In Berlin the dogs are really tidy and well-mannered but the sparrows are wild and aggressive. One of the little bastards did a suicide dive into Jessi’s apple strudel and had the gall to scowl at her when she went after it with a spoon. In Berlin, the only place to find a telephone Sim card to call Asia is at the Turkish kebab shop and if you want to read an English language newspaper you have to go to the exotic publications bookshop on Fahtstrasse. In Berlin we’re constantly moving along the streets in a logjam of white faces, a feat you’d have go deep into the countryside to emulate in England.

In Berlin time means something. I suppose that’s one of the main differences between here and Pak Nam Lang Suan where clocks are just lizard motels. I had a phone interview booked from 1 to 2PM. The phone rang like a charm at 1PM and the end of the sentence, ‘Well, I think that’s everything, Mr. Cotterill’ landed slap on the count of 2. In Thailand not even the moon rises on time. In Berlin it’s light when you leave the last bar of the evening and it’s light when you wake up with a full bladder at 4AM.

In Berlin they don’t allow insects or people in flip flops and shorts, or litter or ethnic serving staff in German restaurants or people with small budgets. We did the tour thing; sat at the top of a double-decker bus and photographed 300-year-old buildings and murals along the Berlin wall and whole reconstructed suburbs. In Berlin, despite what Basil Fawlty says, it’s not a problem for an Englishman to mention the war because everyone here does. Seventy percent of the city was destroyed by the bombing but they still serve me with a smile in the home-made beer shop. The Germans drink lager out of bathtub-sized glasses and eat bread with meals and cake for dessert. I’m astounded the German football team can run at all.

In Berlin I had work to do. I don’t know why but publishers around the globe all have the same concept when it comes to Colin Cotterill promotional material. ‘Stick him in front of a palm tree at the botanical gardens’. I could save everyone a lot of money by just emailing photos of me in the garden at home. For my photo shoot I spent many hours smiling forlornly in front of exotic plants in the Berlin Botanical Garden hot house. I was the highlight of the school trip of several packs of very small children and guided tours paused to take photos of me. It’s just as well I have no pride whatsoever.

In Berlin I had to make a video to promote the new book. They left it up to the director to come up with a concept that would best highlight the man and the work. He picked us up at nine and took us out to the botanical gardens. There he had me marauding through the jungle in a pith helmet in search of something. He didn’t ever tell me what it was I was searching for so my motivation was low. After three hours I still hadn’t found it.

In Berlin I met the naked bookseller. Struggling bookshop owners deep in the German nether lands had the remarkably unique idea of shooting a nude calendar to remind people there was more to reading than twittering and twattering. I’ve read somewhere that the Mormon tabernacle choir and the Riyadh ladies burkha embroidering society are the only two groups on the planet who haven’t produced a nude calendar. In similar projects around the globe, twelve inappropriately designed people whip off their clothes and pose nude behind fruit or sporting goods or firefighting equipment. In this case the booksellers would be hiding behind…you guessed it…books. Sandra, a hearty mother of two, selected mine. Luckily there are three in the series already because, believe me, Sandra has need of all of them – in hardback. The publisher flew her to Berlin for tea and cakes with her favourite author. I was pleased that one person at least considered my books substantial enough to stand behind.

In Berlin they’re preparing for my reading tour next year. By then very few Germans will be able to look at a cactus or a bamboo thicket – or a bush – without thinking of me.

Malcolm Muggeridge (an old English literateur) once said that George Orwell “was no good as a novelist, because he didn’t have the interest in character.” Well, I didn’t need to tell you who George Orwell was, so you may doubt the judgment of the largely forgotten Muggeridge. But I think he was very close to an important factor for the novelist.

Here’s why: Character creates empathy in a novel. It puts the reader in a relationship with the work. Muggeridge’s point was that politics were more interesting to Orwell than the people on whom he hung them. In “1984” we feel for Winston Smith because we imagine what it’d be like to be him – but we don’t really care that much for him as a character. In other words, if Orwell hadn’t had such a fabulous idea behind that novel, it would’ve failed because Winston was too much of an everyman.

