I am trying to wrap my mind around the almost hysterical, obsessive need for people to become a published author. Mostly, I suspect, it is like one of those twist off caps on a cheap bottle of wine where the threads don’t quite catch right. There is a concentrated effort to get the cap off. More simply, getting into the publishing racket is another example of our need for acceptance in the crowd of strangers. We live in age where many people wish to stand out apart from the crowd as an accomplished worthy, special word genius. The problem is the number of people who want to stand out by writing books has become larger than the crowd that read and buy books.

Like most people I admired perseverance as a noble attribute. People who don’t easily give and roll over with the first wall in life they hit. People who pick themselves up and keep on going. That’s my kind of people. Pull up a chair, I raise a glass of OJ to your grit.

But there is a limit. I think I may have found where that fence is. There is a writer who blogs at Literary Rejection Display and he’s blogged about his 11,000 rejections on the way to getting 82 stories published. One publishing industry insider called this record of rejection “inspirational.”

Remember we are talking about rejection. That haunting word that has shadowed every kid from 11 years on. Who in defeat, looks back at the bully and says, “Yeah, I’ll show you.”

Let’s test this theory of what is inspirational inside the world of rejection. Forget about writing stories for a moment. Let’s say the person wishes more than anything to be a world-class marksman and reap the honor of that status with the larger world. He goes to the shooting range. Pulls out his rifle and goes through 11,000 rounds of ammo. He hits the target 82 times. Not a candidate for sniper’s school. But he doesn’t give up. He slaps in another clip and blasts away.

Or assume he’s a trainee pilot and manages to crash land a plane (let’s make that a different plane) 11,000 times but has 82 confirmed landings where the plane safely landed. The air force would likely not give him a set of wings. United Airlines might hire him. But do you seriously want him flying the plane you are in?

Or assume he builds custom cars on spec. His brochure says he personally built spec cars, which were rejected by 11,000 buyers but 82 cars he managed to sell. Do you want to buy or ride in one of his cars?

Or he bakes cakes which are rejected by the 11,000 cake tasters, who spit them out, drink water to wash away the bad taste and ultimately shopped for cakes elsewhere. Still 82 other cake buyers are bought one of his cakes, saying they were yummy. Would you eat the cake?

Would we find the marksman, trainee pilot, car builder and cake maker inspirational in light of their rejections? Or would we wonder how a person can take that kind of beating, wake up the next morning and knowing he had a .007 percent chance of success but still manages to pull out the rifle, get into the cockpit of the plane, go to the garage and assemble another spec car, or to kitchen to bake a cake, firing up the process of almost near certain rejection all over again?

It seems writing stories and books is a special areas of human activity that attracts so many people who willingly continue to persist despite the clear message that rejection delivers: you should devote your talents and energies to something with at least lottery type odds of success. I don’t have the answer to the question of why the continued effort to write when such a clear signal of rejection of a writer’s work indicates that he shouldn’t bother is inspirational? Other than one: It is difficult to let go of a dream. Especially if you believe that in time, with enough effort, the dream can come true.

The harsh reality is that not everyone can play the violin, swim, run, shoot, cook, sing, dance or tell jokes at a professional level. There is a certain level that defines success. It is where a commercial enterprise that depends on turning a profit will pay money in order to support the talent. A big talent brings in a lot of money. Sponsors will pay money to be associated with the skill and talent. Perhaps in sports it is easier to know who has won and who has lost. It is objective. There are cameras at the finish line. Sensors at the end of the pool pick up the first touch. There is no arguing the toss. No bellyaching that a winner is made a loser because the gatekeepers don’t recognize talent. Losing 11,000 times isn’t professional talent. It is by definition not professional. The pitcher who throws 82 strikes is a hero, and can play for the Yankees. But if he throws 11,000 balls into the dirt in order to get 82 strikes, no one is going to write an inspirational movie about that player’s devotion to the game and how the Yankees were damn fools to overlook him.

In writing, the general feeling is that, well, it is all feeling, subjective, and if you tunnel away long enough, you can burrow under the gatekeepers wall and moat, breach the inner walls, and do a victory dance, holding up the published story or book, showing the world you are a winner after all.

No one likes rejection. The reality of the world is that truly talented people with unique abilities and rare talents and skills are a small percentage of the total population. The rest of us admire such people. We watch them perform. We benefit from such performances in many different ways. The problem emerges when we delude ourselves into telling ourselves, “Hey, I can write cozy novels just like Cakes Copeland.” Or “I can tell jokes better than David Letterman.” Or “I can write a novel better than Dan Brown.”

