Matt quite inadvertently alluded to one of my favourite historical characters, Sultan Abdulhamid II, in his 17th June blog (Cheers for Hitler and Brits go home). Don’t get me wrong, I in no way approve of the many undemocratic and downright cruel things that this man did during the course of his 33 year reign. But in the west he is often portrayed as a total villain which is about as far from the truth as the notion that he was a saint. He was neither.

Abdulhamid II was a complex and troubled man who, at the age of 34, found himself at the head of an empire that was rapidly crumbling. The 19th century was a dangerous time of ruthless and predatory empires and Abdulhamid was both preyed upon and courted by Britain, France, Russia and, albeit rather more subtly, the USA. Maintaining Ottoman sovereignty around all that lot was tough. But he was a bright man and, although he lost territory to one or other rival empire from time to time, he managed for the most part to maintain his autonomy. The only people he was ever really duped by, were the Germans. Kaiser Wilhelm II was set on building an empire of his own long before the 1914-18 war and he used his ‘friendship’ with Abdulhamid to further his cause. Abdulhamid had some very intelligent ministers who were deeply dismayed by a relationship that, in terms of trade and defence agreements was almost completely one sided. Although Abdulhamid had been deposed for five years by the time the First World War began, it was his relationship with the Kaiser that lay behind the fateful entry of Ottoman forces into that terrible conflict.

However, fascinating and still contentious though the historical events of Abdulhamid’s reign and legacy are, it is the man himself who actually fascinates. Short, dark and thin, Abdulhamid was not a conventionally attractive man. Apparently his voice was deep and sonorous and he was a very charming individual. Photographs show a grave face dominated by a large nose and glittering, highly intelligent eyes. But there was so much damage. Rejected by his father Sultan Abdulmejid II in favour of his older, more attractive brother Murad, Abdulhamid grew up to be a depressive, hypochondriac with a morbid fear of assassination. When he came to the throne in 1876 he rejected his father’s ornate palace of Dolmabahçe on the Bosphorus and constructed the fortress palace of Yıldız, complete with its own garrison and prison. From his office in Yıldız, Abdulhamid ordered his crumbling empire advised by astrologers and magicians, doctors and enemy agents and sometimes his very worried, very able ministers.

As a graduate in psychology I find myself endlessly drawn to a man who knew in his heart exactly what was happening – indeed he fought with every fibre of his being to stop his empire from fracturing. But his fears for his health as well as his sad and pitiful attempts to lead a ‘normal’ life always thwarted him. There is a lake in the grounds of the palace of Yıldız where Abdulhamid used to ride around in a motor launch. At some point in the journey the boatman would stop to let the Sultan, his only passenger off, so that Abdulhamid could go to the little coffee house by the shore and have a drink. He always paid for his coffee and he was always the only customer. It is said that each of the many pavilions and kiosks that make up Yıldız Palace are connected by tunnels that would allow the Sultan to escape in the event of an assassination attempt. This is at times confirmed and denied, depending upon who one speaks to. But I set the climax of my 2004 Çetin İkmen book HAREM in one of those tunnels and so I’m pretty sure that at least some of these alleged structures are real.

I can understand that some people in Palestine, would revere Abdulhamid. Had he kept the empire together there is doubt as to whether the State of Israel would ever have existed. But on the other hand, he was no easy master. He opposed the democracy his people cried out for at every turn. He spied on his own citizens to an extent matched only by the Stasi in old East Germany and when he was finally deposed in 1909, most of his subjects felt only relief. But he is a fascinating figure and I would like to add the title of another book about him to Barry Unsworth’s ‘The Rage of the Vulture’ mentioned by Matt. ‘Abdulhamid: Shadow of God’ was written by Joan Haslip in 1956 and is the most recent biography of a man who still has a huge amount of relevance in modern Middle Eastern politics. If someone would give me the chance, writing a new book about him is a challenge I’d really like to try and rise to.

This week I’d like to thank Todd Jensen from forensiccolleges.net for passing on my topic. I am indebted for two reasons, firstly because it’s Saturday already and I couldn’t think of anything to write about. Jetlag has a way of turning a boy’s mind to in-flight vegetarian lasagna. But mostly, I’d like to pass it on because of a blob I wrote before we left on our invasion of Europe. You might remember I asked for volunteers to come and look after our pack of (why on earth did we?) rescue dogs. As I expected, I got no responses whatsoever. So Jess and I decided to look into the possibility of recruiting a kindly person through the international network known as Craigslist. We’d already filled in the submission form and sent it off when Todd passed on the following:

1. Dubbed the “Craigslist Killer” in April 2009, Phillip Markoff, 24 was indicted on charges of First Degree Murder and armed robbery, amongst other charges. After responding to several different ads on the erotic services of Craigslist, Markoff allegedly met up with 3 different women in Boston and Rhode Island area hotels and robbed them at gunpoint; one of the women fought back and was murdered. After following up on hundreds of leads Markoff was arrested and despite the alarming amount of evidence against him has entered a not guilty plea; he is set to go to trial in June 2010.

2. In March of 2009, 50 year old radio reporter, George Weber was found dead in his apartment after being stabbed at least 50 times in the neck and upper body. After responding to a S & M sex Craigslist ad posted by 16 year old John Katehis, the two agreed to meet up and exchange sex for money. Katehis describes himself on his MySpace profile as “Extremist, an Anarchist, a Sadomasochist” and originally told police he killed him after Weber tried to stab him first.

3. In April 2010, a Washington couple agreed to meet a couple that responded to their Craigslist ad selling a ring for $1050. The two people who were posing as a couple interested in buying the ring for their mother-in-law, entered the home of James Sanders and tied up Sanders, his wife, and their two children. Two others then entered the home and began to beat one of the children and the father was shot and killed while trying to protect his son. All four people were arrested within a couple of days.