Nonetheless, so much contemporary fiction fails the character test. Read the short stories in The New Yorker – which are fairly representative of today’s “literary” fiction – and you’ll generally see an authorial voice greatly distanced from the emotions of the characters. You’re not in a relationship with the characters, and you wouldn’t want to be in a relationship with the smart-ass authorial voice.

The same is true on the other side of the Atlantic. Ian McEwan’s distance and restraint makes me feel…distant and restrained. Which isn’t why I read a novel.

Instead of putting you in a relationship with the characters, writers like McEwan effectively put you across the dinner-party table from them. And they do it in the voice of an uptight, superior bore. How would you like to be stuck at a dinner party long enough to hear an entire novel read by such a voice? …Yeah, I didn’t think so.

So now we’re agreed (write a comment at the end of this post if we’re not agreed, and I’ll write back in a superior smart-ass voice, just to show you that I’m right) that empathy is what counts. Without it, your characters will be one-dimensional, no matter how good a stylist you are. But what’s the best way to learn about it?

Some people are born with the ability to empathize. Others develop it. To a great extent I had to develop it. It’s a harder quality to build than you might think.

So if you’re not born with it, how do you get it?

Answer: go and live somewhere you don’t belong.

When you’re supposed to share the culture and attitudes of the people around you, you’re also expected to empathize without thinking about it.

You’re Welsh, I’m Welsh, thus without thinking about it we share perspectives and background which we don’t need to discuss. If you do discuss it, people will find you odd or boring. Certainly they won’t be able to explain themselves, because they too will feel like they’re talking about their culture in terms that’re too basic. Many of the questions you ought to ask will seem so obvious you won’t even think to address them.

As an outsider, you aren’t limited in that way. In fact, you’ll be forced to discuss and examine aspects of the culture around you which don’t make sense. The locals will explain themselves to you in a way that may begin at basic facts but will soon progress into how they FEEL about their culture and the people around them. Then you’ll be inside their heads. You’ll be able to empathize and build characters in your fiction.

For me, the place has been Jerusalem. In the last 15 years, I’ve lived here not as an Israeli or a Palestinian but as an observer. In Jerusalem, were you to look at the behavior of the locals, they’d drive you crazy, unless you were able to observe them with a deep feeling for their emotions and experiences. That’s the empathy I mean, and it’s been one of the most important factors in my Palestinian crime novels.

There is a very old and run-down district of İstanbul called Tarlabasi that I like very much. A lot of people from eastern Turkey live there as well as a community of Turkish Roma (gypsies). It’s a bit mad and whenever I go over there, usually to visit the Syrian Orthodox Church, I generally find myself in conversation with someone who either claims to be Steven Spielberg or needs my help to locate their guardian angel. In summer, great lines of limp looking washing hang between the crumbling 19th century tenement buildings and wall eyed dogs roam the streets in search of anything even remotely edible. This is not a place for the delicate or faint hearted. You would think therefore, that when I heard that Tarlabasi was about to be ‘regenerated’, I would have been delighted, if only for the poor locals. But I’m not and neither are said locals.

Don’t get me wrong the plans for the new Tarlabasi look great. Lots of nice clean buildings and nice ordered streets with not a dog or a line of washing in sight. Lovely if you’re a nice middle class professional with a great big wallet from which to extract market-rate rent. Fab if you’ve got a tumble drier and your dogs, if you have them, are strictly indoor pets. But for people from rural settlements, accustomed to communal living, people with little money, I wonder. They do too and many of the current residents are up in arms about the plans.

One of the problems for me, is that I’ve seen it all before. For as long as I can remember various organisations have been trying to ‘revitalise’ the east end of London where I was born. It wasn’t until the 1980s that anything actually happened, but when it did it had very little to do with east-enders themselves. Canary Wharf and the redevelopment around Wapping and Limehouse was done for the benefit of business and of the rich who thought it might be a bit of a laugh to eschew Chelsea in favour of Shoreditch and slum it for a while. And so we got vast blocks of uber-clean glass and steel and Disney-fied streets of old, picturesque houses inhabited (occasionally) by politicians and American film stars. Poor they may be, but the people of Tarlabasi are not fools, they’ve heard the rumours and they fear what might be coming.

