Red light means stop; green light means go; and yellow light is proceed with caution. Except Thai drivers have a way of blurring the meaning of traffic lights. Signaling what is expected, what is wanted, or what one can get away with are mentally built from the cultural bricks of education, family, friends and neighbors. Simple signals such as yes, and no, like traffic signals aren’t always to be relied upon.

In Thai culture, it is a well-established tradition that before you enter the house of a Thai, you first remove your shoes. The feet, according to local custom, are the lowest part of the body. Walking on streets and pavements makes for dirty shoes. There are a couple of levels at work. First, your feet (and everybody else’s) occupy the lowest realm (pointing with your foot at someone is a major cultural gaff). Second, there are some practical health issues packaged with living in the tropics. Dog shit is one. Along with various parasites and bacteria which have been known to hitch a ride on people’s shoes and into their houses.

Even though this ‘shoe’ feature of Thai culture (it’s more like a fetish) can be found in every travel guide ever written about Thailand, it is not uncommon to find a foreigner walking straight into a Thai house as the horrified Thai hosts watch the clump, clump of shoes leaving the equivalent of CSI chalk lines outlining a dead body.

I have a good Thai friend who tells the story of his mother, one of those well-educated, well-read, articulate women I’ve met. A couple of foreigners were taken by my Thai friend to visit his mother. At the door, the foreigners (obviously having read a guidebook) had begun to remove their shoes. The mother insisted that wasn’t necessary. They looked at each other, they looked at the mother, and she repeated that they were welcome to keep on their shoes. So inside the house they went wearing their shoes.

An hour later the foreigners left, and mother and son closed the door. The mother sighed, shaking her head.

“What’s wrong, mother?” my Thai friend asked.

“You know what’s wrong,” she said.

He had an idea what she was getting at but at the same time didn’t want to guess.

“I don’t understand, mother.”

“Your friends walked through my house in their shoes. Why are foreigners so rude? Don’t they understand the most simple thing about Thai culture?”

“But you told them not to remove their shoes. I heard you, mother.”

She looked at him, slowly shaking her head, as if the foreigners had infected his mind.

“Aren’t they aware in Thai culture, that you always remove your shoes? I thought you said these foreigners knew Thailand.”

“They thought you’d made an exception,” he said.

“There are no exceptions. Shoes off. Always.”

He had to admit that she was right. His mother had, as an act of graciousness and courtesy had made a concession to their foreign ways, which she understood to be different. Westerners had no problem trampling over the floors of others with their shoes on leaving a trail of dirt and disease. But they, if they knew Thailand, then these foreigners would also understand that his mother’s concession was not to be acted upon. In her mind, the situation was perfectly clear. The foreigners should have known that in reality her “yes, please keep your shoes on,” should have been translated by the foreigners as, “yes, let me remove my shoes.”

As the son later told me, his mother had assumed the foreigners could “read her mind” and instead they merely heard her words and took them at face value. In a culture where face does have a high value, a mind reading an essential element in social relationships, a foreigner should understand that it is often necessary to go behind the words and into the interior desire and real intention of the person. No one should expect a Thai to spell out her true wish when the rules are plainly, obviously clear and without ambiguity.

This story isn’t just about shoes. It is about the intentions of people communicating in a public space where political and social relationships demand everyone is working from the same cultural rulebook. Paying a restaurant bill is another variation on this theme. Mind reading is a definite plus in Thailand (and most places) but foreigners can rest assured that often Thais are no better than reading each others minds than someone from Kansas fresh from the airport racing into Bangkok to find the real Thailand.

In Israel, the Jews control the banks! They fill all the top positions in the media! They are behind all the major political powerbrokers! They even print the money!

Someone should look into this, Oliver, because I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and I know you’ll agree. I think you’re the man to expose it.

You said in an interview published this weekend that Hitler was “a Frankenstein,” and then went on to add that the Dr. Frankenstein who created him was an amalgam of U.S., British and German industrialists. You added that the Nazis killed more Russians than Jews and opined that, in spite of this, we tend to think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing. (You said something else about having “walked in Hitler’s shoes…” but let’s just put that aside for now.)

On the one hand, Oliver, you’re an oaf who has had to apologize for his “clumsy association” about the Holocaust. Well, the art world needs oafs from time to time. Because on the other hand, Oliver, we all ought to remember that reality is much more sophisticated than the explanations of history which are handed down to us, honed and narrowed until they read very simplistically, ignoring inconvenient facts and allowing people to shout down those who point out such facts.

I agree with you that the historical reality of Nazism was more complex than the cartoon version beyond which political correctness doesn’t allow us to stray. I differ with you in that I don’t think “the most powerful lobby in Washington” (translation for those who don’t speak Stonish: “Jews”) are responsible.

How do I know? Well, the Palestinians do the same thing with their history and it isn’t because they’re so powerful in Washington, is it? (Otherwise, why did you, Oliver, make a documentary in which you ran around Ramallah trying to get five minutes with Yasser Arafat, who’d obviously never seen “The Doors” and didn’t seem very interested in you.)