4. A Vancouver couple was arrested in May of 2008 after allegedly posting an ad on Craigslist to sell their 7 day old baby for $10,000 because they “can’t afford” her. After being alerted to the post, Vancouver police tracked the post to an apartment in Vancouver’s West End where the couple was arrested and the child placed in Child Protective Services. The couple has since told authorities that the posting was a joke.

5. Kennith Goodwin, a 51 year old U.S. Postmaster from Washington was arrested in May 2010 after he allegedly tried to solicit sex on Craigslist with detectives posing as a 13 year old girl. Federal investigators said that the computer he had been using to correspond with the detectives, while he was at work at the Winlock Post Office had been seized. Goodwin was later charged with patronizing prostitution.

6. Kissimmee Police arrested 24 year old Braves pitcher, Deunte Heath on March 26, 2010 for solicitation of prostitution and entering a dwelling for prostitution. The Braves pitcher who was in Florida for spring training agreed to pay $75 for a “sex act” he had found on Craigslist and was arrested as he entered the townhouse where it was supposed to take place. He was released from the Osceola County Jail after posting a $2000 bond that same day.

7. A “group sex” ad posted on Craigslist in April 2010 as a joke landed a 29 year old Connecticut man in jail charged with misdemeanor sexual assault and burglary, amongst other charges. The Craigslist ad stated that there was a soccer mom there ready to have sex with as many men as possible; however, Richard Zeh showed up at the wrong address and was told to leave. When he showed up at the correct address listed on the ad he was again turned away. Thinking the 18 year old woman in the first house was playing hard to get, he went back and sexually assaulted her and was arrested soon after.

8. Brandon and Amber Herbert, an Oregon couple were arrested in April 2008 for posting a fake ad on Craigslist to cover up a burglary that they had committed. After burglarizing a ranch they knew was unattended for a couple of days, they attempted to cover it up by posting an ad on Craigslist pretending to be the owner of the house saying that he had to leave town on an emergency and couldn’t get rid of all his stuff, therefore it was all up for grabs. The man returned to his home to see about 30 people taking off with loads of stuff from his home and it took officers about a week to track down the couple that had posted the ad.

9. In November 2005, a 22 year old California woman was taken into custody after posting an ad on Craigslist offering her 4 year old daughter for sex in exchange for $500. After someone responded to an ad posted by Shannon Nicole Woods they agreed to meet for sex and when the person brought up the sexual encounter with her 4 year old daughter Woods did not object. The person, who was not involved with law enforcement, alerted authorities and a warrant was issued to search Woods’ house and police confiscated her laptop along with several CD’s and placed her under arrest for suspicion of lewd conduct.

10. 22 year old Corey Jackson was arrested in Philadelphia for robbery and aggravated assault in September 2009. A 51 year old man from New Hope posted a Craigslist ad selling a $14,500 diamond ring. After corresponding and meeting, Jackson informed the man that he needed a ride to get the money and when they got there Jackson maced the man in the face and stole the ring. Determined to find him, the man placed phony ads on Craigslist hoping Jackson would try to sell the ring. It worked and when both men showed the police were ready to arrest him.

Thank you Todd. In fact we did get one reply before we withdrew the ad. It said, “Dear Colin, I know where you live now. Me and my pet cut-throat razor, Henry just can’t wait to meet your delicious looking dogs. You’d be surprised how much pain a mongrel can take. Lock your doors at night. I’m coming. (and there was some kind of a stain at the bottom. I’m sure the forensic colleges people are onto it.)

As an author of crime fiction, my literary world is thoroughly salted with violence. Like a good miner, I spend a great deal of time in the mine examining the ore, picking off a murder, a mugging, or a robbery from the walls of the community where I live. Bangkok. Violence isn’t so much a theme of literature as a way of life for most people around the world. In pre-historical times, violence was much worse. Authors of crime fiction like myself study the causes of violence. We are always alert for stumbling on the hidden trap door where, once opened, we can explore why violence happens.

Localized, individual acts of violence we class as crimes. The police handle the offenders and the suspects are processed through a civilian court system with certain safeguards and determined to be guilty or innocent depending on the evidence the government produces. This is how a society dispenses justice. And justice matters if a modern political system is to remain stable. Notions of crime, police and justice are recent in our history.

From 130,000 (our best start date for homo sapiens) until around 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture and cities, incidents of male hunter gather violence would have looked, to our modern eyes, more like criminal acts than war. Small-scale ambushes and raiding parties with the raiders armed with primitive weapons. The contemporary idea of justice didn’t enter into the picture. Hit and run missions resulted in relatively small body counts. But the overall numbers of men killed added up as murdering outsiders was a constant feature of life. It is estimated that one out of three men during this long period in our development were homicide victims. Violence, it seems, is deep inside our DNA.

Our written records go back about 5,000 years. We have documents of that show almost constant war during this period. By 5,000 years ago men had been organized in armies and wars could be waged in the modern sense. We find violence on a large scale—and size does matter—falls along a continuum between insurgency, terrorism and war.

In our modern world, the monopoly of violence is divided between the military and police. The military forces, rather than the police, are given the task of engaging in this kind of violence. There are rules of engagement but the processing is different. The goal in such a conflict is to capture or kill as many of the enemy as necessary to achieve victory. The idea of victory is different than justice. The object of the military is to inflict a defeat so that the enemy loses the will to fight and will seek peace as an alternative to violence. Wars which field organized armies is quite modern. But given our history, as a species we were a natural to up the scope and scale of our historical impulse to violence.

In the case of the police and the military—army, marines, navy, air force, coast guard—the larger question arises as to how a democracy controls, monitors, deploys, punishes, and rewards policemen and soldiers.