When I told a friend of mine about my fears for Tarlabasi, she said that she’d heard about the protests against the development, but she was sure that it would be OK. Her point was that developers have learned not to ride roughshod over historic buildings and communities these days. If I hadn’t recently been over to the London Olympic site, I might have agreed with her. But I was there last week, looking on helplessly as another piece of London’s heritage was bashed down by a wrecking ball. Nice shiny stadium versus the dirty old factory where plastic was invented? No contest. New is good and healthy and profitable and anyway its better for you, so there!

Is it just me who thinks like this? No. It’s actually a lot of communities and individuals all over the world. Sadly, we don’t tend to be the ones with any power but… I have this fabulous dream that one day a chrome and glass sports centre will be pulled down to make way for a gas-lit absinthe bar. Now that is what I call progress!

If we make it through the floods to Surat airport, and if we survive a night in riot torn Bangkok, and if we’re allowed to land through the cloud of volcanic ash, Jess and I should be in Germany by the time you read this. Remember the days when flying was convenient and fun? No, me neither. We’ll be gone for a month. A week in Berlin, (Yes, Dom, I’ll bring you back a piece of wall). A week in Paris where Jess will celebrate her …17th …birthday. And two weeks in England with mum and dad and the London Pride truck driver who looks forward to my visits. I shall be sending you weekly reports from all these places and none of them will contain references to politics. I may however be forced to mention football. I’ll be in England during the World Cup and until England are unceremoniously dumped out of the competition by the Mauritian national team in the first round, there won’t be any other topics of conversation at our house.

But the issue of the week is dog sitting. Jess’s dad is a monk. As such he isn’t allowed to wander far from the temple. He certainly isn’t allowed to come to our house, sleep in a nice bed, watch TV and play with the dogs for a month. But he’s my wife’s dad and we couldn’t find anyone to look after them while we were away. And Jess can be very forceful. Some of you who have followed my life through my personal website will know our dogs very well. They are the type of dogs who would drive the Dog Whisperer to an early grave. Describing them as loveable would be like calling James Bundy and Charles Manson cuddly. They are weird. They do not follow the normal patterns of animal behaviour. Three of them escaped death by the skin of their very dangerous teeth and the other one has a contract out on him. Nobody dares come to our house. Half our place is unpainted because the dogs chased the painter away. The postman throws our mail over the wall. We haven’t had a houseguest since they ate poor Andrew last January. They’re all rescue dogs. You’d think a rescued dog would be so grateful he’d follow your every instruction. But our dogs saw it as a sign that we are godlike creatures and they’ve dedicated their lives to not letting anyone near us. If you want a beach cleared in a hurry, just give me a call and I’ll bring over the mutts.

We’ve done two other big trips. For the first, my friend Lizzie came down to look after the pack. When she got out of rehab she gave me an ultimatum, ‘Me or them’. I’m still thinking about it. For our second trip we were very lucky to find the sweet-natured Janet Brown in a hurry. We followed her web diary; My month in Hell’. We haven’t seen her since. Hence the monk. Our dogs like Jess’s dad. I imagine, even when he’s deep in the throes of panic he’s still able to emanate good karma and the dogs lap it up. He’s brought his temple helper along to feed and exercise them. He’s never been alone with them so we’ll see how they like him without us around. But, here’s the point. Next year, Jess and I have two big trips planned; one in April/May the other in September. And we’re looking for someone to come look after our house. Of course all the above is just a joke. I’m a funny guy. Our dogs are fantastic. (“Put that cow down, Psycho.”) You’d have a little house on the coast with all the squid and seafood you could eat, use of a truck, bicycle, computer, kayak, and the love of four, sweet sweet animals.

You know I’m going to be inundated with offers so I suggest you get back to me really quickly. It’s an experience you’ll never forget. (I’ll throw in fifty bucks a week and an airport pick up)

For the last week I’ve lived near one of the front line areas in the conflict between the Government/Military and the Red Shirted protesters. On 15th, 16th and 17th May I walked along Rama IV, filming and talking with Red shirt supporters, protesters, onlookers. It was a mixed bag of people of varying degrees of commitment to the Red cause—whatever that might be—as the policies and principles appear to be fractured among a number of factions. There are those wishing to reinstall Thaksin as prime minister. Others are bound by a larger social justice and equality movement.