Like anyone else’s explanation of history and nationhood, the popular Palestinian version of how they came to be who they are is a self-serving fiction. That’s what the detective hero of my Palestinian crime novels, Omar Yussef, aims to deflate, and that’s why I made him a history teacher who’d have the knowledge to see through contemporary political myths. Israel’s founding myths also (I’m sure you’ve read Israeli academics Benny Morris and Zeev Sternhell, so you’ll know what I mean) are at least 65 percent B.S. and much trickery with smoke and mirrors.

Just to prove finally that this is neither a Jewish technique nor a Middle Eastern problem, get this: even the Welsh are in on this sort of thing. My own people invented an entirely new history for themselves in the mid-nineteenth century. They had a perfectly interesting real history, but a famous old mythmaker from Glamorgan decided to pump up the druidical elements (all smoke and no mirrors). He added choral competitions and had little girls dress up as jolly witches on the national saint’s day. Bingo, a nation colorful nation with a strong sense of identity.

I once met a rabbi who said, “You’re from Wales? Not much history of pogroms there. But then, not many Jews either.” He’d obviously forgotten about the ransacking of Jewish shops by striking miners in 1911. Evidently, though he was deeply paranoid, he wasn’t quite paranoid enough.

Unlike you, Oliver. I don’t doubt you’ll be convinced that the conspiracy has come down on you and forced you to issue an apology, as you did through your spokesman at Rubenstein Communications in New York.

Wait. Rubenstein Communications? Oliver, are you part of the conspiracy, too? Thinking conspiratorially, I might say that you stuck out your neck knowing that it’d be chopped off by the people who, as you point out, “fucked up United States foreign policy for years.” Was that your plan to get publicity for your “Wall Street” sequel which is out next month?

If so, I’d better cancel this memo.

‘What gender would you prefer?’ she asked.

I walked back to the reception area to make sure I hadn’t stumbled into the organ realignment clinic by mistake. No, it was clearly written on the door, HEALTH CHECKUP. I returned to my nurse.

‘What choices do I have?’ I asked. She gave me one of those looks.

‘Male or female,’ she snarled. I guess she could tell I’d missed something so she started again, slowly. ‘Do you want a male or a female doctor?’

‘Yes. Most certainly,’ I said. 8 am on a Saturday obviously wasn’t her optimum humour zone.

‘Which?’

‘Male.’ I find male doctors generally have warmer hands than female. Too bad they didn’t give me the ‘age’ option. If they had I would certainly have ticked the 50 to 60 box rather than 12 to 17. My doctor was barely old enough to ride a bicycle without a training wheel. His voice reminded me of Gwyneth Paltrow pretending to be a man in Shakespeare in Love. (It was in-flight. I don’t usually…well, you know.)

I was in Bangkok on a stopover after a conference in Khon Kaen. I’d decided to take advantage of the Male Over Fifty package of Twenty-Seven Greatest medical tests with free luncheon voucher as offered in the popular press by a reputable hospital. I felt it was ironic that I send my truck for a complete check up once a year but don’t afford my own ageing chassis the same courtesy. I’d always had a soft spot for women in white ankle socks so I thought a couple of hours of prodding and poking and having gel applied to my abdomen might be fun.

It started badly. Even before they got under my bonnet I was in for a shock. I’m a centimeter shorter than I used to be. Where did it go? And despite losing that substantial piece of myself, I was two kilos heavier than our smiley face digital bathroom scale told me I was. It hurt to think that smiley has been lying to me all this time. The conclusion of this initial test was that I am officially overweight. I tried to argue that my feet are heavier than those of the average person but it was too late to stop the woman committing it to computer. And it got worse. I don’t know about you, but I get a sinking feeling when the ultrasound technician says, “Uh oh!”

‘Yes? What is it?’

‘You’ve got a sister in your kidney.’

In Thailand you find that people perched on certain echelons of society refuse point blank to speak to their foreign clients in Thai, even when their own English is less than comprehendible. Lawyers, high-class escorts with MBAs from Berkley and medical personnel are good examples of this. So I had a sister in my kidney.

‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ she said.

In my book, nothing to worry about is…nothing. If I had nothing that wasn’t there when I rolled off the production line I’d be a happy little Morris Minor. But to find that I had a close relative living in my kidney left me feeling overcrowded.

‘A lot of people have them,’ she said.

‘Well, yes,’ I thought. ‘But not living in an organ.’

‘Why is she there?’ I asked.

‘Nobody really knows,’ she said.

So, if a lot of people have them and they’re nothing to worry about, what cruel vindictive spirit possessed this woman to tell me I had one? Of course it makes a difference.

That afternoon I played pool. Whenever I missed a shot I told my opponent, David, that it was because I have a sister in my kidney. That the doctor said it wouldn’t be long before I have a couple of cousins and an aunt in there with her. ‘It affects my balance,’ I told him.