Professor Richard Wrangman’s premise in Demonic Males, Apes and The Origin of Human Violence, makes it abundantly evident that how species, especially the male counterpart, is hardwired for violence. The male temperament that leads to violence cuts across time and cultures. It is found in Africa, Asia, West Europe, Latin and North America. There are no exceptions to this rule. “Patriarchy is worldwide and history-wide.” Paradise where violence was absent is a fantasy; it never existed.

Coalitions of males patrolling territory and killing other males in raids and ambushes have been an essential part of our species. What makes us, like chimpanzees, unique is our deliberate searching for victims and killing the helpless without mercy. Violence isn’t some random event that evil or bad men commit. It is innate in all males who have a long history of forming gang-parties to defend and expand their territory. Male violence is the historical avenue for expansion and control of scarce resources and sexual partners.

Steven Pinker in an essay titled The History of Violence, notes that pre-modern raids and ambushes historically killed only a small number of participants. But the number of incidents of violence was much more frequent and the population was much smaller. The percentage of adult males killed was vastly higher in pre-historical times. The professional modern killing machines of war kill a far smaller percentage of males. Though given the hugely larger population of males, while the absolute number killed is much higher the percentage of males killed is significantly lower. Pinker points to the tipping point on the decline of violence to the Age of Reason.

“These tragedies can be averted by a state with a monopoly on violence, because it can inflict disinterested penalties that eliminate the incentives for aggression, thereby defusing anxieties about preemptive attack and obviating the need to maintain a hair-trigger propensity for retaliation. Indeed, Eisner and Elias attribute the decline in European homicide to the transition from knightly warrior societies to the centralized governments of early modernity. And, today, violence continues to fester in zones of anarchy, such as frontier regions, failed states, collapsed empires, and territories contested by mafias, gangs, and other dealers of contraband.”

In the modern era with complex political systems and large populations, has produced centralized governments, which control the monopoly of violence by controlling the state-sponsored agents of violence—the police and military.

Above, Pinker lists the conditions where violence festers. I’d add another category—states where civilian control and jurisdiction over the police or military is compromised, weak or ineffective. Such states are necessarily failed, failing or inside collapsed empires. There are many such states where the military calls the shots. Whatever else one calls such a state, democratic isn’t one label that fits well. Though many seek shelter under that illusion.

In the United States an example of the clash between military and civilian authorities is played out between the Obama White House and General Stanley McChrystal for what the New York Times in its lead op-ed piece called the general’s undisciplined comments in a Rolling Stone magazine article.

Michael Hastings’s The Runaway General has created conflict between a military general whose vision of fighting a war is in apparent conflict with the civilian authorities. No doubt such conflict flies under the radar of most wars but when a general who has been put charge of the war by civilian authorities goes public with his discontent and criticizes the civilians who, on paper, are his superiors, then a decision has to be made. And that decision has little to do with the general’s complaints but everything to do with the political decision that places the military and its generals firmly and squarely under the control of civilians who have been elected to office.

Generals aren’t elected officials. That doesn’t stop them from being political. It doesn’t stop them from wanting to run a war their way and without interference from wimpy civilians who go home at night to a warm, safe bed. The military and police run highly hierarchical organizations based on command and control. Soldiers and police work under the orders of their commanders. Soldiers aren’t asked to cast a vote as to whether they move out at 04.00 hours and attack an entrenched enemy. They are ordered to do so. The military and police are cultures that by their nature are anti-democratic. Such a culture is necessary otherwise they wouldn’t be effective in their duty.

The problem is self-interest, hubris, along with the nature of the culture required to make soldiers and policemen effective. The first two traits are broadly spread through the population, covering military, police and civilians. A democratic system with checks and balances, an opposition, free speech, and elections, is our best attempt to reign in the self-interest and hubris of men (and women) who exercise power. If you look around the world at countries where the military runs the show, directly or indirectly, you discover the generals have a way of defining enemies in a way that supports their interest; such regimes avoid elections, restrict speech, citizens who challenge the military are detained without charge, harassed or they ‘disappear’ and corruptions flourishes. In a democratic political system the question of when to use and stop using violence through projecting military force must rest in civilian hands. Otherwise the military will make its own assessment of when to use force, what is effective force, and define victory.

By allowing General Stanley McChrystal a free pass, the United States would send a powerful message to the military-backed regimes—and there are many—that even the Americans have come around to the point of view that the top brass in the military can act like an opposition in a political context. The top general won’t be reigned in even though he’s taken on the civilian administration, directly questioning their judgment in public. Whatever happens in Afghanistan or Iraq, that coded message would be a bad decision for all of us.

Should the American civilian administration have not act firmly, its decision would have been seen around the world as a successful declaration of independence by the the military from its elected civilian controllers. Cut off those civilian restraints and the inherent instincts bottled in the military, we would be far less safe and secure. Military generals around the world would take the American military victory over the civilian government as a chance to stare down their own civilian governments.

Without a president ready to dismiss a general who goes public with his criticism of his civilian bosses, who are responsible for starting, funding, organizing and ending killing missions, America would have joined many countries in the third world. Whatever is to be won or lost in Afghanistan or Iraq would no longer have mattered as the larger war to secure the basis of democratic government would have been lost.

Whatever else President Obama does in his first term in office, the dismissal of General Stanley McChrystal from his command position establishes a fundamental principle of who is charge in cranking up and dispatching a force of violence. Even the highest general reports and serves at the discretion of the president. If the public disagrees with President Obama’s Afghanistan or Iraq war, they can vote him out of office. Contrast that with the third world, where a many voters may disagree with a top general’s decisions but such disagreement leaves them without any effective political recourse.