I’ve blogged with daily photos from the Rama IV Road front line.

No Man’s Land 17 May 2010 Rama 4 Road is a video I shot early evening on Monday 17 May 2010. The footage is from the Red barricades at Rama IV near the Expressway entrance for Bang Nah and the Port.

It is 21 May 2010, Friday morning in Bangkok. There is no crack gunfire. No explosions. No smoke climbing into the sky from tyre barricades or from shopping malls or government buildings. In short, this is the first day for the start of reflection by the participants, those who live in the city, and the larger world.

The questions will be asked: What exactly happened? Why did it happen now? Who were the players, and have those players changed since the first shots were fired? Can there be a political accommodation? If so what factions, parties, and personalities will be in discussion? And on what terms can they agree?

Where will the questions be asked? Who will answer them? What evidence is available and how credible is the evidence.

The main roadblock will be establishing trust between the sides. Suspicion will run high and minds open for evidence presented by the other side will be in short supply.

Decisions by leaders, government or Red Shirts, and judgments about such decisions are the bread and butter of pundits. We will have endless debate on these issues. Most of which will be informed by emotion and anecdotal evidence. Each side will defend its decisions and condemn the decisions of the other side. That is how life works. Get used to it.

Ultimately this conflict was about power sharing. Most political conflicts are. Neither side can wipe out the other, and it takes time for them to come to terms with the idea that they must compromise and accommodate the other side. It may be too soon for this process to start as the wounds are still too fresh.

I often receive emails from book stores, amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, and online literary sites telling me how much I’d like the novels of Matt Beynon Rees. I’m delighted to see these emails, which are based on my other purchases and interests, as only I can truly know just how much the novels of Matt Beynon Rees have changed my life. (Try them, I’m sure you’ll agree.)

Of course, I also get the occasional email informing me that if I like Matt Beynon Rees, I might also enjoy another author named in the email. Well, they’re half-way there, because of course I DO like Matt Beynon Rees. No ifs. So I always have to look to see if they’re right about the second part.

The links are sometimes obvious – “if you like Matt Beynon Rees, try [insert crime novelist’s name here]” – and occasionally baffling though thought-provoking. I had one a few weeks back suggesting fans of Matt Beynon Rees’s Palestinian crime series would really dig a nonfiction book about a cyclone that hit Burma in 2008.

The latest of these connections was no doubt the most bizarre. I clicked on an email from an online book blog a few days ago: “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter.”

It could be that this was the result of the review of the paperback version of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET in The New York Times—it was featured in the same column as a review of the softcover edition of the 39^th President’s ultra-controversial 2006 work of nonfiction “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid.”

Now here’s where I part with the “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” email. Of you like Matt Beynon Rees, you’ll probably enjoy crime fiction. Or just fiction. Rather than “Palestine – Peace Not Apartheid,” in which the loveable old peanut farmer from Georgia accuses Israel of the worst kind of discrimination against Palestinians in the West Bank.

I don’t have an opinion on Jimmy’s book. I never read it. It has “Palestine” in the title and, as Graham Greene wrote, once one has lived in a place for a while one ceases to read about it.

Also it has “Apartheid” in the title. I have an opinion about what Israel does in the West Bank. I’m not going to get into it here, but in a (pea)nutshell, I think it’s a mistake to compare Israeli policy to apartheid, because then the debate shifts to the similarities and differences between South Africa’s old regime and Israel’s occupation – instead of talking simply about what Israel does and what’s wrong with it.

As soon as Smiling Jim put “apartheid” in his title, his book’s content was largely ignored. Pro-Israel mouthpieces could condemn him as an anti-Semite simply for comparing Israel to the unlamented and certifiably pariah regime in Pretoria. Game over. Jimmy even issued an apology a couple of years ago to all Jews on Yom Kippur. As though saying something critical of Israel is somehow a criticism of all Jews. As though there weren’t any Jews who agreed with him about Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians. Game over with a slamdown.

For me, as for many others, Carter has been a mildly useful voice for decency in the world. Though he also represents something a little pitiful, as one might witness in the song “Jimmy Carter” by my favorite band, Detroit whacksters Electric Six:

“Like Jimmy Carter,

Like electric underwear,

Like any idea that never had a chance of going anywhere….”