I know. The first and last example is what gives all that false hope. No one truly believes the network should dump Letterman and hire him as the replacement. Being funny is more than just hard work. Like writing a story or book.

I don’t know what the magic number is before a writer should move on. But I’d say it isn’t the 11,000 elevation, the K2 of rejection. A heavy weight boxer that takes 11,000 body punches while throwing 82 deserves a place in Guinness Book of World Records for continuing to stand in the ring. But inspiration isn’t the word that comes to mind when you look at the boxer who has taken that beating. Sadness is closer to the mark, a sadness that comes from understanding that we occupy a world where no one has the balls to tell the boxer that the fight is over. We tell him that because he’s still standing on his feet after such punishment that he is inspirational. Instead we should be telling him throw in the towel, take a shower, go home, devote what precious time he has left on this earth for and with family, friends, and community. Inside that place, he is more likely to make a difference, have more impact and a life with more meaning. There are things in life other than writing stories, books and films from which self-worth and accomplishment can be achieved. And just maybe those are things that, in the long run, should be valued more, seen as more significant than a published book with one’s name on the spine and front cover.

But wait one moment. Rejection has a certain meaning in the old world of publishing. Will that change as publishing migrates online and ebooks multiply like fireflies around the porch light? No question about it, change is already here. We are entering an new digital age where the old notion of rejection of book will radically alter. No one will have the patience to accumulate 11,000 rejections. They won’t need to wait for one rejection from a traditional publisher. Here’s why. Everyone now has access to make their books available to the whole world by simply uploading it. Others will be invited to read, download, buy or share it. In this new age of publishing, rejection will gather a new meaning. But it won’t be rejection at the gateway to readers.

It will be inside the beltway of readers that rejection will bite like a pit bull.

In this new world where everyone can claim to be an author, rejection will come as “authors” realize that only 82 of every 11,000 online authors are worth reading and indeed are read. The book with a few hits will become the new measurement of rejection. There will be sly ways sold to online authors to pump up their number of readers. That will soon be exposed as fraud. Rejection will be coded in new ways. Don’t think technology will abolish it. That won’t happen. People will still complain and wail of the unfairness of it all. In the end, old age, new age publishing, the bottom line is pretty much the same. There are only a small number of authors worth reading. Making it easier to be “published” doesn’t make it any easier to attract an audience.

Great or even good writing is rare. If you are an avid reader, finding an author you want to read has always been like panning for gold. In the future, readers will miss the old publishing system, imperfect as it was, when editors and agents waded into the murky waters, panning for gold. They published stuff that wasn’t gold. But that is only human. Readers have great expectations when they read a story or book or poem and most of them hate going through tons of gravel looking for a few specs of gold. Instead of those polite, meaningless form letters from traditional publishers, readers may not be so kind when their anger and disappointment of reading an inferior work causes them to shout insults. If I had to make a prediction, rejection is set to become much nastier, personal, and demoralizing. The new crop of authors will look back with longing at how civilized the old world of rejection really was.

The dead man’s mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d gone down on her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great.

As the winter wind came cold off the Judean Desert, I watched her weep and thought: “I have to write a novel about this.”

Forgive me if that sounds callous, but I’m a writer. Or, I should say, that’s the moment when I became a writer.

I was Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief, covering the violence of the Palestinian intifada, when I went to that bereaved mother in her village on the edge of Bethlehem in 2002. I had always written fiction, but only published a few short stories. In the midst of the despair that engulfed Israelis and Palestinians, I found the very thing that could make me happy – the material for my series of Palestinian crime novels.

The killing of that woman’s son as he crept home in the dark was the basis for the opening death in my first novel “The Collaborator of Bethlehem.” The book won a Crime Writers Association Dagger. Since then I’ve published two more crime novels set in the Palestinian towns.

They’re a response to the emotional questions that, as a journalist, I was never able to answer. Strangely, fiction proves to be a better way to understand extreme events than journalism.

Since the first time I set foot in the West Bank in 1996, I had grown disillusioned with the ability of journalism to convey the depth of what I learned about the Palestinians. Back then, I visited the family of a Nablus man tortured to death in one of Yasser Arafat’s jails. The news article I wrote was a good one, uncovering the internal Palestinian violence so often overshadowed by the more spectacular conflict with Israel. But my impressions were much deeper.

I was struck by the candor and dignity with which the dead youth’s family spoke to me; the sheer alien nature of the place thrilled me. At the entrance to the family’s house in the casbah, an old oil drum held black flags and palm fronds, symbols of Islamic mourning. Men sat around smoking under a dark awning. I felt a powerful sense of adventure, as though I had uncovered an unknown culture.