‘I’ve heard of that,’ said David. ‘A doctor once told me I had a herniated dick in my spine. I couldn’t pot anything for a month after that.’

Apart from slightly elevated blood sugar levels which I can put down to the fact that we ate every chocolate in Germany when we were away, everyone agreed I’m in remarkable shape for a man of sixty-nine. Irrelevant that I’m only fifty-eight. Yet all the good news didn’t do a thing to compensate for the fact that I have a sister I didn’t know I had. All I can do is play loud rock music and replace her toothpaste with hemorrhoid ointment and hope that by the time I go for my next check up in a year, that she’s moved in with a boyfriend.

We are very lucky here in the UK. We have free health-care that, over the course of a life, will save a typical individual thousands and thousands of pounds. That said, a kind of price is exacted in the form of time. Even as a small child I recall endless hours of boredom dripping by as I waited sitting on chairs as hard as lead to see lofty and distant consultants in hospitals all over east London. Not much has changed in that respect over the years and yesterday, when I went to see my gynaecologist, I first had to spend an hour and a half in a semi-comatose state waiting my turn in the treatment room. Just like all the other zillions of people in the waiting room, I too thumbed many copies of lurid celebrity magazines and then stood by the window with an expression of hopelessness on my face. But for free healthcare, so be it. If of course, our new government allow us to have free healthcare. For the squazillionth time, to my knowledge, the National Health Service (NHS) is going to be ‘reformed’. What this actually means, none of us, as yet, know. But with the country in dire financial straits, it could mean anything including some sort of payment structure and so everyone is very, very nervous. Healthcare is expensive.

But help is at hand and it comes in the form of a book I am planning to write entitled Uterine Removal on the Number 104 Bus from Upton Park to Stratford. This is based partly upon the seminal 1973 How to Remove your appendix on the Circle Line from that wonderful, and scholarly, text the Brand New Monty Python Bok. A range of new self surgery text books is just what is needed for a world of uncertainty and when the average man and woman on the street is pretty skint. Obviously this and further texts, I am considering (Prostate Surgery on the Orient Express, 101 Plastic Surgery procedures in a plane) is only for those of a steady disposition, not to mention a steady hand. So how does Uterine Removal on the Number 104 bus from Upton Park to Stratford (URN104) work?

Well, first supplies will have to be got. This will include surgical instruments, swabs and bandages, sutures, antiseptics and analgesics. And although swabs, bandages and antiseptics may easily be purchased from any reputable pharmacy, the other items may be rather more difficult to find while the NHS is in its current state of flux. Strong analgesics, like morphine, are only available on prescription and are severely limited. It will therefore, be necessary to approach rather more unconventional suppliers like Mr Johnny ‘Fruitcake’ Leggs of Kilburn. Mr Leggs works out of a small office, or toilet, round the back of the ‘Spliff and Tampon’ pub in Greenford where he routinely dispenses morphine and other helpful analgesics from a suitcase marked ‘Biohazard’. Mr Leggs is also a useful contact when it comes to surgical instruments – or rather blades of varying sizes. His associate, a Mr Havoc of Somewhere Underneath the Hammersmith Flyover can, for a price, access anything from a simple razor blade right up to a full-sized guillotine. As for sutures – well, who hasn’t nicked a sewing kit from a hotel room at one time or another, eh?

Once equipped and hopefully, with enough morphine in your system to kill pain without losing consciousness, your bus ride to gynaecological health and cost effectiveness may begin. The aim is to make the first incision at Upton Park and, by the time Stratford Broadway hoves into view, to be in a position to dispose of the uterine material and any used sharps and unwanted sewing thread. Of course the needs and desires of other passengers will have to be taken into account as the operation proceeds and I would definitely recommend at least two buckets for those with weak stomachs, and four bottles of smelling salts at an absolute minimum. Ideally surgery should only be performed away from young children, pregnant women and people carrying heavy shopping. Some drivers do like to be informed that surgery is about to occur but most don’t. Amazingly some drivers report that on-bus surgery actually affects their driving in a very negative fashion. Staggering, but true.

All this is very practical, as I trust you will agree offering, as it does, a way forward towards health for a population possibly facing crippling surgical bills. The only other thing that may help is of course if our legions of beloved celebrities were to donate one of their plastic surgical procedures to a member of the public on an annual basis. For instance one liposuction procedure may be swapped for the setting of a broken arm. Both practical and philanthropic and will undoubtedly lead to the celebrity in question being loved and adored all the more. Everybody wins.

Note to self: I really must stop spending long periods of time in waiting rooms.

Writing a novel is the end product of a long creative journey. Much the same conclusion can be said about writing and directing a film. Since Monday I have been guiding Hollywood screenwriter Chase Palmer through Vincent Calvino’s world. Chase is writing the script for Spirit House. During the past couple of days, I have been thinking about how a novelist transfers and shares his world with a screenwriter.