However, the decisive element in the question “If you like Matt Beynon Rees, we think you’ll enjoy Jimmy Carter” is a matter of personal animus. In fact, it’s a family insult suffered by the Rees’s of 32 Neath Road, Maesteg, Mid-Glamorgan, Wales, at the hands of James Earl Carter Jr., 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C.

My grandfather Tom Rees read in the Western Mail that then-President Carter was suffering from hemorrhoids. Tom had faced the same ailment some years before and had found nothing eased the feeling of defecating broken glass, until he switched to Allinson’s wholewheat bread. He wrote a letter to the White House in his careful cursive script, letting the leader of the Free World know what he needed to do to poop painlessly.

He didn’t expect any public recognition. But he assumed he’d get a polite note.

Perhaps Carter’s people knew that my grandfather was a former Communist Party member and figured the brown bread was a plot of some sort to keep the Commander-in-Chief on the can and away from the nuclear button, while the Reds swarmed Capitol Hill. In any case, the President never wrote back. Not even a “President Carter has read your inquiry with interest, but regrets that he will not be able to make it part of United States planning and policy at this time, though he is sympathetic to your cause.”

My grandfather continued to consume wholewheat bread, even at a time (the 1970s) when those around him considered it to be a strange fad akin to today’s no-nightshades tomato-free diets.

That’s why I don’t like Carter. Not because of apartheid. Because of hemorrhoids.

I wonder if Jimmy ever got them cured. Maybe he mentions it in his book. Perhaps I ought to read it after all…

We have no government here in the UK. Yesterday our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, tendered his resignation. Everything is up in the air and no-one knows what is going to happen next. There is only one certainty at the moment, and that is that Gordon Brown’s lifelong dream of power is over. He’d wanted to be Prime Minister since he was a boy. Imagine! Well he did achieve his ambition, but I don’t think it did him personally, too much good.

Over the years I have watched Gordon Brown. Firstly in opposition, then as Chancellor and lately as Prime Minister. He’s no all singing, all dancing type of chap, as Tony Blair was. But then do we need the sort of showbiz style PM who takes us skipping into illegal wars? Do we need the kind of ghastly personality plus PM that Margaret Thatcher imposed upon this country for year after gruesome year?

Ultimately Gordon failed in his mission to be a great Prime Minister. But I don’t think that he’s a bad bloke because of that. I don’t think he’s necessarily an ogre just because he can’t smile. God knows, over the years he’s tried! Smiling at journalists, smiling at foreign leaders, pulling a ghastly rictus on U-Tube. None of it has ever worked because the poor old thing has roundly failed to learn how to put on a happy face.

In part I do think that the terrible job he embraced so passionately made him unable to smile. I’d probably hang myself if I had to try and organise 60 million people. But he chose to do it and I believe that it broke him. If ever there was a warning about being careful about what you wish for, then Gordon Brown is it. He got what his heart desired the most and it turned on him and then destroyed him. I hope that once he has left Downing Street he’ll be able to take some time to learn to smile properly. The 60 million will still be there, but Gordon won’t have to worry about them anymore.

“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.” – William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

Now I don’t know about you but I imagine old Bill was trying to be insulting when he said that. But if I was old Ernie I’d have a bit of a chuckle over it. (Before I smacked old Bill one on the nose). Because there’s something really annoying in my book about authors showing off. I’m almost twenty seven and I figure if I don’t know it yet, it couldn’t have been much of a word in the first place. I don’t want to sit reading with a dictionary on my lap just in case I don’t know some vocabulary in my own language. I feel inadequate enough already without a novelist rubbing my nose in it. I was a PE teacher, for heaven’s sake. The only two words we needed with over two syllables were givusanotherone barkeeper.

The problem with writing a blob like this is that there’ll be people out there who know all the words in the English language and they’ll call over their wives and say, “Transmoria, darling. Come and look at this. That Cotterill chap doesn’t know the word, propitiate and he calls himself a writer.” Well, I tell you, if propitiate was such an all-fired special goddamned word, why don’t they put it on cereal packets?

‘Kellogs new zingy fruit loops will propitiate you out of your socks.’