I was under the impression that the English weren’t allowed into Wales any more, now that Tony Blair persuaded us we ought to have at least half a government of our own and let Westminster pay for it. I assume Colin Cotterill managed to make it through the border undercover on his Australian passport. Which is a good thing, because his blog post of this week was a lovely appreciations of my homeland, even down to the 28 yards of daily rainfall for which I yearn as I swelter through 40-degree desert heat here in Jerusalem.

During his stay at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Colin muses that a soggy sheep would be less attractive than a dry one. A dry sheep may conjure up pleasanter images of romantic moments in the haybarn (in a land where there are more sheep than humans, romance might occasionally include a sheep.) There is, however, considerable lanolin in the sheep’s wool, so the rainfall doesn’t penetrate to the sheep’s body and therefore a good shake would be all that’s needed to dry him or her out – for further investigation, as it were.

I hope that clears things up for you, Colin. Next time you’re at the Hay festival, even if it’s raining, sheep are the perfect antidote. (Why do you think all those fat, boozed up London publishing types come all the way to the countryside?) Take this old Welsh joke as your cue:

A man walks into a pub. “Jones has been found having sex with a sheep,” he says. The barman looks up and asks, “Was it a male sheep or a female sheep?” “A female sheep, of course,” says the man. “There’s nothing wrong with Jones.”

Or this one:

A man’s walking along a country lane. He sees a farmer in the field wrestling with a sheep. He leans over the stone wall and calls out, “Are you shearing that sheep?” The farmer shouts back, “No. Get your own girlfriend.”

(Shearing. He hears “sharing.” Geddit?)

Naturally as a Welshman I have a very soft spot for sheep, though despite the jokes I’ve never known them in the biblical sense. As a child, I used to eat breakfast with sheep, however.

More precisely, the sheep would come down from their grazing on the mountains to escape the cold of the night. In the morning, we’d find them in my grandparents’ back garden, chewing the lawn and staring through the window at me as I chewed my Weetabix. For some reason (probably because it always rains in Wales) it’s always raining in my memories of staring at the sheep. There’s something deeply peaceful about remembering the slow munching of the sheep, their empty stare (they aren’t very smart), and the slanting rain over the valley.

When my brother and I would go out to the garden to play football, the lawn would be studded with little black-tan pellets of sheep shit. Unlike dog and cat do, sheep poop barely even sticks to your skin, because it comes out quite dry. So you could do sliding tackles through the delicate feces and go back into the house for tea without having to wash off. Even the sensitive nose of my grandmother was unable to ascribe a negative association to the smell of sheep shit.

At the Jerusalem Zoo a month or so ago, I was wandering the petting zoo with my two-year-old. One of the sheep starting funneling pellets from his bottom – they don’t come out one by one, but rather as if they were being fed out in groups of seven or eight. I grabbed my son. “Look, it’s pooping. Isn’t that wonderful?”

It was then that I realized what fine preparation for fatherhood I had received all those years ago. Whereas most parents are repulsed by their children’s poop, I think I had a magical childhood association with the pellets hidden between the leaves of green grass and have therefore always loved changing the little fellow’s diaper.

…If all this strange copromemorabilia doesn’t put you off moving to Wales, Colin, I’m sure the price of real estate (which has reached positively insane English levels) will.

It’s Crime Fiction Week here in the UK and so authors of crime and mystery fiction have been trudging around the land spreading the good news about ghastly murder. Competing with the World Cup has not been easy and not all of our events have been well attended. But I was lucky enough to speak to a large crowd in Manchester last night who were all far more enthusiastic about crime fiction than about football. In fact the event, which was called ‘How to Get Ahead in Crime Fiction’ actually over-ran by quite a bit.

In the time available to me I tired to cover as much ground as possible. Author talk audiences usually comprise fans of the author and/or series, crime fiction aficionados and also people who are looking for hints and tips on how to write and publish their own work. It’s a lot to get through. So I talked about the chaotic way in which I generally work, how I got published, how I conduct my research and I also read from and spoke about my new İkmen book DEATH BY DESIGN. All quite standard for this kind of talk and all very lively. But this particular audience was very savvy and they all wanted to dig deeper into what I do and why I do it. Talk turned to my motivation and, specifically, my interest in different states of mind.

Because I come from a background of working in mental health services and because I have a degree in psychology, states of mind interest me a lot. In my work in psychiatric hospitals and special units I came across many ways of seeing the world and points of perception that were unusual to say the least. I have watched men and women, gripped by psychotic episodes, entirely change in character before my eyes. I have seen the confusion and distress that can bring and I hope that in my own way I have always been sympathetic and also of some comfort to them at those times. People in mental distress are very vulnerable and can be inclined to harm themselves when in the throes of extreme agitation. What they almost never do is harm other people. In all my years of working in mental health institutions I was never threatened or harmed once. I’ll be honest, I’ve been in some tense situations, but I’ve never, ever been attacked. And this was the crux of the matter in Manchester last night. For once, everyone understood that. I made my pitch, as I do, for supporting and understanding the mentally ill and they all got it!

I can’t tell you how happy that made me. That my books are full of mentally distressed people as victims rather than perpetrators of crime is what I do and what so many do not or cannot relate to. But my audience last night were not among their number and they saw what I see which is the real of crime of neglect of the mentally ill that infects almost every society on earth. Schizophrenia, depression, bi-polar disorder – these things are not easy for people to understand, I know that. I also know that in the wonderful world of charity giving, the mentally ill are way down the pecking order. They’re not fluffy, they’re not children and in some quarters it’s almost standard practice to shun them. But it’s wrong and last night I was lucky enough to be in the presence of a rare group of people who understood that.

As I said to them as I left last night, ‘be careful as you go home. There are a lot of sane people out there and they ARE dangerous.’ It was so nice that they all just smiled knowingly. Maybe the world is changing, just a little bit, for the better.