The lawlessness of Palestinian life also gave me great characters for my fictionalized good guys. But also the villains. Unfortunately there are many Palestinians who have strong motivations to kill each other. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years with some of these men, trying to learn why they take the path of violence—time that has led to a deeper characterization of the villains in my books.

With my new novel, “The Fourth Assassin,” I brought my sleuth Omar Yussef to New York because I wanted him to confront the most important issue of the last decade – an issue which is crystallized in its most horrifically concrete form in the city of 9/11.

It’s a natural progression for a series that began in the cabbage patch near Bethlehem. When I stood there, it was seven months after the attacks on New York and Washington. The questions posed to anyone thinking about the Middle East had just become so much more complex. Too complex and emotional for journalism to encompass them and, all these years later, for politicians, too.

Whether it’s a single sniper’s bullet cutting through the chest of a man outside his mother’s house or a jetliner bursting through a 110-story building, my novels are aimed at the most explosive points in our recent history. That’s why I simply had to write them.

Although still hobbling about with a stick, I am now fully back at work. To be honest I only really ever stopped writing completely for a week, and that was when I was actually in hospital. But now I am officially ‘whole’ again I am back in the world of deadlines, author events and getting to appointments, albeit on our unpredictable public transport system. I won’t be driving for another few weeks yet.

It feels odd but good although I am very aware of how out of touch I have become with my latest Çetin İkmen plot. Of course I never help myself in as much as my plotting is and always has been Byzantine (please excuse the pun). And this novel is particularly complicated with probably more blind alleys and red herrings than ever before. But then the subject matter is not one that can be simply told. İstanbul is a complicated city; socially, politically, geographically.

There is an old adage about the best stories being those that are simply told. There is of course truth in this and I can see that a simple story, well executed, is a thing of beauty and probably a joy forever too. But some subjects just will not fit into that format. Sometimes things really are just not that simple. As Matt will know only too well, the Israel/Palestine situation is one of these. Try untangling that one and reducing it down to its basic elements. Where do you start?

İstanbul is not only one of the oldest cities in the world it has also been and remains an object of both desire and of controversy. Everything comes together in İstanbul – religion, culture, tectonic plates. Yes, on top of everything else, the city is due another earthquake. While people in tea gardens debate whether or not İstanbul is a great European or Asian capital, the on/off road to Turkish EU accession is followed with both interest and despair. What kind of place is this city of unknown millions that changes every minute and yet remains regally the same?

I don’t know any more than anyone else, but if my books reflect anything about this city, it is the sheer complication that it represents. Çetin İkmen will be producing no quick fixes or untangling anything in five minutes any time soon. And thank God for it. My degree subject is psychology and so I have always been interested in human thought and behaviour. My natural urge is to try to dissect everything I experience. Happily I am never short of material especially not in İstanbul.

Imagine you wake up in the morning and open the curtains. It is another ordinary day. Traffic is moving. People are walking along the streets. The street vendors are behind their stalls. Then you open your email because everyone knows that is absolutely one of the first things to be done in the morning. It is like Christmas Morning. Who has left a little present under the tree?

The other morning, I opened my email and found something called The Terrorism Risk Index (TRI) developed by a James Bond sounding company named Maplecroft. TRI which had released a risk ranking for 162 countries. Since the days of David Letterman, most people focus on the top ten list. No one is all that interested on what country ranks 37th or 119th on the list. They are definitely out of the medals.

So I scanned through the top ten list:

Iraq (1), Afghanistan (2), Pakistan (3) and Somalia (4), top the ranking of 162 countries and are rated, along with Lebanon (5), India (6), Algeria (7), Colombia (8) and Thailand (9). These are listed as extreme risk nations.

The first eight countries, I nodded. I can see that. Though having just been to India, where problems seem to be localized. Countries 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 all could be fitted inside India and if you combined their population is only a fraction of India’s population. So, yeah, there are some details that are a bit spotty in this assessment.

That’s not what I found the most upsetting. It is the Number 9 spot.

Thailand #9.

Thailand is an Extreme Risk Nation? This has to be a misprint. Someone has been into the sauce. Other explanations are incompetence, stupidity, or madness.

I look out the window again at Bangkok. No tanks. No columns of smoke rising. No sound of gunfire or explosions. The TRI says the Index measures not only the risk of an attack but also the chance of mass casualties.