I tell you why not. Because we already have the word tickle which is much easier to say and less likely to be confused with the word prophylactic, a finagling congeneracy that constantly trips up academics.

Sometimes I find myself stalled in the middle of a Kathy Reichs thinking, “I haven’t understood one word in the last six pages.” But I do make allowance for writers who just want to bamboozle me with technical vocab they know I won’t waste my life looking up. I think we all secretly want to believe that there’s an advanced technical world out there we’ll never be allowed into. No, it’s the authors who drop in words they find in crossword puzzles that get me. Most of these smartarse words are just stuck up, highfalutin versions of perfectly good words we all know and love. They’re shoved in there to keep us readers in our place.

I’ve just stopped reading a book by P.D. James. I confess I didn’t get very far. In the first chapter she’d already hit me with mullioned windows and palimpsest. She obviously didn’t want me to read any further. When I was growing up the only windows we had were cracked and stuck. Not once did I hear my dad say, ‘One more word out of you and I’ll kick you out that bleeding mullioned window, boy.’ It annoyed me that I had to look it up. Surely the lady could have merely disembroiled the discomfiture by saying, ‘Cecilia walked to the window which had a vertical member such as of stone or wood, dividing it.’ In such a way the noesis would have been autodidactic.

But palimpsest was just plain orotundity.

“Oh, my word, Transmoria. Now the fool’s going to say he doesn’t know what palimpsest is. What is the world coming to?”

Not only did I not know what it meant. I also refused to look it up. So you’ll have to. It’s an extremely silly sounding word which I’m sure has a perfectly haymish synecdoche. Now, something in me wants to forgive P.D. James because according to Wickedpedia she’s 160 years old and a lot of these words were probably arpifuse when she was a girl. But I have toz warn you there are a lot of carpacuous writers out there who vorantly look up words in the dictionary just to show how sepential they are. And I for one am not going to gyre their slithy toves.

“No, Transmoria. I can’t find it either. It can’t be a real word.”

Tourists checking into a five-star Bangkok hotel or dining at an upscale restaurant will no doubt recall the pleasure of receiving a traditional wai from the owner, headwaiter, serving staff. Pleasure is the key experience, the pleasure of being recognized, being special, being noticed—and all of it unearned. Such deference is the ultimate free lunch. This is ‘deference lite’, the tourist edition. It is part of the hospitality package like the complimentary arrival drink and fruit basket that keeps tourists returning to Thailand.

On the outward flight home, assume you are in first-class and the passenger next to you is a college age. His father and mother and younger sister are also in first-class. None of them have paid for their tickets. The father is a politician, a high-ranking officer, a member of the board of directors, sometimes all three combined into one. Beyond ‘Deference Lite’ this is the Full Monty of deference Thai style, which we can call ‘Deference Full Strength.’ In the full strength version, the objects float on a cloud of deference far above the ground occupied by ordinary mortals. Life takes the five-star reception experience to every part of public and private life. It is beyond anything that a foreign tourist would ever experience.

One reason that many Thais feel uncomfortable around foreigners is the Thai deference system breaks down in their presence. An example is when that first-class foreign passenger questions the right of a family to free tickets or inquires into a system that allows such an entitlement. In other words, foreigners might ask to justify such benefits as part of a deference system. That makes many Thais uncomfortable. They have little practice in defending such practices.

Foreigners bring a Thai accustomed to deference down from the clouds to the ground. Even more annoying, foreigners don’t pick up the subtle and not so subtle clues as to deference identifiers, or if they do, don’t accord them the same weight and value. The family names often mean little or nothing to them. The ranks and status of the person brings a shrug. The power and privilege of positions and ranks accorded deference don’t withstand the inquiries of foreigners as to why and how respect is attached to them. Thais will complain that foreigners look down on them. Some racists may do that. But what Thais often overlook is what is mistaken as a personal is the failure to automatically honor a Thai person’s claim birthed inside an unearned deference system. The fact is, that an undiluted deference system—Deference Full Strength— doesn’t extend beyond the borders of Thailand. And it never occurs to most Thais why that is and why exile is far more painful for a Thai than for most nationalities.