The Vincent Calvino series—soon to have 12 novels—is over a million words spanning nearly twenty years. A screenplay runs about 120 pages in length. The film going audience will never read it. Instead they will watch the film. Their experience is what they see on the screen; not what is put on paper for the director, producer and actors. People who watch a movie (unless they are in the industry or writers) don’t understand or much care about the screenplay. Why should they? It is like the building you live in. How often to you think about the blueprints that were labored over, changed, revised in order to realize the physical structure. I suspect not often.

There is no brilliant film without a brilliant screenplay just like there is not brilliant building without a brilliant architectural blueprint. The producers of Spirit House brought Chase Palmer to Bangkok in order for him to get a sense of Bangkok and the world that Vincent Calvino occupies. Chase’s has just finished writing “Dune” a $150 million film for Paramount. Now he’s mentally leaving the science fiction and entering the world of Bangkok. Maybe that isn’t such a difficult journey.

It has been my task to act as a filter to that world. In the case of Spirit House, I wrote the book almost twenty years ago. Bangkok has transformed into a different place on many levels—from the skyline, to the politics, to the composition of the expats who live here. And Spirit House is a novel. Words on paper.

The film that Chase Palmer will write is the visual representation of those words, that world, and the people who inhabit it. I have concentrated on two central elements—People and enduring images. Each day has been a different round of setting and characters. From the Texas Lone Star Bar in Washington Square, Erawan Shrine, the Police hospital, police headquarters, Rajprasong, the Chao Phraya River, the Oriental Hotel, Lumpini Park, the Emporium, the sub-soi near Pan Pan on Soi 33, to the nightlife venues, including Soi Cowboy, Nana Plaza, Patpong, the Thermae, Klong Toey, Tonglor, and the Arab Quarter off Sukhumvit Road.

Is this the real Bangkok? Aren’t you missing things? Of course it isn’t the whole picture. A movie, like a book, captures an essence. The entire scope is elusive and beyond rendering. So one must choose. And choose wisely—people, neighborhoods, and street life. The story must work. The characters must have depth. The surroundings need to support the story and characters. These are the perimeters that drive the creative fiction writing process. Whether the result is a book or a film, there are limits as to what can be included. Every exclusion is a kind of death, a little piece of reality chipped off the vase, and the hope is that what is absent won’t undermine what is present.

The visual images wash over like waves as I walked Chase through this world.

More importantly, though, are the people—Thais and farang—many I’ve known for over twenty years have opened their hearts and minds when talking to Chase. He has managed to hear perspectives from the highest ranked people in Thailand to those who live close to the edge. These people occupy separate worlds, which rarely connect. One of the things I’ve appreciated during this process is how divergent these lives are from one another, yet how close in proximity these lives are led. In the Calvino novels, the detective moves in between these worlds, sees links which aren’t apparent from the outside, and draws (hopefully) into the interior lives of Thais and foreigners. That is the hardest thing to visualize—this core place inside the human that is heart often hidden from the outside.

But if I can approach doing that in words (I know that I don’t always succeed), then I have faith that Chase can capture the right images that will demonstrate the relationships, the emotions, and the connections that I’ve written about. Colonel Pratt, who is a key character in the Vincent Calvino series, brings a spiritual and cultural dimension to the books. Part of the challenge has been to bring Chase in contact with Thais who will give him an insight into Thai culture, language, and Buddhism. Today he met with a close friend, a retired policeman, who was able to create that cultural bridge that will allow Chase to write a part for a police colonel that will show his humanity and dignity.

Bangkok isn’t one book or one movie. It is a complex community with conflicting values, people of all views, shady characters, saints and demons. Each one brings something to the table. Creativity is the connection of things in ways that are unexpected, that open worlds we thought we knew but realize our knowledge was lacking. Most of us live on the surface. Few want to go deep inside. That takes time and energy and can be troubling as we find things that challenge our beliefs, values, and worldview. But that is the nature of the creative process—the production of new associations, connections, revealing an infrastructure of relationships, dreams, promises, and conflicts.

In the best films like in the best books, we find ourselves emotionally touched by the journey, and if it has been a great journey, in some ways our lives will be changed. My hope is that in the week I’m taking Chase around Bangkok that the people and images will cluster into a visual experience of Bangkok and the people who live here quite unlike anything that anyone else has ever done. And when people find themselves discovering a place for the first time and finding something true about the human condition that, for a moment, will rise above the daily noise of everyday life and embrace them like a mother’s smile.

A book takes a long time to write, and then it takes a while to sell. And another while to sell in another country, and another after that. So a writer’s smile spreads across time.

My long-term grin widened this weekend, when I signed with my UK publisher for my next two books. Not only because Atlantic, the excellent publisher which has brought out all four of my Palestinian crime novels, bought my next books. But because Atlantic is launching a very exciting new imprint called Corvus.

The new imprint is headed by Nicolas and Anthony Cheetham, a father and son team who made Quercus such an important imprint. They’ve taken on my next book MOZART’S LAST ARIA, which is already completed and being edited in New York by the delightful Claire Wachtel at HarperCollins, and the novel I’m currently writing, which has the working title CARAVAGGIO ON FIRE. It’s about the Italian artist who, incidentally, is thought to have died 400 years ago on Sunday.