The extreme risk of mass casualties in Thailand? What were the authors of this report thinking? That a cartel of tuk-tuks drives has plans to run down foreigners on Sukhumvit and Silom Roads? The implications are immense. I suspect most expats, if they have insurance, have some kind of clause providing the insurer doesn’t have to pay a dime if the insured is stupid enough to sustain damage or loss in an extreme risk nation.

Imagine the conversations all over North America about holiday plans.

“Darling, about that trip to Thailand, did you know it is an extreme risk country?” he asked.

“God, cancel the flights. I told you we should go to Mexico. But you wouldn’t listen,” she said.

“You’re right, dear. We’ll holiday in Ciudad Juarez,” he said, sighing, knowing that he had lost the battle once again.

Keep that Mexican travel brochure in your mind, because I will come back to it—that is to Mexico.

Let’s put this discussion into a larger perspective. Terrorism in 2010 is a label like communism in the 1950s, everyone was afraid of it and no one was quite certain what it meant other than the people involved were evil, blood-thirsty and had access to weapons that could kill loads of people. Beware of labels that everyone throws around like a beanbag but hasn’t a clue as to what is inside the bag.

Why, for instance, isn’t Mexico on the TRI list? Give us a break. This country has a major civil war being fought in the northern states right next to the American border and yet it is Thailand (yes there is an insurgency in the South) gets #9.

It’s all in the terminology. When pundits write articles about the drug cartels in Mexico they don’t use the word terrorism. Instead they use “criminal insurgency.” Not that criminals and their insurgency is any cause to make you feel safer.

In 2009, 7,500 Mexican died in this inner raging drug war.

Thailand, in the number 9 position, making it an extreme risk nation had no way near that many people killed by armed insurgents in 2009. Why are drug cartels with a heavily armed militia of thugs appear to be deemed less of a threat than terrorists? Because people are conditioned to fear terrorism, and if terrorists are involved, then somehow the murders by the stadium load, seem to be a natural phenomenon like an earthquake. Suicide bombers strike fear into the heart of the TRI audience while an army of machine gun wheeling cartel thugs is ignored as if were just a sprang ankle.

Most countries have criminal enclaves (places pundits like to call slums) where criminal fight over the turf, kill each other, and bystanders, and the authorities by and large stay outside the perimeter. I suspect America has many such enclaves, and given the death annually by handguns, there is a low-grade war going on inside these enclaves with the statistics reported out to the larger community. In terms of body count, terrorism casualties are about as common as bathtub drowning, when compared with the kill rate in the world’s criminal enclaves. Such enclaves are dynamic. There is every indication that North America may be in period of accelerated expansion of such criminal enclaves as unemployment is slated to remain at all time highs for years to come. See Don Peck’s How a New Jobless Era Will Transform America.

The authors on this blog write about crime and violence. Our books develop political and social (as well as economic) connections to crime. This linkage is what makes crime fiction interesting and compelling. The best crime fiction is a war report that takes readers inside one of these criminal enclaves, shows the pathways to the larger community. Most members of society are delusional about the true nature of risk, because they can’t properly identify how such risk comes into existence, the tenacity of the underlining problems, and the corruption and double standards that undercut the rule of law. These enclaves are awash in money. Drug money mostly. It bends and snaps the rule of law. Yet people feel, by and large, safe. It is those foreign terrorists that give them nightmares and not the organized cartels, the gangs, freelance criminals circulating in their own economy five miles away.

The problem with concentrating on terrorists is that, in the larger scheme, their crimes are a drop in the bucket compared to the ongoing criminal insurgency raging across the planet. Terrorism is a sideshow. And always has been. The main event, where the extreme risk pops out right under everyone’s nose happens inside that criminal enclave that you glimpse on the TV news, usually with police and emergency service vehicles angled in the street, lights flashing, bodies being taken out and a reporter telling you the police are investigating the crime. That is every day. Day in and day out.

The risk of you becoming a casualty is much greater at the hands of one of the discontented and poor young men who have no prospect of jobs who turn to crime as the only available option. This new army of angry, young recruits may not be fueled by the hatred of a jihad. The fuel of despair and hopelessness are the precursors to hatred and you don’t need a religion to motivate such young men. Wanting status and the material stuff that a material society proclaims is essential for your manhood is the new scripture.

Inequality, corruption, and violence are valid risks to assess. But you should look in the right place. The TRI is a distraction. It draws one away from the main risks we all face. Terrorism is ugly and frightening, but it isn’t in the top ten of real risks that any ordinary individual will likely face.

They are in a criminal enclave within spitting distance of your backyard. Don’t worry about the terrorists; worry instead about the young man with a gun and nothing to lose.

