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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Georges Simenon died of natural causes in September 1989.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, I really don’t.

It’s too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With shocking self-obsession, it thinks the eyes of the world are turned admiringly upon it all the time.

Jerusalem sometimes seems like that inexplicably popular idiot everyone knew in high school. Exerting a stupefying magnetism over people with otherwise solid judgment.

I’ve been in Jerusalem 14 years. I’m under no illusions as to what keeps me here. I’ve made a good life for myself with good friends, and the place provides me with the material for my writing.

But I’m rather immune to its other supposed charms. It’s no Tuscany.

Yet all my journalist pals have come and gone – and come back again. I’ve been here so long, everyone to whom I’ve said goodbye ends up dropping in for dinner once more. It wouldn’t happen if I went back to live in Wales. No one is drawn there with idealistic visions of its sublimity…

I spoke to a writing group in the center of Jerusalem last week. Lovely people the lot of them. Mostly young Americans or Canadians, Brits and South Africans who’ve immigrated recently to Israel and want to get together with writers of a similar background. All of them so devoted to Jerusalem.

To some degree, each of them has to live here a while to see beyond the newness. They’re experiencing the same happiness I recall when I arrived at university and discovered a kind of freedom I’d only before imagined. Until then, they’ll write about Jerusalem in the tones of the biblical psalmist, making of the city a personified lover, the object of desire and devotion.

That isn’t how I see the place. I’ve lived through an intifada, seen Jerusalem mangle the bodies of its peoples and accept the spray of hateful slogans on its walls. I’ve been called all kinds of names by all kinds of people and sued by some particularly unreasonable ones. I’ve come close to being run down on crosswalks by angry Israeli drivers and shoved aside in the Old City by angry hashish-raddled Palestinians.

For a while all that made me angry too. Not so angry that it overcame the feelings of creativity it gave me. There’s a certain anger – spun forward and made pro-active, positive – at the heart of Omar Yussef, the hero of my Palestinian crime novels.

Why not? Because I discovered I liked the hash-tokers of the Muslim Quarter rather better than I enjoyed the company of their politicians or their professional classes.

That’s one of the main reasons I write crime novels about this place. Crime novels are the opposite of idealization. They see “the skull beneath the skin,” as Eliot wrote of John Webster (a playwright I recommend to anyone who likes a bit of morbid, cynical straight-talk).

It isn’t that I take a negative view of Jerusalem and its environs. I long ago realized that I continue to live here because there’s something I like about it, and its people. Just not in a romanticized way. It’s simply because I’ve come to understand the ways in which the people and their city push each other to the edge of existence. It’s when they’re on the edge that I find out what really counts for them.

And for me.

You would think that somebody who has just fallen headlong into a cellar and broken their leg would be less than keen on the subterranean. I wish I could say that were true, (I am a clumsy type after all) but it just isn’t. Show me a mysterious grille in the middle of the pavement and I will break every nail I have as I attempt to lift it up. Many moons ago I was actually lowered into a Byzantine cistern by my wrists whilst holding a torch in my mouth. Then of course there was my attempted foray into a disused Victorian public toilet just off Great Portland Street. But let us draw a veil over that one. I like things ‘down there’ and so I was absolutely delighted when my latest book ‘Death by Design’, just ‘happened’ to include subterranean action underneath the streets of London.

As well as acting in a distinctly suspicious manner in underground railway stations and foot tunnels, I had to do a good deal of research for this book. It was during the course of researching and making useful contacts that I came upon an organisation called The Old London Underground Company. The brainchild of a charming man called Ajit Chambers, The Old London Underground Company (TOLUC) is opening up London’s neglected subterranean tunnels and disused underground stations. There are lots of them and they are fascinating. Back in the 1980’s my son and his classmates from his old school in the City of London visited the disused Mark Lane station on Byward Street. This was the forerunner to Tower Hill and its dimly lit platforms can still be seen from trains going from Tower Hill towards Monument. But that’s just catching a glimpse. Going down into the station, which is a time capsule from the late 1960s, is quite another matter. TOLUC wants to open up places like this for tourism for community and corporate meetings and events and just for the sheer joy that providing a window upon a very important aspect of London’s history will bring. These tunnels and stations represent some of the best examples of Victorian engineering anywhere in the country. The ingenuity employed to build these networks is truly staggering as is the part such underground workings have played in the overall history of London.