Writers will know what I mean when I say that signing the contract is a wonderful marker, but also similar to many other things in a writer’s life – it seems like a big milestone, but no one’s around to witness it except you, so you have to go inside yourself to enjoy the moment.

It’s what I felt when my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM was published in the US on Feb. 1 2007. I stood at my computer on that day, wondering if something was supposed to happen. Was the phone supposed to ring? Was I to receive congratulatory emails from friends? Queries from journalists? Well, nothing much happened that morning. I looked out across the valley toward Bethlehem, congratulated myself, and got on with writing the next book in the series.

That’s how it is with contracts. I know — I’ve been lucky enough to sign a lot of them. My first novel came out last week in Greece, and has been published in 20 different languages and even more countries than that.

So this weekend I was at my agent’s office. My two-year-old son went outside with one of my agents to water the garden. My agent’s assistant chatted with me while I initialed and signed the contracts, but we talked about her plans, because despite the sense you might get from my blog I usually prefer not to talk about my accomplishments. The phone kept ringing for my agent, distracting everyone.

As with anything else in writing, I smiled and reminded myself of something my good friend Thomas M. Kostigen said more than a decade back when I was visiting him in Los Angeles. Tom, who’s now one of the foremost environmental writers in the U.S. and quite an adventurer, too, had just completed work as a screenwriter on a movie called “After Sex” (Brooke Shields fans will know it as the one with the girls’ golf weekend; Tom makes a cameo appearance, as it were, in a smashed photograph as Brooke’s ex). Tom had done 60 rewrites at the request of the director, the producer, the stars and so on. “You just have to enjoy the process. If all you want,” he said, “is to be the guy who says he wrote a movie to impress people, it isn’t going to be worth it.” I’ve never heard a better explanation of the difference between a real writer and someone who thinks it’d be cool to be a writer.

When a writer can maintain that attitude, everything – even the silence all around when the contract is being signed and mailed back to a distant publisher – looks positive. And that is the only way to get yourself up and to get yourself writing the next day.

Cameras are such easy, everyday things to have now. I was out in central London earlier this week with mine, taking shots for a book I plan to write set in Soho in the 1970s. Wandering around taking pictures of chi-chi restaurants and self consciously bo-ho little shops, I suddenly felt really quite sad that I hadn’t taken any photos back in the 1970s. In those days the place was very different. Then it was awash with sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and peep-shows as well as the numerous characters that wandered the streets and sat in the bars. I remember them all, even if I don’t have so much as one photograph of any of them. When recreating the long, hot summer of 1976, I will have to rely on my memory, my friends memories and the historical records that I have accrued about that place and time.

I was a teenage drama student then and, together with my fellow ‘thespians’, we all used to hang out in Soho and its environs being ‘artistic’ and indulging in a lot of underage drinking. Our favourite pub was actually The Salisbury on St Martin’s Lane. Even now a hymn to over-wrought Victoriana, the Salisbury back then was a pub where gay men could be themselves and where the women and girls who frequently accompanied them could have a drink without being hit-on or pawed. I was one of their number and can recall many wild nights of too much alcohol, a lot of feather boas and a great deal of laughter in the Salisbury. One very strange night, a friend of mine went home with a ballet dancer who turned out to be a bathroom wrecking maniac. I was briefly pursued by a huge middle-eastern pimp who ran a whole rack of rent-boys in Piccadilly. I can’t remember how either of us survived – but we did.

It’s odd now to think that places like sex shops and porno cinemas were our playgrounds then. Whether we didn’t know or care to think about the exploitation and corruption behind such places, I really can’t say now. But I can still remember hanging on for dear life to my friend Johnston as a sex shop owner with a very bad wig on his head inflated his entire range of rubber sex dolls for an octogenarian with no teeth. We both left, running and crying with laughter. We’d go to films with titles like Naughty Little Vixens just to watch all the old men run in and out of the toilets the whole time. Again, we’d do so for a laugh. I couldn’t tell you what any of the films were about then and I still can’t now. We’d usually top an evening of such activity off with a plate of pasta in some little Italian restaurant where the food would be so plentiful, four of us would share one portion. Then, likely as not, we’d all walk home. None of us had any money and with terror alerts (the IRA back then) on the tube every other day people were not so keen to travel on the underground. It was a time of fear and anxiety for grown-ups like my parents who were worried for their jobs and sometimes, given the bombing situation, for their lives as well.

But for kids, it was a fun time even if the environment in which we lived was shabby and sometimes threatening. People often talk about the recent past, particularly the seventies, as a time of monochrome hues, a place of black and shades of grey. My own recollections are much more colourful and I do really wish I’d had a camera then to capture at least some of it. But then maybe I don’t. The interior of the old Salisbury that I see when I close my eyes is, I know, so much better than any photograph.