You’d think there was something wrong with spying.

People pay good money to watch Daniel Craig dispose of villains in the bloodiest fashion. They nod in approval when M pushes 007′s perfect false passport across the desk. Yet everyone’s peeved about what in all likelihood is a Mossad hit against a Hamas operative in his Dubai hotel room on January 20.

Oh, that’s right, because the Hamas guy – meanies though Hamas might be – was a real human being who’s now dead, after all.

No, wait, that isn’t it. Western governments don’t really care about dead Arabs. If they did, they wouldn’t have sent Tony Blair to be the Middle East peace-process point man for the Quartet (the UN, the US, the EU and Russia), even though it ought to be perfectly clear that the only person disliked more in the Arab world than the stammering King of Cool Britannia is the future head librarian of the Presidential Library in Crawford, Texas. (Why so unpopular? Started a war that killed a lot of Iraqis, that’s why. Arabs do care about dead Arabs…sometimes.) So it isn’t the dead guy that’s behind the international fuss.

Ah, that’s right. These spies used our passports. Of the 11 assassins identified by Dubai’s police chief this week, all were carrying British, Irish, German or French passports. Three of the British passports carried the near-perfectly correct details of three Brits who’ve also taken up Israeli citizenship. Three others included names similar to European-Israeli citizens, though other details were incorrect.

To a crime novelist, the passport thing seems pretty tame. I suspect that, actually, the Euro pols and dips would like to lambaste Israel for the hit itself. They can’t quite bring themselves to do it, because, after all, Islamic extremism is the West’s current Enemy Number One. And whatever you think of Hamas, they’re into Islam and they’re pretty extreme. So the passport shenanigans get to be the focus of Euro ire.

I can understand why European governments will feel the need to throw a diplomatic hissy fit. But they’re wasting their time on the Israelis. In Israel you can throw a real, full-on hissy fit in public at some outrageous slight, and your Israeli target will simply go blank-faced and turn away, as though you’re the one who’s gone too far. The diplomatic version is laughably unsuited to the Middle East.

In other words, diplomacy in this region is pointless. You want someone to get a message, you kill.

If that sounds like the world of crime fiction, then that’s why this neighborhood is so well-suited to the genre. That’s why my Palestinian crime novels are a better way to understand the reality of this place than the international pages of your newspaper (which, you can be sure, will be running stories in which diplomatic protests by Whitehall and the Quai d’Orsay are taken seriously, rather than being treated as the piffling waste of time that they truly are.) Don’t take them seriously. Get yourself a novel instead.

Oh, joy to the world! Yesterday I had the plaster cast taken off my leg and nearly cried with joy. It was feeling so heavy and the itching inside was so furious I was beginning to suffer from insomnia. Well, you try sleeping with a massive great hot pot on the end of your leg!

That said, of course the leg that was revealed once the cast was sawn off was not a pretty sight. In fact I can feel a whole new career in horror writing coming on just as I recall it. Thin, white, flaky and scarred, my right leg looks a bit like a refugee from an Egyptian archaeological dig. Also it doesn’t really feel at all like my leg. Whether that is because I am aware that the bones are now held together with pins and plates, I don’t know. But my foot now feels quite detached from me and I just have to hope that upon some fateful moonless night, it doesn’t turn upon me. Imagine being slaughtered by a homicidal ex-body part?

But that said, the leg is really too weak to do much at the moment. Most of the time it flops about pathetically, hurting and being as stiff as a floorboard. Apparently if I take it out for walks a lot and wiggle it about whenever I sit down, I should be driving in 2 weeks time. If only it felt as if it belonged to me! But then maybe that will come in time. Maybe myself and my leg need to have a bit of a romance before we commit for a second round of co-habitation.

But all of this does make you think – or rather it does make me think. Human beings usually come in coherent whole bodies. They move, think and exist as complete entities. But when they/we are physically damaged, especially if bits do actually come off, something of a disturbing psychological nature does take place. I don’t know what it is apart from saying that my perception of it is indeed of some sort of temporary separation. When I broke my leg and lay on the floor waiting for the ambulance to come with my foot on the wrong way around, I did want to be either a million miles away or assume a completely new identity. That not being possible, I began, I think, to see my leg as ‘other’ – outside and beyond myself. It makes sense that someone should do such a thing in order to cope with such a situation. It also makes sense that now I should still feel that separation too. I didn’t see my leg for six weeks. When the plaster came off, it was a stranger to me. It had of course, also, changed.