‘Will they get on the bus or do we get out at the border?’

‘What border’s that?’

‘The international border.’

‘It’s Wales, Jess.’

‘I thought it was a different country.’

‘Well, it is…sort of.’

‘So?’

‘So, it’s not the type of country anyone would go to the trouble of applying for a visa to get into.’

‘What about drug smuggling – weapons?’

‘I think they’ve got enough already.’

We were on the local bus from Hereford to Hay – a journey fraught with disaster if you happen to have a French accent. My publicist had warned me about of the horror of attempting to travel by local transport in a hostile country. ‘They get lost and break down all the time,’ she said. It sounded like fun. I’d expected a 1952 Bedford with wooden benches and a beer-breathed driver called Taffy and his chippie wife Bronwyn with black smoke coming out of the rear pipe (The bus, not Bronwyn.) The publicist insisted I take a taxi for safety. I reminded her that three weeks earlier, not that far away, a taxi driver had massacred half the county in an armed rage. She assured me that only happened once every six months or thereabouts. Even so, we opted for the bus where at least there’d be eye-witnesses and we could always drop down behind the seat while other passengers were being mowed down. Of course, the sleek modern bus was a huge disappointment to me, just as the lack of a passport stamp was a disappointment to Jess.

We pulled into Hay and said goodbye to our fellow passengers, all white haired elderly ladies apart from one bald one. They invited us to tea if we found ourselves with a spare moment. We were staying at Ye Olde Black Lion public house. Jess insisted on checking us in ‘cause she’d downloaded ‘Ten Common Phrases in Welsh’ from the internet. I’d agreed to test her for several hours on the train from Paddington until she had the intonation down pat. She said it was a language very similar to the central Thai patois of Suphanburi.

‘Lllewalynallykripatill’, she said to the smiling receptionist. (‘Get them ewes out from under the sewage tank, Lassie.’)

‘Sorry?’ said Latitia the Belaruzian desk clerk.

‘Llllluminiumllachhert,’ said Jess. (‘You Welsh certainly make a mean rarebit.’)

Latitia looked in my direction and smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry, please tell your adopted refugee daughter I don’t speak Vietnamese.’ That shut Jess up till dinner time. She hates being confused for an adopted Vietnamese refugee even more than I hate being compared to Alexander McCall Smith.

We spent the next day popping in and out of bookshops. According to the Hay chamber of commerce there are eleven bookshops for every man, woman, child and golden retriever in the village. How it became the second hand book dealer capital of the UK nobody seems to know. But I tell you I’d have very little chance of snapping up a 1958 forensic science textbook with margin annotations on the gulf of Thailand. Perhaps riding my elation, Jess announced at the end of the day that we were going to move to Wales. We popped in to see Edwyn at the real estate and green grocery and looked at prices. Jess was impressed at how everything looked just like the villages in Midsommer Murders, her favourite police drama series. Again I pointed out that the gory death toll in Midsommer is about eight a week but that didn’t deter her. She’d had to forego her addiction to the show once I’d given her the choice, ‘me or the TV’. That decision had been a very close call so I didn’t want to push my luck by giving her the ultimatum, ‘me or Wales’. I figured I’d leave it up to the weather. Our visit had coincided with the three days of summer they get along the Wye valley. Everyone was wearing revealing shorts and halter necks, even the women, and I could see how a Thai’s fancy might be swept up in the heat. But the average daily rainfall in Wales is twenty-eight yards and the temperatures regularly dip below those of Finland. Yes, I agree, hugging a sheep in warm weather is therapeutic, some might even say ‘erotic’ and despite my better judgement, I’m glad we did it, but wait till the rains come. Nobody loves a soggy sheep. Ask Matt Beynon Rees.

This question lies at the heart of a recent Guardian essay “The human heart of the matter” by Geoff Dyer. Dyer, himself a novelist, looks at recent books set in Afghanistan and Iraq including David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Sebastian Junger’s War and finds that non-fiction has relatively more strength than fiction. And that American journalists, whose companies provide them with real luxury more able than their British counterparts.

It’s not just the money, according to Dyer, but the American journalists benefit from the “all-round flexibility and versatility of American English” while their British cousins struggle inside the language cocoon of class. The sharing of real-life characters in a number of the non-fiction book has Dyer hitting a high note as such ‘real’ characters interconnect into some grand epic as if all these non-fiction were a multi-volume work.

As for past novelists who later wrote about a war they had fought in, Dyer mentions: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, and Joseph Heller’s Catch 22. But their timing was all off for our modern, faster-than-a-speeding-bullet world. So only non-fiction can come to grips with the material in the time needed to make a mark.

There is so much wrong with much of what Dyer wrote and implied that it is difficult to know where to start. The essay has the fingerprints of David Shields and his Reality Hunger, an anti-novel screed, all over the essay. Like a lot of other people in publishing, Dyer has drunk the Kool-Aid, nodding that Shields is right about uselessness of reading a Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq war novel. Not, now in 2010.

Donkey is a concept Dyer borrows from one of the non-fiction authors. The characters in the book, drawn from real life, are have referred to as their “donkey” – a real flesh and blood character and like a good vampire, the duty of the non-fiction author is to suck every last noun, adjective and verb out of the victim, assemble them into a pattern, making the donkey seem more or less suitably complex, before moving on to another ‘real life’ character and a new chain of events. Like Shields, Dyer is a convert to the idea books are data dumps, mineshafts from educated miners, who go down the shaft, watching the donkeys rather than looking for the gold. The other seduction is the non-fiction author’s personal journey into the terror zone of war. The implication being that unless your own ass has been on the line in a fire-fight what right do you have to write about one? This is a point of view for sure.