On a personal level I find all of this very exciting and I am pleased that the Company is attracting support even at this problematic time. But then recession or no recession, innovation must and should proceed. 2010 has not started at all well for me (old broken leg) but things like TOLUC make me feel optimistic and raise a smile. Pulling such an ambitious project off will be a huge coup and I for one can’t wait for those tunnels to open. For anyone else who is a bit of a subterranean freak more details about The Old London Underground Company can be requested from the website: www.theoldlondonundergroundcompany.com

Just like I pictured it. Skyscrapers and everything. (With apologies to Stevie Wonder) I tell you there ain’t nothing you can’t get in that city.

“Hey, mister. You wanna girl?”

“No, thank you.”

“Girl with testicles?”

“Maybe later.”

“Ganja?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Porn?”

“I don’t…No… Thanks a lot for asking.”

Pizza Hut and Starbucks and KFC and MacD. and more Seven Elevens than you could sound the door chimes of in one lifetime. Outside elevators like Sprite bubbles and sky trains that make you feel like you’re riding along in a mechanized advertisement for Pedigree Chum. Oh, wait. You are riding along in a mechanized advertisement for Pedigree Chum. Avatar animated 3D violence on the big screen with four-year-olds screaming their lungs out all around you. Little globules of sushi that cost more than the weekly salary of a Burmese builder. Sprawling shopping malls with sexy pre-teen talent shows and bomb searches and January discounts on Gucci, and I mean, the real Gucci. Not the just-as-good fake Gucci they sell out on the street.

No, sir. There ain’t nothing you can’t get in Bangkok except maybe Thai culture. Oh, there’s a lot of the instant stuff for tourists but you’ll probably find those Mo Lum dancers have MBA’s from Sacramento. Those quaint embroidery-festooned hill tribe ladies at the night bazaar have polyester pant suits back home in the wardrobes. And I’m not talking about the modern culture of tuktuks or dancing policemen or Yakult delivery ladies. I’m talking about Thai smiles that aren’t listed on the job description, and wearing a sarong because it keeps your willy cool in the hot season, and flip flops that are for walking along roads, not just from the bathroom door to the sink. I’m talking about where we come from. The Thailand outside.

Not many people know this but there’s a full-body culture-erasing scanner at Suvarnabhumi airport. It automatically deletes your cultural sensitivity. Just by entering the city you lose all sense of decency and decorum. I’ll give you a few examples. On my first night in the big city I went to have dinner with a huge literary celebrity, a crime-fiction icon, the whatever-the-male-version-of-a-diva-is of detective noir. He lives in a fancy condominium with a view of smog in four directions. I shook his hand, gave the two bottles of wine I’d bought to his wife and engaged her in a brief conversation about the efficacy of traveling on the new subway system. My icon walked into the kitchen with another wife and introduced her. I had been chatting merrily away to the maid. They have a maid. How was I to know where all our sisters and daughters disappear to? And how was I to know that I should have taken my shoes off at the door? They had a Christmas tree in reception for goodness sake. And don’t forget they’d erased my cultural sensitivity at the airport. Everything was designed to throw me out of kilter. I was Jethro Clampett on his first night in Beverly Hills and, believe me, things didn’t get any better.

Fortunately, my host that night was CG Moore and he has to pretend none of this happened if he wants to keep me blobbing for him every week. I’m back home now with my shoes off and my lunch pack swinging freely and a good old spicy squid salad (that was not made by a maid) dripping on to the keyboard. I’d like to forget my week in Bangkok but, unfortunately, I can’t because every day we get metropolitan garbage spewed up on our beach. (All hail to the light-heavyweight world champion of segue.) It’s a daily reminder of how the decadent other 2% live. CG suggested I post a few pictures of our urban flotsam on the off chance it makes someone feel guilty. Yeah, really.

I turned on the air-conditioner with the remote and immediately checked email. This is my habit. Like a gunslinger drawing two pistols and firing. Wrote this sentence as the email downloaded. Eleven messages. A quick glance: DOROTHYL which says there are 603 lines of text waiting to be read. The FCCT sent me a notice of upcoming events. Google Alert has four entries where second-hand copies of my books are being sold on amazon and ebay. Some Fan mail. An inquiry about getting published. An invitation from a fan.