So now the romance begins. Me and the leg, the leg and me. I’ll exercise it, wash it and try not to cringe when I look at its pitiful thinness. With any luck it will just get better and I will accept it. If not, it may kick me to death as I sleep. Oh well, at least it’s out of plaster.

I am sending off this blob a week early because I have been summoned to Vientiane by the International School who have agreed to pay my airfare and accommodation in return for a twenty-minute live oral blob. They expect me to stand up in front of a hall full of three hundred parents, diplomats and politicians and expound. They expect me to wow them with my witty repartee and leave them with a moral. Somehow, when I think of it like that, free airfare and a bar fridge doesn’t sound like that much of a prize.

To be honest, one of the reasons I started to write was the distant dream that I could be reclusive. I had hopes that I would be a moderately unsuccessful writer who had to spend all his free time churning out novels just to make a living. No tours. No public speaking. I had my sights set on the bottom rung of ‘the list’ just above all those self-published “Look How Fascinating My Life Was” authors whose total sales come from relatives and harangued ex-school friends. Sadly, I became a megastar and hopes that I’d never have to stand up in front of people and ‘entertain’ them faded away with my first seven-figure royalty cheque. (Decimal points count as figures, do they not?) I was a household name and the world wanted me.

My first ever performance as a published author was in front of eleven people (four of them staff) at the Mystery Bookstore in Huston, Texas. As I had never been to an author event I didn’t know how to behave. I took my glass of wine to the front of the room, sat on a stool and waited for something to happen. The audience, not knowing who I was, were also waiting for something to happen. Consequently, nothing happened for a good three minutes. I slurped wine. They watched me slurp. One of the staff, feeling uncomfortable, broke the ice with a profound question. “Could you tell our customers who you are and what you write?” And so began my first ever author tour. I have to say that the more famous I became, the fewer people turned up to listen to me. I am not a very engaging speaker. In order to distract the audiences’ attention from this fact, I put together a power-point display with cartoons and photographs and I found that it did my entertaining for me. Audiences barely noticed me. If I’d shot somebody during my talk I doubt anyone would have been able to give the police a description. My highlight was a full production power-point spectacular to two people at a huge bookshop in Chicago. Not even the staff could be bothered to turn up. It was the evening I enjoyed most on the tour.

The irony here is that I was a teacher for most of my professional life. I’ve spent more hours at the chalk face than Frank McCourt. My last professional engagement as a lecturer was a course called, “Oral Improvisation and Performance’ (tee hee). How could I bluff MA students into believing I was a powerful orator yet wilt like a dry daisy when I’m on the road on my own? I can put it down to only one thing. When I taught I was always using someone else’s material. I didn’t invent the English language and I had no investment in it. If it was wrong it wasn’t my fault. If I trained social workers I was using well accepted theories, none of which I made up. But when I’m doing author tours the material is me: Colin Cotterill. I have to talk about myself, answer questions about my feelings. Even my wife doesn’t know some of the things I told four hundred people in Harrogate last year. I have become the subject and I’m sure you’ve read somewhere, unlike other nationalities I won’t mention, Englishmen are reluctant to go into detail about their personal lives with four hundred complete strangers. Is it any wonder I give conflicting information at each event?

Oh, what a ways I’ve come since those early days. How many more times do I have to turn down Oprah? Can’t the BBC just leave me alone for a week or two? And here I am off to Laos for the top hat and tie social event of the Vientiane calendar. The problem is, everyone in Vientiane has seen my power-point already so I’ll have to make something up again. I’ve already started memorizing jokes and rehearsing that spontaneous self-consciousness that endears me to strangers. If only they knew how miserable I am deep inside.

Several times a year I meet authors who are passing through Bangkok. As Bangkok is a pass through kind of place. Ever so often one of these encounters leaves a lasting impression. For instance, Mr. Cakes Copeland internationally acclaimed author of the series that included the Number 1 bestseller The Ice-cream Lady of Angkor Wat, was a recent guest.

Cakes walked in carrying three items. He swept past my wife, mistaking her for the maid, as he gave her a bottle of wine, “This is for your boss.” As to the carried items, Cakes set them down on the fold up card table I use as my desk, dinning table, and cat guest bed. It stands along with several non-matching fold up chairs in my humble living room. He spread out over the plates and plastic spoons and forks that my wife had so carefully arranged: a white flag, a newsletter and a set of blueprints.

“These are from Andrew McCreadie Jones,” he said with pride.

