Hopefully, as crime fiction authors, we write books that entertain, sometimes they may even enthral. But another side to our work, not always, but on occasion is to highlight issues that affect a wider society than just our investigators, our victims and their families. In January 2011 my latest book A Noble Killing will hit the shops. It is a Çetin İkmen mystery and involves murder, deceit and is full of incident and drama. It is also about, so-called, honour killing.

Honour killing is a pernicious practice whereby girls and women are killed because they have been deemed to have dishonoured their families in some way. This may be by getting pregnant out of wedlock, it may be because the girl in question refuses to marry a man her family have chosen for her, it may also be just simply because someone has spread a malicious rumour about her. It can take many forms. Sometimes the family of the girl decide as a group that she has dishonoured them and they all take a hand in her death. In other cases one person, sometimes a very young person who, if arrested by the police will attract a shorter prison sentence than an adult, is detailed off to kill the girl. On other occasions the girl is encouraged to kill herself. What all of these instances do have in common however, is that they are almost exclusively instituted by men. I’m sorry to say this men, but even in the twenty first century some of you still see some of us as little more than possessions. And that doesn’t just apply in Turkey, that applies everywhere.

When I was a teenager I remember reading, and being greatly affected by, a play called The House of Bernada Alba by the great Spanish poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. It is about a widow called Bernada Alba and her daughters who live a life of respectable seclusion in early twentieth century Spain. Because they live without a man, in order to be deemed respectable by their neighbours, the women must live in virtual purdah, never leaving the house and relying on their servants to do everything ‘outside’ for them. But one of the girls falls for a man she occasionally sees from her window and when he stops to talk to her, tongues begin to wag. From that moment on the entire household is bent upon an unstoppable course towards tragedy, something completely defined by the society and social mores of that time and that place.

In recent years, honour killing has been almost inextricably linked certainly in the western imagination with Islam. Some people actually believe that Islam allows this sort of thing. But it doesn’t. I don’t know of any religion that actually states that you can kill women who you think have ‘dishonoured’ you in some way. It is no more real in Islam than it is in Buddhism, Judaism or the Christianity that was so much a part of the life of Bernada Alba. Honour killing is about men and about power and it is also about how that translates into a social pressure.

When a girl or a woman ‘dishonours’ her family, the people around the family, their wider relations, friends and acquaintances can close ranks to exclude her and the rest of the family until the ‘problem’ is ‘sorted out’. Sometimes people who have a ‘bad’ girl in their midst are shunned by those around them, sometimes people won’t serve them in shops, do business with them or consider their other children as serious prospects for marriage. Dishonour can wreck an entire family and so when the senior men of the family eventually meet to decide about what might be done to put things right, the sacrifice of one to save the many is often deemed simply the logical thing to do.

Boys who ‘dishonour’ their families by putting themselves about a bit may been frowned upon in some societies, but they are not generally killed for it. Sometimes they are even applauded. No, I’m afraid that honour killing is something that comes about because most societies are still, at bottom, patriarchal. Some of the most sophisticated people in the world have and are ‘trophy wives’. It’s viewed as OK and on one level it is – people can and should be able to marry whomsoever they wish irrespective of age, status, etc., etc., etc. But on the level of woman as pretty possession, it is not OK. Human beings are individuals and no one should be able to ‘possess’ anyone else. Unfortunately thousands of years of patriarchy, usually sanctioned by states and clergy (as opposed to actual religious teaching) mitigate, even now against this. And so women, even in ‘advanced’ western societies can still be viewed with suspicion and can easily become victims of rumour, supposition and plain, outright, spite. At school we all learned that the best way of destroying your enemy was to spread malicious lies about him or her, didn’t we? It’s a long way from playground malice to honour killing but the witch trials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were sometimes instigated by children – and of course rivals, people jealous of the ‘witch’ and men who secretly desired the ‘witch’ too.

Unfortunately murder is still, sometimes, a feminist issue even in the twenty first century. I just hope I’ve done my job properly and written about my take on it in a way that will make people think. Sadly, for the moment, women like those in my book are still out there and still frightened.

The social contract in the West provides that representative governments are elected to enact laws to make certain conduct (or absence of conduct) criminal. The law breaks us down into three general categories: natural, artificial and potential persons. You and me, we are what the law calls ‘natural’ persons, thank you very much. Not like a corporation which is a construct, an abstraction and while very much an artificial person, nonetheless the company is a person for many purposes and can commit crimes, too. Not like a potential person, which is that clump of protoplasm that divides and grows and at some stage (hence the hot debate) becomes a natural person.

Having identified a person, we can now look at a certain aspect of criminal law. The bit I am interested in talking about are the criminal laws that define what we can and cannot put in or take out of our bodies. Or indeed restricts the pleasures associated with our bodies. Of course companies, as artificial people, don’t have bodies and don’t experience pleasure or pain; though its officers, shareholders and directors as natural people seek pleasure and avoid pain like the rest of us.

Steal a car, get caught, and you are guaranteed to be processed through the criminal justice system. If the car isn’t stolen, but the cops find a joint inside, the car is seized and the driver likely goes to jail. In some jurisdictions, you can plan on spending a period of jail time longer than your car thief cellmate. The law is strict on what pleasures are allowed for natural persons. Companies can’t drink; potential persons are unable to drink (at least directly). So it’s mainly natural persons who are in the crosshairs of the law.