I attended a conference this past week. A conference is a three-dimensional, marginally more animated, bizarrely cast version of reading a couple of books. In fact, for the acquisition of actual knowledge and the ability to stop and have a glass of red when you’ve had enough, a book is infinitely better. I have to assume therefore that conference participants have ulterior motives. From my observations, these are the top twelve reasons why people go to conferences.

1. If you’re somebody in your small shrubbery of expertise, that is to say if you’ve written books or edited journals, it gives you the opportunity to be felt. Fans may step up and give you a quick adulation and ask you to pose while their cousin Brenda photographs you together. At the very least they’ll point at you and whisper things about you under their breaths. This is your Paris Hilton fix for the year.

2. It gets you out of the home/office/doghouse for a few days.

3. Even if you have a dodgy personality and/or an awful accent, you still get fifteen minutes with a captive audience to expound on some baffling nonsense that only you know or care about.

4. You get to stay in a hotel which, although it never actually happens, is an environment with huge potential for extra-marital activities.

5. You get coupons for food and beverage which gives you the false impression that it’s all free.

6. You get to mingle and exchange name cards with people you have nothing in common with and overstate your importance.

7. You receive an actual printed invitation to an opening reception which makes you feel special despite the fact that everyone got the same invitation. Once there, you realize that all the drinks on the tray are non-alcoholic but by then the doors are locked and you have to sit through two hours of ‘humorous’ speeches and ‘entertainments’ that you could only really enjoy if the coke and fizzy orange contained hard liquor.

8. You get to listen to a ‘keynote’ address. Keynote is Latvian for excruciating. The keynote is just like any other long boring speech but it’s given by a shrubbery celebrity. The success of this event is assessed by exactly how many people fall asleep despite this being the first day and everyone being still fresh and excited. Even though, in all honesty, nobody has understood the keynote address, they all refer to it during the week as if it were a late-discovered Dead Sea monologue.

9. You get a conference goody bag which contains tourism leaflets, inedible boiled sweets, insurance offers, invitations to things you really don’t want to go to, an out-of-date conference program that you have to go through by hand and change, a book they couldn’t sell, something made/molded/crafted or dug up in or around the town where the conference is held, and a pen with just enough ink in it to fill half of one of the twenty sheets of blank paper with a bank logo in the bottom corner.

10. You get to stand up at the end of a paper, grab a live microphone and speak about something totally unconnected to the topic. This is called karaoke for failed academics.

11. You have the unique opportunity to sample Antarctic conditions without forking out on a plane ticket to Faz. Like loudspeakers, air-conditioners in Thailand do have control buttons that contain a range of settings. But, ‘If you’ve got it, Max it’ (contemporary Thai saying)

12. You get to go home. This is my personal favourite. There you can open a couple of books and find out what it was really all about.

As a one-time educator, I have attended numerous conferences. I was told that the perfect conference is one that leaves you asking questions at the end of it. That’s good to know because I always have a question after a conference. Why do I continue to attend the bloody things?

How do we understand another person’s perspective? To read another’s intentions, beliefs, desires and imagination is necessary in order to predict behavior. This ability to predict requires an element of empathy but that isn’t sufficient. It is necessary also to have a Theory of Mind about another person. We don’t often step back and ask ourselves how social, economic and political relationships depend on assessing the mental state of others.

There has been a great deal of international crime fiction in recent years. How should we judge fiction has been written by authors, who are not native to the culture? My answer is it depends on whether the book is premised on accurate representations of the reality of people inside that culture. That would include the four of us who write weekly on this blog.

The question in the back of a reader’s or a reviewer’s minds is whether the author has accurately represented the theory of mind in the culture where the novel is set. Most of the time, neither reader nor reviewer is in a good position to make that assessment. I am assuming, of course, that the theory of mind is different from culture to culture. While there is much common ground between people in various cultures, it must be said that cultural difference are important in assessing the intention of others inside that culture.

In a tense situation where tempers are raw, a smile in Thailand may not be a signal of appeasement. The offer of a wai from a hotel clerk doesn’t carry the same intention as a wai offered to a mother, a monk, a boss, or a general. Without a theory of mind that takes into account the language, history and culture of another person, it is possible to make mistakes. Even when you study the culture for years you can make mistakes. I make them. And I suspect that I am not alone. A gesture, expression or words that are fully comprehensible and predictable inside your own culture may fail you inside another culture.

We are creatures of habit. And our habitual ways of assessing another’s theory of mind is often done without much introspection. That’s where empathy comes into play. But most of us aren’t that reflective or critical; we float on automatic pilot, guided by inferences and attributions embedded in our mental processes. Once that happens, without empathy and introspection, the actual reality of how the other’s person’s beliefs and desires are different in subtle and not so subtle ways takes more effort, because the implications are more complex and the outcomes less certain. We like shortcuts. You can often tell reading a book set in another country (especially when you know something about that country) whether the writer has taken the shortcut on the literary expressway.