Deference is the respect or esteem that one person displays and is expected to display to another. In deference culture the superior person in the equation feels an entitlement to gestures of respect from the inferior members of society. Inferior may be defined in terms of age, rank, status, wealth, talent, skill or abilities. Every culture has deference infused in the society. There are people who are respected. That is a common thread around the world. But not all cultural deference systems are the same.

In the West, the deference culture is built around what must be ‘earned’ before a person can expect deference. It is also secular. In the West there is nothing sacred about deference owed or received. Yes, there will be some deference legacies passed along from generation to generation. But those legacies are fragile for the most part and along with a credit card will get you a first class seat on the airline of your choice. Social harmony isn’t disrupted because a person loses deference. In fact, a case can be made that overall social harmony is reinforced by the regular vetting of deference beneficiaries, as the bad apples can be plucked from the barrel. In Thailand, such a vetting would be viewed as ‘causing conflict’ and is discouraged.

In Thailand the deference culture is largely built around age, rank, family, and wealth. The Thai expression is kreng jai, and that term underpins the social, political and economic system and has done so for centuries. Deference doesn’t come in a one size fits all. It can be found in many different contexts and manifest itself in a number of different gestures and attitudes. It can be seen in the beautifully executed wai to an elderly person in a hospital room. It can be also seen when a Benz runs a red light in front of a cop who turns a blind eye. Or when the headman instructs a villager who to vote for. The social and political beneficiaries of deference run from along many different fault lines—monks to gangsters, from teachers to godfathers, from an old family name to a government official in quasi-military uniform. Regalia are important in Thai eyes. Look at the posters of candidates around election time. Most of them are in military styled uniforms or academic gowns, staring out at the potential voters who are expected to see a superior whose rank and name and status entitles them to power.

In Thailand, a case can be made that unearned deference is the norm within the deference system. By unearned I mean the person has no special talent, skill or ability that would independently grant him or her respect from other members of the community. The unearned deference is reaping respect from what someone else sowed. If you have the right family name you expect to receive deference. It doesn’t matter that you’ve accomplished nothing that would entitle you to deference independently. Any deference system can withstand a number of people in the legacy category. The problem with Thailand is the quota on deference functions the opposite way from the West: those who earn it (if they can) float along the margins because the true deference is reserved for the unearned deference holders.

You see them in their fancy cars, shopping for brand name items in the large shopping malls in Bangkok. These people look down on others and they expect respect from those very same people. The political power is also largely in the hands of such unearned deference holders. Not only do they demand their entitlements to deference, they can back those demands with political power. If on the way back from the shopping mall, they run over and kill a couple of peasants, the legal system is expected to defer to the driver’s and victims relative rank. Money changes hands but through the filter of how the deference is allocated.

In deference culture, where deference is independently earned, members of society view the person through a critical lens to assess the worthiness of another contribution, talent, and skills before conferring deference. That is not a one-time assessment. It is an ongoing monitoring system. So if you are Tiger Woods, one day the deference debt owed by others can disappear especially when your private life exposes you as having violated certain moral standards. When it is unearned, the beneficiaries of deference have a life-long entitlement that protects them from criticism, evaluation, or exclusion. It is this “get out of jail” card that allows immunity from legal troubles and gets them to the front of the plane as a matter of right.

The perspective of members within an unearned deference society does indeed think differently. It is common to read or hear Thais say, “Foreigners don’t know how we think.” What they are really saying is that foreigners don’t understand the Thai deference system. That is indeed a true point up to a point. Foreigners may well understand how the deference system works, because they see it from the outside looking in. They’ve not had constant indoctrination into a certain deference system that instills core values, attitudes and perspectives, ones that are accepted a fully valid and true and beyond discussion. To that extend, foreigners understand how Thai’s think but question the underlying basis of the belief system.

In Thailand, the personal information locals seek and the uses of that information are different from the earned deference system of the West. In a social setting, the signals and signs are read quickly: the family name, the rank, status or age are assessed. Then the connection between that person and his or her family with others, establishing the network, the wheels within wheels, that the person bothering with the inquiry can establish their power and reach within the political and economic network. The gift giving which flows as a tangible sign of respect is the slippery slope that descends easily into corruption. It becomes the basis of patronage and the client/patron relationship. The unearned deference system is intrinsically undemocratic. Instead it is firm embedded in a hierarchy where the major players right to place in the deference system can’t be independently questioned, criticized or discussed. It must be unquestionably accepted.