The reality of ‘crime’ is that blur any line between conduct, which causes the loss of property, liberty or life to another person and conduct that results in someone else being the victim, meaning they’ve suffered a loss from your pleasure. Most countries don’t pay much attention between crimes with victims and crimes without victims. Pleasure is not a legal defense. Elected governments enact the law that criminalized the conduct. So do dictators. And surprisingly what is criminalized is roughly the same kind of thing insofar as victimless crimes are concerned. Neither tyranny nor democracy is all the friendly to a number of pleasures chosen by natural persons.

This is where cultural difference comes into play. Let me start with three common, every day examples: prostitution, piracy of intellectual property, and abortion. All three activities are crimes in most places, Thailand included. Thai law proscribes such conduct and offenders are subjected to fine and imprisonment. That’s the theory. But walk along Sukhumvit Road from Soi 3 to Soi 23 in the heart of Bangkok any night of the week and you will pass vendors hawking pirated DVDs, hookers hawking themselves and nighttime entertainment spots where the pimping and hawking happens inside. And you are likely, without a great deal of trouble, to locate an abortion clinic easier than finding taxicab driver willing to use his meter on a trip to the airport.

At this point, the mind of many foreigners starts to short-circuit and smoke starts to curl out of the ears of the newly arrived. If it is illegal, why can I see it all around me? To start with just because the transactions aren’t hidden doesn’t mean they are legal. This activity, which is illegal, occurs in the open and nothing happens? That’s when the dizziness of cultural shock starts to rattle your brain stem. So how and why does that work and can we have some back home.

In many parts of Asia, laws are as tough as anywhere in the West, but the way such laws are enforced are not the same. Enforcement of law goes into sleeper mode. Meaning it can be ‘awakened’ easily. Recently, a morgue at a Buddhist temple in Bangkok was found to have hundreds of dead fetus from several abortion clinics. The Huffington Post ran with the story. The Globe Mail wrote, “Thai authorities found about 2,000 remains in the temple’s mortuary, where they had been hidden for a year – apparently to conceal illegal abortions.” A public outcry has resulted in Thailand and elsewhere. Like the famous scene in Casablanca after the police storm into Rick’s and discover that gambling has been going on and the authorities profess to be ‘shocked’.

To criminalize conduct is to remove it from ordinary life in one important respect: legal activity resides on one side the official the ledger and illegal activity is off the books so to speak. The bureaucracy is designed to process licenses, extract taxes, supervise, control and monitor legitimate businesses, or the ones that on the surface follow the law, and that often translates into an artificial person going through all kinds of complicated, costly, time diverting routines that arise from running through endless official loops.

Illegal businesses are unofficially connected to officials through an underground governing system that has the usual interference but minus the paperwork; the hurdles to the bottom line are far less. The natural person breaking the law because his or her pleasure is illegal needs a powerful patron for protection. That patron doesn’t work for free. He exacts a price for protecting those involved in illegal activity. In the West, this system is called corruption. In the East, it is also called corruption but an argument that the system only works smoothly because corruption has been built into the system. Governments can pay their officers small salaries, if they are making a living on kickbacks.

For this to work, basically everyone needs to turn a blind eye to activity that is publicly displayed. Corruption that allows illegal activity to openly function requires widespread complicity or it simply won’t work. Of course, it doesn’t always work. Sooner or later someone or something triggers a chain reaction: such a couple of thousand dead fetuses turning up at a morgue in a Wat. Then everyone ducks for cover as they point the finger at someone else. There are demands for an investigation. There are demands to arrest the lawbreaker. Usually a crackdown follows. And in this case a crackdown was ordered on the illegal abortion clinics. Politicians, seeing an opportunity, offer laws to liberalize abortions, others to increase the penalties. What had been going in front of everyone’s nose was suddenly in the newspapers and those segments of the population with deeply held conviction about abortion appear and demand that the government do something to enforce the law.

This brought into play all the bottled up emotional debates on when a potential person becomes a natural person, and what rights a natural person (i.e. a woman) has over her body. When this time bomb goes off, everyone is shouting and running for cover at the same time.

I mentioned crackdown. I can’t remember if people have this in the West. But it is a central feature in administering the justice system in Asia. A crackdown comes into play when the illegal conduct breaks into a headline and leads on the nightly TV news. The heat is on and all bets are off. The patron protectors turn their back on the illegal operators, close them down, even arrest a few of them, and promise that this illegal conduct will never happen again. Crackdowns last around two weeks until the fickle, attention-deficit public finds another example of illegal conduct screaming in the headlines. The crackdown ends, and it is business as usual. The old complicity resumes and people go back into sleeper mode.