It is common that books are written just as investments are made and wars are fought by people who have made decisions based on the theory of mind of others. Many times, though, the premise of the other person’s theory of mind lacks an understanding of the other minds, which have different values and goals. Perhaps the theory of mind that assumes that Afghan villagers wish to have representative democracy won’t greet such a system with incomprehension and mystery. What makes one group of people laugh until they are in tears requires an understanding of how their sense of humor is shaped by their language and culture. Watching Thai TV is more fun if you are watching it with a Thai. They know when to laugh, when to cry and when to cry foul where, for the average foreigner, the intentions of the characters resonant in a different way such confusion and boredom. The cultural applause sign doesn’t flash for them.

It is a rare entertainer whose act transcends culture. Super heroes work the best because the theory of mind is one where the hero isn’t restrained by the usual forces that work on mere mortals. The more human and local the story and character, the more difficult it is to translate into another language and culture. Translators pull out theirs into another theory of mind.

Taboos, superstition, social structures, the role of men and women, and sexuality are cultural constructs—the concrete and steel of the mind. People assume their beliefs are universal because they are mostly sealed off in communities where that theory of mind works most of the time. It is only outside that community that the native theory of mind breaks down. We draw moral judgments based on the actions of others. But the person so judged may have done something morally acceptable in his culture such as an honor killing of sister but represents morally reprehensible conduct to someone from a different culture.

Emotional communication even within a culture can be difficult and uncertain. Add the cultural element and such communication becomes a minefield. From an early age we learn to map other people’s emotional states. As children we learn the ABCs of anger, disgust, hate, jealousy and envy. These experiences form an emotional language that we learn to read in others.

When it comes to understanding a foreigner’s emotions and actions, most people are, in effect, autistic. They have a difficulty in understanding that a person in another culture will see things from a perspective different from their own. It is a theory of mind impairment and one that can easily work in creative works such as novels, plays and films. How do we know the author is showing us a perspective of Thailand, Israel, Turkey or Iraq other than simply a projection of their own perspective from their home culture?

Scarcity and the allocations of scarce resources are universal in nature. Start with money and sex. The way people in any society deal with the relative scarcity of money and sex and how they deal with crime when someone decides to take a short cut is often local and culturally based. Hierarchies are erected to allocate scarce resources. Each system of hierarchies believes in its superiority. International companies doing business in other cultures can miscalculate the importance and role of the local hierarchies in influencing the intention of the local partner. Information access is another concept heavily influenced by culture. The Chinese view about information access and the American view illustrate two different theories of mind trying to understand and cope with the other.

A theory of mind is judged by the competence in judging the mental states of others. We look to predict the intentions of others by understanding the beliefs and desires that are used to form such intentions. It is also how we measure, what we choose to measure and what we conclude from the measuring process. We need to get inside the mind of another to understand the source of beliefs, vanities, hunches, beliefs, wishes, desires—the place where emotions are formed.

Emotion formation of another is cultural at core. A theory of mind takes into account another person’s likely emotional response. The role of a mother, power of authority figures and structure, what is rude, what is polite, what is left unsaid, what can be said, when deference is required, and when someone is insulted, threatened, or made uncomfortable require an understanding of how this aspect of mind is created within a culture. The basis of co-operation also requires an accurate understanding of how other people value, create, protect and fund co-operation.

There is a tradition of pundits saying that foreigners can’t understand how Thais think. In other words, no foreigner could form a theory of mind about people who were raised in Thai culture. That is, in itself, an interesting theory of mind, suggesting that all non-Thais are basically rendered autistic when it comes to understanding how Thais form intentions and the true nature of their beliefs.

We’ve never limited in a time with a greater capacity for communication. But the ability to communicate hasn’t kept up with the facilities and technologies that allow for instaneous communication. It may be that we evolved with a time lag built in. We can only begin to comprehend a theory of mind about people inside our own culture, and now with many cultures accessible at a keystroke most people simply don’t have the time or inclination to do the heavy work of figuring out how others think and form their intentions.

One reason to read international crime fiction is to find a voice that reliably takes the reader into minds that have been shaped by different cultural forces. To understand how such people think, their morality, their emotions, and their beliefs becomes the first step to avoid the trap that one theory of mind fits all. So far I have been lucky to have readers and reviewers my attempts to examine, understand and illustrate the theory of mind of Thais. This mental framework examination works like a back story behind the obvious one that rolls out like many other novels.

My own bias is that without such introspection, an author may have created an entertainment but such a book doesn’t open any doors for the main reason I open a book—I want to know (without being lectured) about how the culture influences for social relationships and the way culture influences a character’s choices. We like to read a book, which offers up a version of your own theory of mind; it is like comfort food. Exotic food, like exotic culture is an acquired taste. The only problem is what forces have shaped our mind doesn’t always correspond to the forces that shaped the mind of people, their emotions and actions, living in other cultures.