With a little working this idea could be adapted and extended to abolish historical, horror and science fiction. War is organized, state sponsored violence. But, at its core, is the ugly coil of violence, hissing, lunging, fangs showing. Crime is more ad hoc. Perhaps only police reporters should write fiction about crime. Though they might not be as well paid as their foreign correspondent counterparts, but, if American, would speak the lingo of the donkeys running drugs, numbers and prostitutes. The fact is the overwhelming number of crime authors aren’t working or ex-cops, judges, prosecutors and public defenders who see a steady parade of these donkeys and their acts of violence throughout their working day. Most working crime authors come from outside the circle where violence is an organic part of their daily life.

That tells me, that in terms of violence on the micro level, readers value the gift of a vivid and sustained imagination, rooted in reality, rather than demand that the author has undergone a series of similar experiences.

It’s a mistake to cage your imagination and dreams in the razor wire of actual characters and real events of violence. Following an imaginary donkey, won’t win you the non-fiction author’s ‘reality’ cup, but it may be your fictive character’s point of view is more salient and perceptive than any real donkey in the field.

Let’s start with some novels that Dyer doesn’t mention. Graham Greene’s The Quiet American is (last time I looked) a novel set in the Vietnam War. The French War. A novel that the State Department might have wished to flip through, taken few notes, had a couple of interior seminars before landing troops. That novel is still in print, read and studied 56 years after it was published. It didn’t take years and years after French defeat to be published either. Neither Graham Greene’s deficiencies (being British) in pay nor the anchor of his upper class, privileged education failed to sabotage The Quiet American and it might be argued because he wasn’t an American that he saw them more clearly than they saw themselves. If Graham Greene had written The Quiet American as a non-fiction account of his time as a journalist covering the war, the cool stuff from the front lines, the deaths, the horror, the boredom, would that have been a better way to handle the material?

Dyer also believes that the professional journalist/author is the best person to tell the non-fiction tale and not the soldiers who, as donkeys, provide the material for their betters. Dyer gives a couple of examples of poor warrior accounts of Iraq. No doubt that many soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan will write their personal accounts and with modern publishing online, those accounts will circulate in a way that wouldn’t have happened in previous wars. A lot of those accounts while of great release and interest for the author, along with his or her family, friends and neighbors, by commercial standards, the writing is repetitive, clumsy, distracting the reader. The quality of any book is the delicate entanglement of story, pacing, turn of phrase, the embedded magical moments when meaning and insight leap like a flame on a dark night from the words of a professional who skillfully lights them. That said, it doesn’t follow that a soldier who isn’t a writer can produce a brilliant war novel. And for the same reason Raymond Chandler, who was an oil company executive, could write powerful novels about crime and violence in Los Angeles without ever being a cop or private investigator.

Try reading, for example, The Sorrow of War: A Novel of North Vietnam by Bao Ninh. It is hard to believe that a professional journalist at the top of his game could have written a non-fiction account as powerful and moving as this novel. Bao Ninh shows the fundamental weakness of the David Shields cult. Lurking behind the reality, the shadows beyond the donkeys, are the larger truths of what does to people, their hearts, expectations, and attitudes.

The more daunting task is for an author’s to use introspection and insight to make sense of the reality of the mess, the hopelessness, fear and despair spawned by violence. That is also the goal in a non-fiction war book. Read Bao Ninh’s novel about his Vietnam War and ask yourself if this soldier’s story would have been more effective as a non-fiction book. The non-fiction book, should take over the literary war scene by bringing in some of these novelistic techniques to explain the futility and mess of murder. There is the heat of battle and there are the long nights of doubt and reflection. Dyer is on the side of non-fiction authors who wish to occupy this high ground alone. I wouldn’t bet all of my money on non-fiction of war to satisfy my literary need.

George Orwell wrote the splendid Homage to Catalonia, a non-fiction account of his Spanish Civil War experience in Barcelona. I suspect most people have forgotten about this book if they ever had heard about it in the first place. But mention 1984 or Animal Farm—novels that, may in their own way have absurdity of war and violence as a theme—and most people would heard about these books. Orwell’s essays are also still read and studied around the world. But Dyer’s essay is about non-fiction books about war; and on that score, Homage to Catalonia, a first hand account of the politics, personalities, ideologies, and combat, written shortly after the events, has almost no modern audience.

Emotional choices matter as does the collateral damage that spreads far beyond the immediate wounds and sudden deaths. Certainly non-fiction war accounts do and have charted the deep psychological and emotional issues arising out of combat. But is a non-fiction account the best vehicle to satisfy this hunger? Or does fiction allow for a much deeper explanation of the mental make up of the donkey reality on the battlefield? The hunger is to understand how men in war are all of us under great stress that comes with being shot at.

The answer to the above questions is: it depends. Graham Greene and Bao Ninh are powerful examples against the Reality Hunger fundamentalism. Another example is William E. Holland, a helicopter fighter pilot, Ph.D. English Literature Stanford University, Rhodes Scholar, and author, wrote a Vietnam war book: Let A Soldier Die. This was one of the first Vietnam novels published in the States and by someone who becme a professional author. Holland served as a combat helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Holland demonstrates you can, if lucky, read about a reality donkey in combat written by such donkey. There were many Vietnam War novels but Holland’s Vietnam War was one of the first that filtered the reality of combat through a novelistic sensibility that heightened the impact of violence and unrivaled the coded language of men at war.

This website is called The International Crime Authos Reality Check, which means we take ‘reality’ seriously, and we take it seriously within the context of crime fiction that we create. If Dyer’s analysis is correct, we have no business writing about violence. Though given our backgrounds, a number of us have been near or in battle zones only means we should be using those experiences to write non-fiction books.