As for Intellectual Property, now there is a can of worms with multiple heads: from pills, to movies, to watches, and perfume. In the West, piracy of intellectual property rights is a serious offense. People go to jail for copying movies. Because films are protected by copyright and copyrights are (largely) own and controlled by artificial persons. The FBI shows up with battering rams and automatic weapons, breaks down doors, hauls away computers, inventory, and employees. In the East, people are puzzled over how anyone can own ‘intellectual property’. It is too abstract. First, it isn’t own by a real person. This isn’t someone who looks like you or me, your aunt or uncle. It’s arises from a piece of paper. The company is artificial. It’s not like kicking a dog. Show me that thing you call a copyright or a patent. Show me the victim. You start to see the uphill battle Western companies have in Asia.

People, are by nature, literal. With prostitution people have no trouble visualizing the issue, and if they need assistance there is a lifetime of porno to teach them (another area of criminal law and illegal activity, to talk about another time). You can see the hooker and not an abstract copy of a hooker. She’s a natural person! The John is also a natural person. If such perfect symmetry existed in the universe, it wouldn’t be a mystery any longer. The same with abortion; there’s physical evidence, in the case of the wat, bags and bags of dead fetuses. But in this case, the fetus, while not abstract like copyright, in the minds of many are potential persons and rights of the mother come first. Still whatever side you take on the abortion issue, you don’t need to go to the white board and draw a picture of a fetus. Just because it is, arguably a potential person doesn’t make it an abstraction like a company or film copyright.

Another thing, piracy of intellectual property isn’t exactly victimless as a crime. But the victim is likely another abstraction: a corporation. It is a legal entity, a certificate of incorporation hanging on the CEO’s wall. One thing a corporation is not: is a natural person. In other words, this isn’t a teenage mother ending an unwanted pregnancy, or a hooker in a tight fitting dress: a case can be made that a corporation is something that has no problem victimizing other corporations and natural and potential persons. If you are the CEO, CFO, on the board, or a shareholder, then you know for a fact, that victimization is not inconsistent with big profit margins. Ask the big guys on Wall Street with their multi-million bonuses coming up in time for the holiday season.

There is a lesson in this process of making something a crime especially when connected directly with control over our bodies, deciding what goes in and what goes out. What we learn is that when there is no victim, making something a crime, especially if it involves paid for sex, pirated movies or a woman’s control over her own body, we have issued an open invitation to establish a shadow economy run as monopoly by corrupt agents of the state. Illegal casinos, underground lotteries, illegal distilleries are a few other examples that natural persons seeking pleasure often indulge in and are, of course, illegal but widely tolerated. The money from these sectors may indeed be vital to the economy. No one knows how much money changes hands. We can guess the amount is substantial and crackdowns are costly to the alternative economy and that’s why they don’t last all that long. People need to get back to work. One person’s pleasure is another person’s service or product and profit is the engine that drives the machine.

Pleasures are a good business. Keeping them illegal keeps the profits high. No taxes, no other fees other than those paid to keep the authorities happy. It is surprising that everything associated with pleasure aren’t automatically made illegal as they potential for unofficial profits are immense. That would give away the game. So it is just selected pleasures that thrown behind the curtain, kept out of sight.

The downside of unofficially allowing state agents to assume the role of overseers of illegal pleasure empires is definitely not a good way to downsize government. The criminal laws, at least with a certain category of crimes, are official window-dressing for that segment of the community that believes that the government has a role to play in stopping a person from doing something that is harmful. When the population wakes up from sleeper mode the one thing that follows like night follows day is the crackdown almost never exceeds the length of a school holiday. And it is sweet dreams all the way around.

MADONNA TO BE GRANDMA

Pop superstar Madonna is set to be a grandma, according to people familiar with reproduction. Though her daughter Lourdes is currently only 14 years old, reproductive specialists and experts on Catholic girls say the birth could come within as little as a decade. Fans of the 52-year-old Material Girl are sure to hit the blogosphere hard with speculation as to the potential father. Justin Bieber declined comment.

DAN BROWN NEW BOOK EXCERPT

Da Vinci Code fans will be among the thousands battering down the doors of the Staten Island Poetry Festival next week, when conspiracy king Dan Brown reads from his new book of haiku, “Autumn of the Albinos.” Brown gave “International Crime Authors” a sneak peak at some of the highlights of his new opus:

“The first cold rain

Robert Langdon, Professor of Religious Symbology at Harvard University,

Said ‘Where the hell am I?’ ”

And then this:

“The dark winter night

The cowering art curator whimpers

‘I’ll tell you what you want to know, please don’t hurt me.’ ”

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY HAS RARE FORM OF HERPES

British sex-bomb Keira Knightley may have an entirely undetectable form of herpes which is completely invisible and leaves no trace, even when cultures are studied under high-powered microscopes. Celeb blogs have been abuzz with talk that “The Duchess” star, known for her pure English rose looks, may be afflicted with what one STD expert described as a kind of herpes that essentially mimics the absence of herpes and is, in fact, not herpes. Other stars with a similar non-herpes herpes condition include raunchy Monty Python star Michael Palin, Batman, and Mickey Rooney. Though harmless in 100 percent of cases, non-herpes did lead to the death of beloved actor John Turturro, although Turturro isn’t dead.