Reading and then accurately writing about the mental state of others has always been difficult. Travel and communications were not easy until recently. But modern communications has made it seem that globalization has created a Global Theory of Mind. In a way, that is true. People communicate on a frequent base beyond their borders in ways their parents and grandparents could never have dreamt possible. But despite such communication, the basic limits remain. People still have different ways of attributing intention, displaying emotions, and acting that are products of their culture. Perhaps that will one day give way to a more general theory of mind. If so, that day is a long ways into the future.

You can’t walk through a wet market on a Friday morning in Bangkok on the Internet. You can’t join a group of Thais during their lunch break. Or you can’t talk to the Thai mystics who read cards on the sidewalk. There are hundreds of these small things that still require boots on the ground, time on the street and inside the cafes, and total immersion that is beyond the capability of our best software and Internet resources. Though, it is highly probable that nestled in deep time simulation programs will recreate any market, street, bar, restaurant, or public square, and inhabit it with people with a theory of mind appropriate to that time and place. Meanwhile, we toil on gathering theories of minds the only way we can—through observation and introspection and empathy.

I want to know something about the mental states of the people I write about. I don’t want my characters to become abstractions or projections. How to do that needs a combination of curiosity and diligence, and a love for the search of the underlying building blocks of perception and action. At some point in this process, I know I am getting closer to the truth when I begin to understand what I a Thai woman once told me, that she didn’t believe in ghost but admitted to being afraid of ghosts.

World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.

Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with articles in which journalists extrapolated from aspects of the play and team-make up of various countries to draw lessons about the politics and sociology of those same nations.

Thus we learned that the Germans were successful not because their coach is a very smart tactician, but because they were multiethnic. We found that England’s loss was rooted in the shameless cash-fest of their football league, rather than the coach’s inability to counter German tactics and the evidence that the team’s players (who’re also pretty multiethnic) are simply a notch dumber than those of many other countries. Finally we thrilled to discover that there’s hope for the future of Spain, even if the country’s high court ruled this week that Catalans can’t refer to themselves as a “nation.” There were Catalans on the team that won in the final, the newspaper wrote, and so everything in Espana is /chévere/ (as the Spanish say when they’re feeling good) after all.

Naturally all this is the result of feeble journalistic maneuvering and the need to come up with enough “theme” stories to keep editors from questioning the expense of sending a reporter to South Africa to write about things which are free on everybody’s television set.

The popularity of international crime fiction, however, has been in its ability to provide a window into a society in an entertaining format. Like football. Only real (even if it is fiction.)

The strangeness of World Cup journalism is evident in the piece written by New York Times columnist Roger Cohen about the breakdown of the French team (which refused to train because the players, who cheated their way to the finals according to the Irish, decided the coach was a bum.) Cohen wrote that he had never had to repress such rage at a press conference as he did at the one given by the French coach. A few weeks previously, Cohen had been in the Middle East, where surely things ought to get one raging just a little more than a bust up between millionaire sportsmen. But it was the football that brought out the beast in him.

There you have the root of it. A situation of utter meaninglessness – a statement by the coach of a team that’s on its way out of a tournament that, in essence, is pretty meaningless even to the winners a few days after the final is played – riles up a journalist more than a conflict in which violence and suffering continue every day.

Maybe the French coach should’ve said, “hey, nobody died.”

But there’s something about sport which suggests dieing. People like the gladiatorial aspect of it, the sense that defeat represents something almost geopolitical. Sport, after all, is merely our way of practicing for the day when we all have to start really killing each other in earnest.

Which is why people ought to fill the post-World Cup gap left by sports journalistic hype and televised hours of dull build-up play in the midfield with crime fiction set in foreign locations. Crime fiction gives you life as lived by others, usually in extreme circumstances (after all, murder may be the only thing more extreme than the emotions experienced by a sports fan as he watches his national team scream at the referee.)

For example, if you read the mysteries of Manuel Vazquez Montalban, they’ll demonstrate all the cleverness of his fellow Barcelona boys Xavi and Iniesta in the Spanish midfield. And they’ll be a lot more edifying than the second-rate football you might have to watch until the World Cup comes back in four years.

**A footnote: a reader commented on one of my blog posts that it was missing my usual reference to “my Palestinian crime novels.” He complained that this denied him his “bingo” moment, as he evidently only reads my blog to spot my instances of self-promotion. This footnote is merely to point out that before I wrote MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS I was in Gaza once to write about the entry of Palestine into the Fifa world of soccer nations. I didn’t include this in MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS yet, though I do have an idea for a villain based on the national team’s goalie, who was nicknamed The Fly and whom I believe would make an excellent cat-burgler for one of MY PALESTINIAN CRIME NOVELS. I end it here, saying to reader “Dai Laffin,” count the references, there are three, “Dearie Me,” “Cup o’tea,” “Monkey on a tree.”

***A final footnote: apologies to anyone whose grandma never took them to a bingo hall and therefore doesn’t know why I wrote “Dearie me,” etc. They rhyme with “three” and it spices up the game when the bingo caller doesn’t just read off a list of numbers…Well, it spices it up a bit.