Novels (and to call them non-fiction novels is like calling a ladyboy a girl.) I come down on the side that writing off the war novel as inferior doesn’t square with the past, and I don’t think that present non-fiction authors have seized the high ground for their exclusive use. There will always be a Graham Greene, Bao Ninh, George Orwell and William E. Holland who bring us the experience of war that we can never forget, and one that will live when much of their non-fiction accounts set in Afghanistan and Iraq is food for worms. Or compost for new sources of oil millions of years into the future, providing the basis for yet more wars, more accounts, and more forgetting. It’s not witnessing the violence and mess, it is writing a framework where the meaning of ruined lives, destroyed lives can be redeemed. Fiction or non-fiction, the hardest connection is the link between that literary ‘there, there’ aspect of a character’s mind with that part of your reader’s mind and heart, the place where you quietly puzzle together the nature of suffering and loss.

The company you keep can put the culture around you in a new light, let you see it as you haven’t before.

That’s true when I travel to different countries and discover that readers in Germany have a particular take on my Palestinian crime novels that differs from the way they look to Americans, for example.

I got to thinking about this when I was wandering the Nablus casbah this week with two German friends. An enthusiastic Palestinian fellow asked me to explain to them how much he appreciated Hitler, and as an afterthought he noted that all his people’s problems are caused by me and my compatriots from the British Isles.

I had just climbed up the old Turkish clocktower in Manara Square at the heart of the casbah with one of the Germans. I’d never seen the door at the bottom open before, but there was a policeman inside on this occasion and he generously allowed us to go up the ladder. On the first balcony, I stepped through more pigeon feces than I’d have thought could possibly gather in one place. It was crusty for an inch or two, then a little slushy beneath. I had a grin all over my face of the kind that tends to appear there when I discover a new corner in a place I’ve often been – and loved being there – before.

Above us swung the two weathered lead weights of the clock, there since the Ottomans built the tower 150 years ago. I leaned on the thin columns and Arabesqued stonework and looked out over the small square where I set an important scene in the third of my novels, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, in which my sleuth Omar Yussef attends a massed wedding organized by Hamas at the foot of the beautiful old clocktower.

When we descended, the policeman had been joined by two friends. One of them, a gregarious fellow in a red polo shirt, inquired in Arabic as to our origins. That my friends were from Germany excited him considerably. He told me that Germany was great and he very much liked — then he used a word which I couldn’t place. It sounded like the Arabic word for “releasing,” which seemed to make little sense. Was it some kind of sexual joke? I thought it unlikely, given that one of the Germans is a woman. That’d be implausibly crude for a Palestinian.

When he repeated the phrase, I saw what he was getting at. I tried a strained grin. After all I always try to be nice, no matter what opinions are expressed to me in Palestinian towns.

“What did he say?” one of my German friends asked.

“He says Germany is great and, uh, he likes Hitler.”

The red-shirted fellow backed up my translation with a flamboyant Nazi
salute.

“Shame on you,” said my friend, who’s from Berlin.

The other fellow in front of the policeman’s desk read her demeanor and asked me, “She doesn’t like Hitler? Why not?”

“Germans are ashamed of what he did,” I told him.

He nodded his head, accepting that idea. The policeman tried to quiet the red-shirted fellow. “We Palestinians like Germany, because Germany supports the Palestinian people,” he said. “But we don’t like Hitler.”

“Yes, we do. For sure. Ask anyone.” The man in the red shirt showed me his signet ring. It bore the seal of Abdel Hamid, the Ottoman sultan who oversaw the decline of the empire and was deposed by the Young Turks in 1918. “Abdel Hamid was great. The British came here in 1917. They made all our problems.”

My reading of Turkish history suggests that while Abdel Hamid made his own furniture for his palace, he was also paranoid and perhaps a little nuts. (For a fictionalized version of his story, I recommend “The Rage of the Vulture” by the wonderful Barry Unsworth.) On the other hand, I had two great-uncles who fought with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in Palestine in 1917. Everyone from Damascus-based terror chiefs to Bethlehem refugees have been both disapproving and amused by this fact. I chose not to enter into an appraisal of British involvement in the Near East with the Hitler fan.

There’s an old Bedouin phrase (though some people say the Chinese thought of it first): The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Well, one can assume that Hitler wouldn’t have been a big supporter of Israel, had he been around to see it. So the pro-Hitler statements of some Palestinians when confronted with a living German are a measure of their hatred for Israel more than anything else.

(I have an idea for a future Omar Yussef novel which will take place in Jerusalem, but will also involve some action from Berlin during the war years. Yes, there were Palestinians over there at that time…But I’m not going to give away the plot.)

As we walked on into the casbah, my German friend sighed. “Welcome to my world,” she said. “I get that all over the Arab world. But from Palestinians in particular. It’s the same for all the German correspondents.”

When I travel through the Palestinian towns, I hear all kinds of complaints about the West. Many assume I’m American, so they ask me to deliver an offensive message to George W. Bush, which I happily promise to do so if I ever bump into him. If it registers that I’m British they request that I let Tony Blair know he’d better not come to their refugee camp or they’ll make big trouble for him. I spend a lot of time in Tuscany, so it’s conceivable I might one day be at the next table to the orange-tanned former Prime Minister, and I’ll certainly inform him that he isn’t flavor of the month in Dehaisha Camp.

Among Palestinians, I like to emphasize that I’m Welsh. That usually leads to a brief pause and a change of subject. I’ve never been asked to pass on the anger of the Palestinian people to the head of the Welsh Assembly, or the Bishop of Llandaff, or Tom Jones.

But touring with some Germans gave me a new perspective on the places I’d been visiting for so long and what it’s like for others to go here. Next time some Palestinian bitches at me about my old pal David Cameron, I think I’ll be rather relieved.