BLOG INFORMATION ONLY 4 PERCENT TRUE, STUDY SHOWS

A study by the Arianna Huffington Center for Blog Studies at Blue State University finds that only 4 percent of information carried by blogs is “true.” The study also noted that only 20 percent of blogs include information, so that in fact only 1 percent of blog content is true. The study found no correlation between truth and the number of hits garnered by a blog post and noted that the 1 percent of truthful content was entirely ignored by all surfers. Nick Denton, founder of Gawker, said, “Well, duh,” though it couldn’t be ascertained if that was his true reaction.

Oh, crap I’m getting that creepy 1980s feeling yet again! A royal wedding exactly thirty years after the apogee of camp that was Charles and Diana’s do back in 1981. The UK was in a bit of a state, to say the least, then too. The Thatcher woman had to take us all to war in order to get at least some of us back on side in those days. Remember the Falklands? Remember too that universal satisfaction with Thatcher didn’t last for very long afterwards. No jobs, you see. Young people, like me and all my mates hit the streets marching for jobs, in support of the striking miners, gay rights, against the hated Poll Tax. Thatcher didn’t listen though and this country, in my opinion, became a richer more competitive but also a much greedier and self-centred country than it had ever been before at the end of that process.

Twenty First century economics are even more scary than those we all wrestled with back in the 1980s. This latest economic crisis is truly global and we all seem to watch helplessly as countries like Greece and Ireland and even France struggle to rein in their spending and at the same time keep people in jobs. Here on the edge of real life where the writers live, it is even, if anything, more scary. Some people (I know it’s hard to believe, but it is true) consider books to be luxury items that they can do without. They don’t buy them and they don’t take them out at libraries. How bonkers is that?

Books are essential and not just because, indirectly, they pay my heating bill. Back in the 1980s when yuppies reigned supreme, when greed was good and when a frightening woman with a handbag had this country by the throat, disappearing into books was one of the few escapes that one had. Of course some of us did derive a lot of pleasure from laughing at yuppies wearing bright red braces talking into mobile phones so big their arms used to ache. But Wuthering Heights it was not.

I am actually disappearing into books more and more as this recession deepens. I’m on Brick Lane by Monica Ali at the moment. I look forward to getting into that world every day especially now that the television has been hijacked by every royal correspondent in the world. Don’t get me wrong, I wish Prince William and his bride all the very best for a long and happy life together. But I don’t need to know what their every move is going to be for the next eight or however many months. I don’t want or need the media to shove all that in my face. Luckily for me, I am working so that takes up most of my time. I also have my family, my friends and my books. What remains is scant and precious and I don’t really want to spend it looking at VT of shoes the various wedding guests and officials may or may not wear.

I hope that Prince William and those advising him have the power and the sense to back away from a huge, costly celebration like his father and mother had back in 1981. When cuts are happening and people are losing jobs, it just isn’t on. Get married and jump into a book (after a reasonable amount of time!) is what I say. Prince William and his wife are very welcome to jump into my next book. A Noble Killing published in January if you’re reading this, William! It’s cheap, it’s deep, it’s thrilling and it won’t cost you anywhere near as much as a honeymoon in Hawaii – or wherever.

Arguably there is nothing less ‘authentic’ than a sales pitch. Someone who is trying to sell us something is going to say all kinds of things to close the sale. Flattery and guilt are marketers’ and bargirls’ best allies. When selling moved in a big way to online, the mentality of those seeking to sell you the latest remedy for erectile dysfunction had found a new place to nest.

Anyone who moderates a website comes face to face with the latest ways for the cunning salesperson to slink into a comment/discussion thread and put the idea in our minds that they aren’t really selling anything but should you want to buy something they have it by the cargo ship load.

Given part of the name of this website is ‘Reality Check’ the moderator must read through the comments submitted and decide which ones are from people wishing to share their views on one of our essays and those busy bee workers whose job it is to discover new pastures for the capitalist cattle to graze.

Our website has become a target for the Spam brigade, that international band of brothers and sisters, who like bounty hunters, track down any website with even the most meager numbers of daily hits as a potential source of revenue.

This website receives around 100 spams every day. If you use the word ‘sleaze’ (I raise my hand as a culprit), or ‘sex’ (over to you Barbara) or ‘Clive Owen’ (good one, Matt), or “I quit” (Colin may have been kidnapped by spammers, we are looking into his whereabouts) then the robots, spiders, and humanoid operators spring into action. They’ve tracked us down.

So what is in that sealed vault that the moderator sees and spares others from enduring. Below is a cross section of recent comments that International Crime Authors Reality Check has received. I have no doubt that this essay titled Sex Sleaze and Spam will attract another stampede of glue sniffing profit hounds who prey upon the literary minded among us. Circling like wolves around those of us who click on links inside comments, those of us who are taken in by the siren call to buy handbags, evening dresses, cocktail dresses, watches, online college courses, and interracial dating services.

The technique is to target any essay posted on the site and hope that the message looks ‘authentic enough’ to pass the moderator’s eye. Below is a cross section of recent ‘comments’ from vendors around the world. Be prepared to enter the land of flattery, guilt, and English as a 4th language.

1. Matt’s essay titled Clive Owen is Going to Die brought out the purse people just in case among Matt’s many fans there are those searching for unusual handbags.