Normally, I would go through the emails as if they were actually sent to me personally, deserving my full, undivided attention. Then I would mark down an event in my diary, send a note about it to friend, reply to emails. Then I’d open Mozilla to be informed who had added me on Facebook or had written on my “wall.” I’d check the NYT website, Bangkok Post website and couple of blogs.

In other words, I’ve been sailing through the afternoon with a hurricane on my back, accomplishing nothing. Forget hurricane; it is more like being stuck on an informational treadmill. There is no direction on a treadmill. You just run. There is a degree of excitement in this racing through messages, websites, blogs, comments, wikipedia entries, running words and phrases through google. If you love information gathering, then it doesn’t ever get any better than the Internet. You get to be that kid in the ultimate candy store. Gorge until you can’t see straight. Gorge until you can’t think straight or at all. And at the time you are doing this, it all seems so compelling, fun, and rewarding. But sitting back at the end of the day, I ask myself one question:

How much have I written on the new novel?

Not much to write home about. I have a fairly complete outline and the first 10,000 words. My outlines are rough guides and the finished book usually looks like a distant cousin. The books should be further along at this stage. I feel that I am falling behind. Partly this is a function of distraction.

Writing a book requires long hours of focused attention. You can’t mulitask and write a novel. Because you have to keep the whole story, plots and subplots, characters, their connections and motivations inside your head as a unified whole. This is a fragile territory. One that is easily disrupted. You have to create the emotions for those characters, make their lives and what is at stake for them real. You must concentrate on their lives to have any hope of doing this.

The Internet temptation is the beginning of the end of mental terrain that authors have occupied since the invention of writing. Movies and TV had the potential for distraction but the Internet is in a league all of its own: it is a social networking for vast numbers of strangers with something on their mind, a belief, an opinion, a theory, a fact they discovered. It is perpetual show and tell. All the searches, online reading, emails largely coil together in one lump at the end of the day. If you are writing novels, the idea is to turn all the metal into something tangible. Not a car or a lawn mower. But a book that runs 100,000 words that others will buy, read, enjoy and demand all their friends buy, read and enjoy.

Or so goes the theory. Next week I will talk about how Georges Simenon’s death marked the death of the writing space that authors occupied for thousands of years. I’ve already written next weeks blog before leaving for India. I will be in my room working as you read this week and next weeks blog.

Think of me unconnected to the outside world. Lost in Calvino’s latest case. He’s in New York and the story moves between New York and Bangkok. Think of me writing a New York and Bangkok story while in India.

The best thing about moving from journalism to fiction writing is that people show you more respect.

As a journalist covering a contentious issue like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I was often subject to rather nasty verbal attacks during public speaking engagements. For a partisan of either side, I seemed a fine target for their generalized contempt—they thought journalists were all against them and here was a live reporter on whom they could vent their spleen.

Thankfully that doesn’t happen now that I’m the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. I wasn’t sure that it would be different, but it turns out that there’s a big change in the way people behave toward me.

Here are two examples from the last week alone.

In Cologne, Germany, last week, I talked in a bookstore at the invitation of the Cologne-Bethlehem Association. Much of the audience was made up of middle-aged and older Germans who visit Bethlehem frequently and have made strong ties with the people there.

One older gentleman suggested that, because my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM shows the corruption and extortion carried out by the gunmen of the town during the intifada, my book “tended toward Israeli propaganda.”

But the old fellow was very respectful and as I answered him I could tell he was listening. (My response, of course, is along the lines of “No, actually the book doesn’t even address whether or not it’s right to shoot at Israelis; the book concerns itself with the negative effect those gunmen had WITHIN Palestinian society.”) Listening’s something that was often evidently not happening when, as a journalist, I would talk to audiences.

Then this week I went to the Israeli settlement of Efrat in the West Bank. I’ve visited many times before to write news reports about the confiscation of land or the endless pressure from Washington to stop building in the settlements. This time I was invited by the Gush Etzion Book Group, a few dozen women who live in the local settlements.

There had been quite some fiery debate within the group about whether to have me come and speak to them. Indeed, someone hinted that certain members of the group had stayed away.

But I was glad to be there. After all, much of THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM takes place in the village of Artas and the Dehaisha Refugee Camp, which abut the northern reaches of Efrat. I want very much to talk about my books with people who have a stake in the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. Provided they’re willing to listen respectfully, to examine what I’m actually saying and not what they think I’m saying (or what they wish I’d say.)