Andrew McCreadie Jones made his name with The One-legged Marathon Runner of 12B Wildebeest Cresent, and about thirty-three other books with the same characters and a variation of Wildebeest Cresent in the title. Jones was a legend. He had once called Cakes an obscure upstart who didn’t know an anchor from a light bulb. Even by academic common room standards, the rivalry between these two authors had in recent years taken on a particularly nasty tone. “Our feud has ended,” he said. “Jones wisely has seen the light.”

My wife came in with a paper cup with Cakes’ white wine. It was still lukewarm but much to Cakes’ credit he only winced when he took a drink and tried to smile.

“You’ve signed an armistice,” I said.

That was the wrong thing to say. When two cozy writers start a war, don’t think for a moment their malice is any less than the most jaded noir or hardboiled author.

Cakes held up the white flag. “Does that look like an armistice? You’re a writer, you should be more observant.” He smoothed his finger over the faint outline of a Scottish cresent on the flag. “Jones has surrendered. I have won.”

He opened the newsletter. Jones face smiled out in the middle of the page. He implored all of his fans that henceforth they must pledge to buy 2 of Cakes Copeland’s series in any buy two get one free sale. The newsletter went on to acknowledge that Cakes Copeland was the Tiger Woods of the cozy world. That was written, of course, before Tiger Wood’s life took a sharp right hook off the fairway, but the sentiment was what counted.

My wife appeared wearing the one dress I bought her eight years ago after receiving an advance from a Thai publisher. She dropped two ice cubes in Cakes’ plastic up and refilled it with white wine. It had been in the fridge and was slightly colder but she was taking no chances.

When a writer like Cakes appears for dinner a certain sad reality about your own career as a writer sets in. Unlike Cakes Copeland who gets a seven-figure advance and has two digit Amazon rankings, my advance and Amazon rankings are just the opposite of his. My books are hardly read outside of the porcelain god worshippers found in the toilets of most Bangkok bars after midnight.

To Cakes’ credit he never mentioned my small audience and tiny advances. Instead he’s always had a good word for me, telling others that I am quite the success, and lead to what many people would be a hi-so life style. Cakes’ imagination was often fueled by delusions. Isn’t that part of the cozy author’s temperament?

He opened the blueprints. They were for his 15-room mansion on a remote beach in the south of Thailand. It included a museum for many gifts cozy fans had sent him over the years, his snuff box collection, opium weights, skulls of small mammals, his books, letters and manuscripts.

“What do you think?” he asked me. “Not too J.K. Rowling I hope.”

“Impressive,” I said.

He never touched his wine. The ice had melted and the lip around the rim of the plastic glass started to send sweat beads down the side and onto the card table.

“Good,” he said. “I found that my books are in 169 languages.”

My eyes widened. “That’s huge,” I said.

“That’s what I thought until I searched on the Internet. There are 6,500 languages. I phoned my agent and demanded to know why he’d done such a poor job of selling foreign rights. And do you what he said? ‘Most of those languages don’t have books. They don’t write. It’s all oral word.’ And I said to him, audio books, duh. You call yourself a literary agent? You’re ignoring a huge audience. And he said, ‘how they supposed to hear a book? Put a seashell to their ear?’ ”

Cakes paused long enough for me to ask him. “What did you do?”

“I fired him.” He smiled, the thought made him radiant.

My wife, the ever loyal companion, said, “Did you receive the story Chris sent you?”

“Your maid speaks perfect English. How did you find her?”

“Just lucky, Cakes.”

My wife smiled. There was something disarming about Cakes Copeland that you couldn’t figure out. He was so honest, straightforward and earnest that no one could ever find fault with his logic even though the underlying premise was wrong.

“Ah, yes, the short story. Very nice.” He paused, looked at his nails.

“But you misspelled ketchup. Twice.”

My story had been the “Best Little Hamburger Hustler in Soi Cowboy.” I had done the spell check. But those programs are far from perfect. The wife had appeared from the kitchen with a double cheese pizza. Cakes Copeland rose from his chair. “I’m meeting with the GM of the Oriental Hotel. They want to name a suite after me. Oh and one more thing.” He pulled papers out of his pocket, smoothed them out on the coffee table. “I had my publisher run the BookScan rating on my last book. One week. 25,456 copies sold. And look at this.” Below was the rating for Andrew McCreadie Jones last book: 1,567 copies sold. On another piece of paper, were the figures in BookScan for my latest book. 11 copies sold during the same period as Cakes and Jones.

“Are you sure you won’t have one slice of pizza before you go?” asked my wife.

He waved like a politician to a crowd of well-wishers. “Eleven is a lucky number,” he said. “I think I’ll buy a lottery ticket later tonight.”