Jame Purses Shop
twitter.com/IsraeliFashion
Dagnese883@gmail.com
2010/11/14 at 8:15 am

2. My essay the Elephants and Ants didn’t produce people selling tickets to local zoos but someone offering employment in the States, where there is always a need to recruit ants, fell upon this essay like jackals on a dead zebra. There are many ways to interpret the word ‘win’ as in winner or ‘wind’ as blowing it out the backside, ‘window’ as the place to open and jump out. You decide.

jobs usa gov jobs
job-adviser.com/jobs-for-usa.jsp
mensplus@hotmail.com
2010/11/14 at 7:22 am

3. Note to self: Don’t use ‘sleaze’ because it is like honey for bears when it comes to spammers. My essay titled Sleaze and the Free Market generated a frenzy of spam feeding. For example, those flogging short evening dresses must have felt that we shared a common pool of consumers. The message below isn’t proof of aliens but starts to build a profile of people hired to write comments for the Spam kings. Making penises bigger also must have tagged the ‘sleaze’ making many people believe that size and sleaze go together. It was thoughtful that both Geraldo and Donny sent the same message from the same making penises bigger website to let me know they had to reboot the essay.

shorteveningdresses.net
Mozier36044@apple.com
2010/11/14 at 5:13 am

4. Barbara’s Bad Sex essay was given the Oxford donnish treatment by a firm flogging designs.

A-Designs ATTY
dizero.com/a_designs.php
Kraut31@yahoo.com
2010/11/14 at 1:55 am

5. The essay titled ‘The Problem with Travel’ drew comments from those selling Replica Watches.

replicaseller.com
Townsend@ymail.com
2010/11/14 at 12:07 am

Fine Watches on Sale for Ladies and Men at Discount Prices. If you are interested in buying Genuine watches, take a look at our Store, Shop. http://www.replicaseller.com/replica-iwc-watches-paypal/Cousteau-Divers

6. The Clive Owen is Dead essay brought us an invitation to buy red cocktail dresses and another invitation for those who don’t easily fit into a cocktail dress. (Note to Matt: how is it that you have all the dresses chasing you?)

redcocktaildress.net
Clermont7781@gmail.com
2010/11/13 at 11:28 pm

If you are one of those lucky ones, then you need not have to worry. However, not many of us are fortunate enough to have such a figure.

7. The essay on ‘Saving Private Books’ earned a window award. I am certain we’ve made the right choice.

windows 7 home premium
wholesalekey.net/windows-7-key-c-3.html
a-crzedwoman@socal.rr.com
2010/11/13 at 7:17 pm

Sorry for the huge review, but I’m really loving the new Zune, and hope this, as well as the excellent reviews some other people have written, will help you decide if it’s the right choice for you.

8. The essay Captive Audience and Comfort Management: An open Letter to Jeffery A. Smisek, Preside United Airlines made me wonder if all of my essays might cause anxiety in a child or just the one about have to watch a boring video on a United Airlines flight. As for Cary’s comment about chaste women and bad men, I suggest that he/she write directly to United Airlines about those issues.

Felipe Calhaun
ezinearticles.com/?Child-Anxiety-Symptoms&id=…
Beverlin235@gmail.com
2010/11/13 at 6:10 pm

Interracial dating locale owing chaste women and bad men. Democratic chin-wag, personals, and forum supporting interracial dating betwen filthy men and pallid women.

9. The Essay on Sleaze and the Free Market produced a fairly long comment from Francisco Colgin that opens up a lot of questions about university education in the United States.

Francisco Colgin
onlinecollegereviews.us
Brookfield@support.google.com
2010/11/16 at 10:45 am

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When the British Prime Minister announced at the cabinet table the engagement of the heir to the heir to the throne this week, he professed himself “delighted.” The government ministers raised a cheer and hammered the tabletop in delight.

This parody of a Colonel Blimp drinking club goes to show that you can take the boys out of Eton, but you can’t take Eton out of the boys. Still “delight” was everywhere as the BBC went into 24-hour blabberfest mode about the “delight of the nation” at the imminent Royal wedding.

There can be no greater testimony to the ability of journalists to “bury the lead.” After all, Royals are getting married all the time – even before the British wedding takes place, the Prince of Monaco is going to marry a beautiful Swedish pro-swimmer (Nice one, Albert.) So that’s not news. Yet how often does the helicopter-pilot child of a bulimic and a superrich bisexual marry the daughter of online-toy salespeople. Surely that’s more interesting than whether she’ll be called “Queen Kate”?

Prince Charles said he was “delighted.” The Queen was “absolutely delighted.” Is this now a word we writers must avoid? Has it descended to the inexpressive cliché level, like “nice”?

Robert Frost wrote that “a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” One might suggest that Prince William’s parents’ marriage began in delight – David Cameron took the day off from Eton to sleep on the streets so he could get a good view of the pageantry back in 1981, he claims, which may be why he doesn’t mind that his budget cuts will put a lot of other people on the streets – and ended in the nearest thing to wisdom that can today adhere to any public event. Namely, conspiracy theory.

So perhaps there’s something darker to the “delight” experienced among Britain’s upper echelons, its outdated monarchists, and its tabloid headline-writers. Something more literary.