Having recently finished one full-length adult novel, a children’s novella and two short stories, I now find myself completely knackered. It’s all very well doing this writing thing, but trying to make money at it, takes some doing!

I think I may have actually joined the ranks of the un-dead, that or some sort of weird zombie sorority. The day before yesterday I went into Manchester to do some shopping and had to really push myself not to just sit down on the nearest bench and go to sleep. In Marks and Spencers I had the fright of my un-life when I looked at myself in a mirror and saw a character from a Dario Argento horror movie. But then is this atypical or unusual for me in any way?

No. I always overdo things. I think that somewhere deep inside I actually enjoy running around like a hamster in a wheel and staying awake all night knotting and un-knotting plots. I don’t know why. It’s most unhealthy and can be frustrating and depressing. But I persist, or rather I have persisted. Now, maybe, I am about to at least consider some sort of change. Why?

Well let me tell you that this particular bout of knackeredness is different and, to me, very, very scary. Because not only am I knackered, I am also totally empty too. The usual legion of things to do remain, but I don’t have a thought in my head. I am, theoretically, working on several things at the moment – or rather I would be if my brain was working.

This isn’t so called writer’s block. I’ve had that before and I’ve always managed to work through it. No, this is the real deal, exhaustion both physical and mental. Scary.

I got into this situation via several different routes, none of which I will bore you with. Suffice to say that working almost as soon as I came round from the anaesthetic after I broke my leg back in December probably didn’t help. Last time I even attempted a day off to go and do something nice, I came down with the flu. How many more stress indicators do I want?

But this isn’t a ‘poor me’, cry for sympathy thing. I don’t really do those. I’ll lay down for a day or so and maybe even read something light and entertaining and I will get my brain and my body working properly again. Perhaps I may even be a bit easier on myself in the future. After all I don’t like feeling empty. It’s never happened before and pleasant it is not.

Now here’s the lecture-y bit.

Don’t do as I do, do as I say and DON’T drain yourselves dry by working in crazy ways. It’s wrong, it makes you’re brain come to a standstill and your body feel like a sack of spuds. Whatever the Goths, the Emos and all the other black, clad morbid kids may say, the ill look is a very bad one. I hope to be able to get rid of mine very soon.

It’s ugly I tell you. The riots in Bangkok were crochet compared to what’s going on in Angmaring. I bet you none of those paunchy BBC field reporters with their orange tans and tailored flak jackets would even consider getting themselves embedded down here. I can’t claim to have started the trouble but I concede I might have escalated it. I suppose I’d need to give you a little of the background in order to show you just how nasty things can get in the hospice and retirement village capital of the United Kingdom.

Hold on to your hat cause I’m going to lead you down some of those seedy back streets and dark alleyways of an addiction in the over-seventies that nobody is brave enough to mention by name. In England, if you time it just right, you can watch soaps, fresh or used, from eleven o’clock in the morning till nine at night. Once you’ve arranged for the neighbour’s granddaughter to teach you how to do it, you can record them and watch them over and over again – in slow motion. Not satisfied with home grown soaps, the stations even import from the other side of the planet. There’s no clinic to wean of you off, no government grant to divert addicts to greener lawns like quilting or sudoku. Once you’re hooked you’re on your own. It’s deceptive to the new initiate because these soaps are couched in a whole paisley print sofa of crap television that gets so bad you start to believe they’re quality theatre. I have a family member who’s an addict. We used to call her mother but she’s started to insist we refer to her as Agnes Boundok after her favourite Australian soap star. She has an Agnes Boundok outfit she wears to the club on Saturday nights. It’s disturbing but perhaps just as well she didn’t decide to be Charmain Cheroot who got herself pregnant to the landscape gardener at sixty and was blown up on her honeymoon after marrying a younger man who turned out to be her estranged grandson.

The soap star previously known as mother is 84. She has a fancy piece called Brent who’s only 78. She’s always had a thing for toy boys. Brent’s actual name is George but…well, you get it. But hereby hangs the thorn in their side that will eventually tear them apart (I get a lot of my metaphors from TV). Evidently there’s some sports event going on in South Africa at the moment. George is a football fanatic. He plans to watch every game, even the games that are being played consecutively. They only have one television and it belongs to mum. Need I say more?

Jess and I arrived back in England over a week ago and there isn’t a lot of conversation going on. The games started yesterday and George was planning to take his shooting stick down to the high street to watch the games in the front window of Greenways television store. So Jess and I went to the Oxfam shop and found a second hand television which we set up in the spare room. All was going well till we all decided to head down to the south coast to stay with the man previously known as dad although mum likes to call him Fluff (Agnes Boundok’s faithful dog who was rescued from the Taliban by a sympathetic lesbian squady who’s having an affair with the wife of the Prime Minister). Our visit has coincided with the East Preston village festival so in a moment of rare generosity I ran down to the conservative club hall to buy tickets to Saturday night’s musical. You’ll probably be envious when I tell you that it’s Annie Get Your Gun as performed by the Littlehampton Amateur Choral society. Tickets are a lot harder to come by than crack cocaine (mum, what is that in the biscuit tin?). But you’ll never guess what’s happening on Saturday night. Kylie Raja Singh and Chichi the friendly panda are getting married on prime time television and England are playing the USA. Add to this Fluff’s favourite series, CSI North Cheam is having its season finale and you can see there’s a lot of tension at our place. The tickets for Annie were three pounds each and they aren’t refundable so even if I have to tie them to the back bumper of the car and drag them there, they’re going to the show. It’s shock treatment. My plan is to cure all of them and have them reading books and ‘talking’. We’re six hours away from curtain and mum’s locked herself in the bathroom. George is on a hunger strike. Dad’s barricaded behind the compost heap in the back garden. This isn’t going to be easy.