A number of people criticized the Thai constitution of 1997 for requiring a candidate for MP to have a university degree. It seems, from a middle-class point of view, a way to exclude the voices of rural people who have less of a chance for such an education. Another perspective is that the less educated class as something that must be in the constitution demanded this provision. This makes perfect sense from their point of view; only someone with a university degree could expect the deference of government officials and others to plead the case of a rural peasant. Sending a peasant leader to Bangkok as an elected MP would be counterproductive in an unearned deference system. Such a person would find the doors closed. The petition from the provinces would go unread and unattended.

The political impasse in Thailand since 2006 has been fed, at least in part, by a large segment of the population unwilling to continue to extend unearned deference to their betters. If democracy means anything, it means that in the larger political body of society, the political class that demands or relies on unearned deference as the basis for their political power will be in conflict with those who no longer are willing to defer without a prior commitment of equal respect. That is the fundamental weakness of an unearned deference culture: respect is unequally and unfairly distributed. It is never based on equal respect and consent.

The deference system plays out in many different ways from the way traffic lights are operated to restrictions on citizenship and immigration, to the processing of VIPs in the legal system. Once you have an idea of how the deference system is working underneath the surface, unmentioned, often unmentionable, suddenly what seems incomprehensible is filled with new meaning.

Is deference a kind of Ponzo illusion?

“Exotic” crime fiction has taken off in the last decade. People want to read about detectives in far-off places, even if they don’t want to wade through learned histories of those distant lands.

Many of the biggest selling novels of the last decade have been “exotic crime.” You’ll find a detective novel set almost everywhere in the world, from the “Number One Ladies Detective Agency” in Botswana through Camilleri’s Sicily to dour old Henning Mankell in the gloomy south of Sweden.

The success of my co-bloggers at International Crime Authors – with their detectives plying their trade in Thailand, Laos, and Turkey, alongside my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef – is also proof that this taste for international crime is more than just a publishing fad. The novels aren’t just Los Angeles gumshoe stuff transported to colder or poorer climes.

Here’s what I think is behind it:

Read a history book or a book of contemporary politics. Often you’ll find a list of the enormous numbers of people destroyed around the world by war and famine and neglect. You won’t get any sense that the world…makes sense. Crime fiction doesn’t purport to save the planet, but it does demonstrate that one man – the detective – can confront a mafia, an international espionage organization, a government and come out with at least a sliver of justice.

And justice is one of the few ideas which can still inspire.

Readers also prefer crime fiction about distant countries over so-called “literary” fiction about such places.

That’s because crime fiction gives you the reality of a society and also, by definition, its worst elements — the killers, the lowlifes — but it also gives you a sense that a resolution is possible. (See above.)

Literary fiction, by contrast, often simply describes the degradation of distant lands. If you read Rohinton Mistry’s “A Fine Balance,” for example, you probably thought it was a great “literary” book, but you also might’ve ended up feeling as abused as his downtrodden Indian characters without the slightest sense of uplift.

Crime fiction doesn’t leave you that way.

Now, that’s also true of the Los Angeles gumshoe. But the international element gives us something else to wonder about in these new novels. Not just because the scene is alien. Rather, it’s because we all trust to some extent that bad guys in Los Angeles will go to jail — or become Hollywood producers. We have faith in the system. So a detective has some measure of backing from the system, and consequently novelists have to push credibility to its limits in order to make him look like he’s taking a risk, to make him look brave.

International crime, particularly when it’s set in the Developing World, can’t be based on that same trust in the system. The lack of law and order in Palestine, as I observed it as a journalist covering the Palestinian intifada, was one of the prime reasons I had for casting my novels as crime novels. It was clear the reality wasn’t a romance novel. Gangsters and crooked cops in the West Bank suggested the more vibrant days of the US crime novel back in the time of Chandler and Hammett, when it was much harder to argue that a city or mayor or police chief wouldn’t be in the pocket of the bad guys.

When a detective goes up against such odds in international crime fiction, it’s truly inspiring.

For books that start with a murder, that’s not what you’d expect, but it’s the reason for the success of this new exotic avenue of the crime genre.