The mid-twentieth century American writer of horror and mystery fiction, Shirley Jackson, said: “I delight in what I fear.” Here’s what’s happening in Britain, then—at least as the crime genre would have to portray it. The Queen fears that Kate will turn out to be another troublesome media darling with dark Diana-esque secrets (conspiracy theory: she’ll end up having her killed, too), so she experiences the frisson of danger and is delighted. Prince Charles fears Kate will give birth to a lovely little baby boy and by the time his mother shuffles off this mortal coil the press will suggest Charles—whom no one likes—misses out on the crown and retires to the countryside so that the new young family, who people are sure to love, can move into Buckingham Palace. His deepest fear and, yet, an easy ride, which would delight him. As for the government ministers, they fear the attention of the press, mired as they are in deeply divisive cuts to every ministry, so some happy-clappy coverage of the Royal Neverland can only be a great diversion for these most craven and worthless of men and women.

For fans of conspiracy, crime and horror, then, the Royal announcement is indeed delightful news. It promises all the cruel, reactionary nastiness of older generations visited on an apparently innocent young couple. Those who know the genre will see where this is going. William will refuse to acknowledge what’s happening and will tell Kate she’s being a silly girl. Kate will face down the dangers alone and in the end the haunted halls of the palace will be drenched in blood.

How delightful.

God help us, but this isn’t an easy job! Anyone who ever tells you that being a writer is ‘soft’ either doesn’t know anything about it or is just too trite for his or her own good. Whatever, he or she needs a good kicking, in my opinion.

I am in the process of wrestling with a plot. In crime fiction, everything has to work. You have to have a beginning, a middle and an end, a protagonist, a couple of good guys, some people who are not really involved but could be, maybe some love, some sex, a few weird and disordered spotty teenagers. But that’s not the hard bit. Making sure that your murder is possible/plausible and ensuring that your bad guy can actually do it without being seen by random people, CCTV cameras, some bloke’s mobile phone camera, patrolling cops, Father Christmas or the Man in the Moon is no mean feat. And then he or she has to have a motive, which has to make sense AND to cap it all, sometimes, the damn thing has to tell us something about ourselves as human beings too. When I said wrestling, I really did mean wrestling.

I’ve got stuff everywhere at the moment. Homeless soldiers waiting to be slaughtered, a happy young wife who doesn’t know that her world is about to get suddenly very dark, a really chilling artefact that I’ve never heard of in any crime story ever before EVER. All I need to do now is knit it all together to make one great big, glorious, coherent, whole.

And that, of course, is the bit that is totally eluding me at the moment. I’ll do it, but just right now all I want to really do is bang on about the comedian Joan Rivers. She’s one of my favourites because she just doesn’t care. As well as looking like something you might just see scuttle across the roof of a Gothic church out of the corner of your eye, Joan is the antidote to not giving offence. If it exists and it might just make someone throw up in disgust, then Joan will say it. Wouldn’t you just love to do that? When the builder comes to your house to re-plaster a wall and makes a really bad job of it, wouldn’t you like to say, ‘What’s the matter, man? Did you suddenly go blind while you were doing that job or what?’ instead of what all non-Joans will say which is, ‘Oh, thanks. How much do I owe you?’

As well as being ‘lost in plot’ as it were, I am also in a lot of pain with the leg that I broke at the end of last year at the moment. So I’m pissed off and angry. Under these circumstances I can become Joan for little bits of time. So I’m keeping away from the telephone. If it’s someone who knows me well, they will understand and put up with all the ‘bad’ words, someone who doesn’t know me, doesn’t deserve it (unless they’re a moron who has pissed me off or hurt me). I’m staying indoors too. As well as being like the Arctic outside, I’m not happy about the public seeing my angry face and bad, bad, bad hair. Like Joan, I will just say what I am however vile that may be, but people don’t necessarily have to see it. So imagine a grumpy gargoyle with hair like string and a disposition not unlike the Gorgon Medusa. Charming.

And so the wretched creative process continues…

His thinning hair was totally white. He wore a ruffled shirt displaying the kind smile of your favorite uncle. He looked perfectly ordinary. Nowhere near like a multi-millionaire. At least the one’s you see in movies, TV, and gracing Forbes and the Wall Street Journal. No one would mistake him for J.P. Morgan or Warren Buffet.

He sat in the Beer Garden, Soi 7 Sukhumvit Road, a semi-sleazy place, which serves good food. It is a place to have fun. Fun, though, requires energy and time. Money helps. I struck up a conversation after overhearing him advise a Czech tourist that Phuket was twenty-minute drive by taxi from Bangkok. It crossed by mind that he was either winding up the Czech or was sadly ill-informed. He turned out he was a lawyer for a big American law firm and made more than one million dollars a year. He fell in the ill-informed category, as there was malice or ill-intend in his wildly wrong estimate of driving time to Phuket (maybe 12 hours if the traffic gods are on your side.)

