance monitor in a soldiers’ head and send him or her into battle. Though the historical record is highly suggestive that males bond into maundering bands intend on ambush and murder.

Strangers are uneasy as they go through an alien territory. No doubt we have a genetic memory of killing or fleeing from such individuals. Then we built walls. Because we are territorial by nature and predatory by design, and fearful of the intentions and motives of those we don’t know. If we have no prior bond with them, or a bond that has been broken, and we think of such people not as people but monsters and feel nothing but hostility toward monsters.

Without the bond of community we are on alert of the distance of others. We measure that distance. It’s on the nightly news. Where the enemy is hiding and waiting. We are told to be vigilant. We take off our shoes and belts watches and open our laptops for inspections at airports. There is no flight distance once you’re on an airplane. We live in an age where people are hunkered down, watching the horizon for danger. Perhaps we are reverting to a wolf flight distance pattern. What we don’t want is for foreigners to stay too close to where we live. We don’t want those who are different in appearance, belief, religion, or social class at our elbow. It makes us fearful for our throats.

We shuffle along day-by-day inside our own private zoos thinking we are free. When we watch the nightly news broadcast it is a trail of visual images of people who miscalculated the flight distance and ended up wounded or dead. Those images of horror keep everyone on their toes. Keeps them on their side of the fence. Keeps them in line and dependent on the government for protection. The wall builds best friend. Fear. Those of us who set stories inside such communities hope to illustrate perceptions from multiple points of view and without making a judgment of right or wrong. What we can offer is a version of how people inside the cultures we write about measure the flight distance that separates them from us with a glimmer of hope that understanding how and why we measure might give us a new way of looking at others and ourselves.