He gathered up Jones’ surrender flag, the blueprint of the mansion, leaving behind Jones’s newsletter as a gift.

I was grateful to have a reminder that writing is warfare by other means. Authors are warriors. Pens are guns. A bullet to the heart in words nevertheless wounds just the same. To the victors go the spoils. The honors and the audio rights to the listeners of approximately 6,500 languages.

I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read.

I’ve published three previous novels about Omar Yussef, my Palestinian schoolteacher/sleuth. Omar has been called the Philip Marlowe of the Arab street, the Hercules Poirot of the Near East, Sam Spade fed on hummus, and Miss Marple crossed with Yasser Arafat.

Why then is my new Omar Yussef novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN set in New York City? Not in the Middle East, the Near East, Palestine, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, or any other place where Yasser may be copulating with Miss Jane Marple.

I lived in New York six years, until I came to Jerusalem in 1996. I know it better than any city outside the Middle East. I had a lot of fun in New York. Maybe too much fun. In no other place in the world can a young man so overindulge in the temptations originally offered in the city of Sodom. Which in reality is close to where I live now in Jerusalem. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place.

I know New York with my eyes closed. Literally. In my twenties, after leaving some bar or club, I blacked out on every line on the subway map.

I dated women from every borough of the city, from Westchester and upstate. From the 201 area code (dare I say, New Jersey.)

I married a girl from the North Shore of Long Island, and in my continuing effort to know New York in all its facets, when we divorced, I married a beautiful woman from the South Shore of Long Island.

But each time I returned, no matter how well I thought I knew the place, New York seemed different. The change became most apparent after 9/11. I wanted to understand it through the eyes of Omar Yussef.

That’s why he finds himself in Brooklyn in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. Visiting the area of Bay Ridge that has become known as “Little Palestine,” for the influx of Palestinian immigrants.

Little Palestine isn’t a community of Palestinian intellectual émigrés, such as sprang up in European capitals in the 1970s. It’s a new wave of young men mostly, saving to bring their families over, working two or more jobs. Theirs is a typical American immigrant story.

Except for the FBI agents going through their trash.

The Bureau didn’t uncover any broad conspiracy in Little Palestine. But it did add to the tensions between the Arab community and other New Yorkers after the attack on the Twin Towers.

That’s the situation into which I wanted to place Omar Yussef. Mutual distrust, after all, makes for good crime fiction.

In Brooklyn, it also happens to be real.

Almost every writer of fiction that I know is haunted by an annual prize called the Bad Sex Award. It is given, as you can imagine, to the author who has written the worst, most cringe-making sex scene of the year. Past winners have included Rachel Johnson the sister of the Mayor of London, Boris. She took it all in good spirit and laughingly accepted her award with amused grace. But when the winner and his or her ‘winning entry’ is announced, and published in the press, it is a real shudder-fest. Words like ‘tumescent’ and ‘climax’, ‘throbbing’, ‘gasping’ and ‘member’. I can feel my skin crawl up my back as I type the damn things, much less say them!

It was therefore with some trepidation that earlier today I started on what is not my first sex scene, but the first one in this, my latest Çetin İkmen book. One of my continuing characters, who has a very chequered sex life, is embarking upon a whole new lot of steaminess with one of his past mistresses. It’s meant to be strong stuff. He’s a good looking guy with an eye for the ladies and she is a hot to trot cougar with a side-line is weird modern art. In addition, for my plot to work as it should, these two should be at it like bunnies. But here’s the rub…

I want to have them bouncing about like space hoppers (for those of you who remember such things) and gasping for air like beached fish, but I don’t want to use those words. I hate them, they’re as naff as hell and if I do use them then it’ll be the Bad Sex Award for me and I’ll never be able to hold my head up in the library ever again. As a result of this I have, so far, failed rather miserably in my having sex on paper mission. My first attempt involved my protagonists not really getting it together at all. Attempt number two ended up sounding like something out of some sort of manual and my third go found my couple grunting and groaning in a very indecorous fashion against a wall. I’ve looked back at my previous sex scenes which were actually really quite good (even if I say so myself!). But I don’t want to duplicate things from previous novels and so I can’t just copy those out verbatim.

I’ll have to get this right at some point but I think that for the moment I might just leave my couple in limbo and get on with other parts of the book. I think that maybe I need to forget about the Bad Sex Awards for a bit and maybe not have quite so many pain killers rattling about inside my body too. With luck the plaster cast will come off my leg next week and I’ll be able to walk without crutches, and heavy pain control again. Maybe then I’ll be able to get a bit fruity, in a good way, on paper.