I’ll call him Robert (not his real name). Robert was 55 years old but looked ten years older. Life shows a map of wear and tear on everyone. Some people’s youth are sandpapered down to the fine polished masks of an ancient monk, others retain the rough bark of youth. Robert’s had carved him into the image of a semi-old man. His assets were substantial. He billed 3,000 hours a year. Figure 1,200 non-billable hours are spent at a partnership meetings, conferences, includes all travel time and the time required to keep current in the field. There are 8,760 hours in one year. That leaves 4,560 hours. If you sleep 8 hours a night, deduct 2,920 from that total. Now you are down to 1,640 hours. A rough count is less than 4.5 hours for everything else: sports, laundry, checking email, surfing the Net, eating, drinking, cleaning up, reading (you might have to cut that), chasing women, catching them, feeding them, bathing, shaving. In other words, Robert didn’t really have a life. He had a profession and he pretended that was life. Only an impressive list of clients that kept him on planes to London, Sydney, with 24 hour down time reserved for Bangkok.

I asked Robert why he didn’t retire? He had millions in the bank. He made more than a million a year. Was it that he loved his work? No, Robert said, he didn’t love his work. It was hard and tiring work. Then why not quit the law practice and do something else? He said that he’d been thinking about it but since he’d been working since 18 years old, Robert couldn’t imagine himself or what his life would look like without his job as a partner in a major USA law firm. He’d climbed the mountain. He’d planted the flag. Robert had no intention of getting off that mountaintop. That’s where he was stuck, waiving the flag, feeling happy he’d been up the challenge, wondering why after living with the view for years, he had an unsettling boredom. Instead of dealing with 7.8 hours a day, he’d have to find something to occupy himself for about 15 hours a day. The thought terrified him. Too much unorganized, uncategorized, unplanned time caused him feel panic. What would he do? How would he know what to do? Who would he bill to investigate what to do?

That partnership in the law firm was the key to his existence: having clients set his time, design his day, inhabit his every waking moment with one problem or another, and best of all, he didn’t have to think what to do next. It was done for him. He could use his brain to solve other people’s legal problems. 3,000 hours a year renting his brain out for others to run their problems through. He was a million dollar man but he wasn’t happy. It would be going to far to say that his life was empty, meaningless life. If anything it was too full; but too full of stuff that he was doing for money and wouldn’t otherwise choose to do if no money was attached. The meaning came in meeting the expectation of a client. But he’d reached a point where satisfying a client wasn’t providing much personal satisfaction.

Robert had become someone who couldn’t quit the rat race because of his dependency on others to confirm his value, identity, and work day schedule. Without the clients, he’d be lost. It wasn’t just the money. It was the fear of the emptiness to fill if the clients no longer called.

From the people I talk to I don’t find the millionaire lawyer to be exceptional in his fear. Most people who roll through the system are taught to aspire to a career, fame, and fortune. They are never taught what they should do once they achieve these goals. Instead, they continue their lives on automatic pilot, feeling guilty that they can’t find another way to live. They have left living for the future and that day, it seems, never arrives.

Robert said he thought he’d probably live to seventy-five or eighty, and in his mind that gave him plenty of time to make the right decision. This was a defining moment. He had the right idea. Think ahead. How much time was left on the clock? Roughly, Robert had about 175,200 hours left on his personal clock. What do to with that time? Bill it? Or live it unbilled?

The gap between 55 and 75 or a period 20 years needs some accounting. Robert had glimpsed his 75 year old self and wasn’t certain what to do for him. What Robert hadn’t done was put himself in the position of Robert who is now 75 and who was looking back over the past 20 years. What does the seventy plus Robert wish his 55-year old self would have done? That Robert owned large amounts of property, investments, and could easily live on the income with luxury and comfort. So it wasn’t the fear of poverty that was the driving force. What the two differently aged Roberts needed to find was a compromise that allowed each of them space.

I suspect the 75-year-old Robert would have wanted something other than billable time over the last twenty years. Or may be that is wishful thinking. I am not that cynical. Not yet. Even at 55 years old, I believe someone like Robert can find a way to design his own life, time and organize experiences that don’t need to be billed but hours that belong only and solely to him, carrying the freedom to do whatever makes him happy.

British actor Clive Owen, star of box office hits like “Sin City,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age,” and “King Arthur,” is expected to die, according to people familiar with death.

The 46-year-old heartthrob, famed for his slightly nasal London twang, lusterless delivery and not being as good as co-star Julia Roberts in “Duplicity,” is in apparently good health, but death experts tell “International Crime Authors” that he will probably be tragically dead by 2060 at most and could go any day between now and then.

To be sure, this revelation, which will shock Hollywood, doesn’t take into account cryogenics or further potential developments in the Botoxing of internal organs by Southern Californian doctors, dental hygienists and auto mechanics. Nonetheless, Hollywood bloggers are sure to take news of Owen’s eventual demise as a sign of the mortality of other stars who seem to be otherwise a long way from their end.

How long can it be before Ben Affleck and Scarlett Johansson, among many others of Tinseltown’s Glitterati, begin to feel Death’s icy fingers gripping their innards and disturbing the digestion of their soy lattes? Will Calista Flockhart’s appetite wither for the Cobb salad she doesn’t eat during interviews over lunch at famed Santa Monica eatery Caché, when she thinks of “Time’s winged chariot hurrying near”? And what good will the conviviality and brotherhood of “Entourage” be to Mark Wahlberg, when paging through seventeenth-century French egghead Blaise Pascal’s Pensées he considers that “We shall die alone”?