The evening in Efrat went well and, in fact, much of what we talked about was how little I’m interested in politics—despite the apparently political subject-matter of my novels. What interests me is “the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street” (that’s a line from my sleuth Omar Yussef in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the next of my novels, which will be published Feb. 1).

Such respectful treatment is a big contrast to situations I encountered as a journalist. Then I would look out over audiences which seemed to be entirely red-faced and with arms crossed across every chest. The hostlie body language didn’t change, even though I was essentially saying the same things I’m saying now. Partisans hate journalists and, I believe, many of them used somehow to detest that I had found a kind of personal peace in covering the very conflict that stirs them up and stresses them so.

In Cologne and Efrat, I believe people heard what I had to say and understood that I’m pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli. Politics makes people choose sides, and I want no part of that.

I also think choosing sides makes for rather bad novels. It’s in the shades of gray, where decisions are so difficult or even impossible to make, that a novel becomes truly compelling. Think of Graham Greene’s best novels. Political journalism on the other hand is, to say the least, dreary. Think of the glib rubbish turned out by columnists who have to fill three op-ed spaces each week.

Who would you respect more—Graham Greene or G. Gordon Liddy? See what I mean?

So I’ll continue to talk about my books to anyone who’ll take the time to read them, because that in itself is a sign of respect and openness. Those, after all, are the qualities most needed by both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict if they’re ever to find peace.

Time was when you could buy a very nice little fake handbag that had been knocked out in someone’s garage with a clear conscience. All over the world little groups of people made clothes and accessories in the latest fashion for half the price of stuff sold on the high street. Market stalls were full of such items and when I was a teenager buying such cheap copies was the only way I could afford to be in any way ‘on trend’.

Quite what happened to change all this is unclear. Theories include the notion that the coming of designer labels into middle and working class consciousness was what altered things. Suddenly we all HAD to have a Lacroix necklace, a Gucci handbag or a Nike trainer even if what we actually got was a fake. It was the label that was important. Whether organised crime jumped on this bandwagon from the start or whether in fact they pre-empted this trend is also unclear. What is now beyond doubt however is that the type of people who knock out fake handbags these days are not Mr and Mrs Slightly-Dodgy in their garage. People who do this also run arms, traffic people and drugs, own brothels where women are treated with appalling cruelty and, in some cases, have connections with terrorist organisations. Clever and well connected, these people are powerful, ruthless and totally without conscience. Fake drugs like the too-good-to-be-true Viagra one sees almost everywhere these days are either ineffective or actually harmful. Pain killers that do not have any analgesic effects, heart pills that do nothing at all, contraceptives that make you sick. If it looks too good to be true, then guess what?

I had been morbidly fascinated with the knock off industry and its reputation as the slave trade of the 21st century for some time. However when I began to write my latest book ‘Death by Design’, a mystery set in and around the knock off trade I had to get down to some full-on research. What I found was worse than anything I had imagined. In some of the factories where these fakes are produced workers (usually illegal migrants) are chained to their work benches just like the workers used to be in the worst cotton mills in 19th century Lancashire. In many cases these people are working off their ‘debt’ to the slave masters who are also the people who trafficked them into the European Union, Turkey or wherever. Gangs are international, well organised and, unlike ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair, they really know the true meaning of ‘joined up thinking’.

I don’t know how to counter such organisations and neither does my protagonist, Çetin İkmen of the İstanbul Police Department. But in ‘Death by Design’ some of the co-operation that will be needed between law enforcement agencies across the globe is explored. A connection is discovered between a knock off factory in İstanbul and a similar operation in London. İkmen is therefore despatched to the British capital and given the job of integrating into one of these operations in the guise of an illegal immigrant. Not only does this well-educated and respected man learn a lot about the fake trade, he also finds out what it feels like to be considered ignorant, worthless and alien.

Although ‘Death by Design’ is an exciting book, with its fair share of homicides, explosions, car chases and a very brave and also funky Mayor of London, writing it was often a depressing pursuit. That our little designer treats are bought at such a price is both shameful and uncomfortable. That those who simply seek a better life elsewhere are exploited and brutalised by this industry is terrifying. ‘Death by Design’ is a fictional book which takes these international connections between crime gangs, dodgy manufacturers and terror groups to its logical conclusion. But if you do read it, ask yourself whether it is actually that far fetched after all. Also, next time you are looking for a new handbag or pair of trainers just take a moment to think about where you might purchase them from and whether that designer label is really worth looking for.