Owen, or perhaps his agent, is sure to come to the realization that he hasn’t a day to lose. Faced with death, he must open himself to all the experiences a man may have. After all, when he lies on his death bed – perhaps in 2055, but potentially as early as today – will he ask himself: “Why didn’t I work more? Why didn’t I do a sequel to ‘The Pink Panther’?” No, a thinker like Owen who graduated London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Do they do thinking there? Check this, please – Editors) will have concern for the way he fed his head, when he prepares for the big sleep. Perhaps he’ll ask himself, “Why didn’t I read more of Matt Beynon Rees’s books?”

What will you ask yourself, when the Grim Reaper ties you to a barn door and starts to sharpen his scythe? Read my books now. NOW! You may only have fifty more years or much, much less to do so.

(Editors note: none of this applies to Johnny Depp, who will be fired into space in a rocket, like his pal Hunter S. Thompson.)

Over the years I have had the pleasure of being asked to write various travel articles for newspapers and magazines. Usually based in Turkey these articles have allowed me to explore topics as diverse as Greek Orthodox shrines, nargile (water pipe) café’s and the snake goddess cult of the Sharmeran. Only last week I was asked to consult on a new İstanbul guide scheduled for publication in 2012. Terrific! Then of course we had the bomb blast in the centre of İstanbul last weekend.

Tragic and appalling as that event was, I nevertheless have no reason to believe that the city will in any way ‘close for business’. Great melting-pot metropolis’s don’t. The dead are buried, the injured treated and life goes on. Books are published. What I find disturbing, quite apart from this latest atrocity itself, is how routinely fearful individual people seem to have become.

For every kid out there doing the gap year thing, there are ten back here in the UK who are either too poor to do it, have no interest in travel or are too busy working, pubbing and clubbing. Of those, there are also a few who are too fearful to go anywhere. This applies to adults too. I hear a lot of people say ‘Oh God, I wouldn’t want to go there!’ these days. When asked why, the reason/s they give are generally to do with personal safety and/or levels of comfort.

Sometimes I can understand it. Going to Afghanistan at the moment, unless one is working out there in some capacity, is probably not a good idea. That said, Afghanistan is somewhere that is definitely on my list of ‘must do’s’ for sometime in the future. Things change, countries move on and off in different, sometimes very surprising directions. But what about Australia? A bit hot at times admittedly, but very familiar, sanitary and safe, you’d think, for Europeans. And yet… And yet a lot of people won’t even contemplate Australia because of the wild life. ‘Everything wants to either bite or sting you!’ a young friend of mine said recently. ‘Couldn’t possibly go there!’ Admittedly the idea of Australia’s truly bizarre sea creatures lying in wait to induce rapid septicaemia is worrying and I, I admit, may well have to walk Australia’s beaches in Wellington boots, but I would still go.

Early next year I am off to Detroit, Michigan which, I am told is one of America’s most violent cities. I have to go in order to do research for my next book but I am also, to be perfectly honest, really curious about the city too. Drive by shootings happen in Detroit, gangs peddle drugs and junkies beg on street corners. It’s a place that has been in economic difficulty for years. Things like this happen when people have no jobs and few prospects. London in the early 1980s was depressed, shabby, crime ridden and, at the time, was the most violent city in Europe. I was there, I saw it, I used to get hassled by beggars and I knew of shootings, violent robberies and muggings. None of those things happened to me, I was lucky. But I was also not involved. I wasn’t in a gang, I didn’t walk in deserted places on my own at night and I didn’t piss anyone with a gun off – not that I know of. In other words I took reasonable precautions. What I didn’t do was cower indoors.

There is an old saying about ‘shit’ happening. Yes, shit does happen. Innocent people, in the wrong place at the wrong time, get shot, mugged, knifed, whatever. You jump into the ocean and swim about, minding your own business, when something horrible and bitey comes up and takes your foot off. It happens. It just doesn’t happen very often and if it does occur you are just very, very unfortunate. The very slim chance of the bitey thing coming to get you is no reason to not ever enjoy swimming in the ocean. What you do is a risk, but it is a small and calculated one.

I think that maybe sometimes we know too much. Almost every country you can name has problems of some sort, a few of which may turn out to be lethal. That’s no reason, I don’t believe for not going there. Calculated risk is what it’s all about, in my opinion. Obviously one doesn’t go to a location where gun-battles take place on the streets all day long. But places and people change and what was as dangerous as hell this year may not be next year. Places, like people, shouldn’t always be tainted by their past if it is no longer relevant.

To use a bit of psycho-speak, human kind has become a tad risk averse. As well as being a shame this is also not really very healthy, in my opinion. Life is about risk and without a little danger in our lives, things can get rather dull. It’s November now, time to be planning that summer holiday 2011, and my advice to you is to look at where you actually want to go first, then look at the ‘issues’ involved. Don’t just be put off by the ‘issues’ up front. Make your own assessment, make your own mind up about what risks you will and will not accept. Also, take it from a crime writer that if we’re talking ‘orrible murder, then that can take place anywhere – even round your fireside.