Over the weekend a well-known Thai fortune-teller predicted that Andaman coastal provinces will be hit by a tsunami on Thursday (30 December 2010). The Bangkok Post reported that some tourists reportedly canceled hotel bookings as a result. In Thailand, people take astrology and fortune telling as seriously as Americans who believe, based on the bible, that the earth was created 10,000 years ago. Well we all know the earth was created at least 15,000 years ago so we can dismiss the contrary view. As for going up against the received wisdom of fortune-tellers, what is Thai government going to do when a seer predicts gloom and doom at a major tourist spot at the height of the tourist season? After all, almost everyone in the government wears amulets, visits fortune-tellers to consult for the most auspicious time to call an election, open Parliament, get married, get divorced, and that is just the beginning.

But this fortune-teller was threatening to break a Walmart mega-warehouse worth of rice bowls. One approach was to bring in the director of the Meteorological Department to confirm from its earthquake and tsunami research and development division, “that while no one could predict the precise timing of an earthquake, the department had improved its monitoring systems and disaster response strategies.” If that isn’t a slug in the gut of the fortune-teller, I don’t know what is.

Think about it. Fortune-telling is based on the ability of the seer to predict the precise timing of future unknown events. That’s why generals, politicians, housewives, students, lovers, taxi drivers, bar girls, and just about anyone else you can think of, pay money to Thai fortune-tellers because they can see their future. So what the Meteorological Department has done is to climb way out on a cultural branch of belief and started to saw. The department has cut through the branch by suggesting a scientific monitoring system is superior to mystical forces a fortune-teller is connected to. Who is going to win this battle? Scientist or the fortune-tellers? Don’t hold your breath that this will ever be a close vote in this neck of the woods. Red, yellow, all colors united on this front.

Telling what happens next has always been a tricky business. For countless centuries people relied on astrologers and fortune-tellers to give them comfort. But things haven’t been going well for their industry as men and women in white lab coats have been breaking their rice bowls.

This tsunami prediction is just one example where we find science has reared its ugly head and spit in the mystical eye of the seer. Try getting a professor of geology to make a public statement that the earth is about 4.54 billion years old. He’ll be lucky if he can be inducted into the Federal Witness Protection Program after Fox does a report with all those nice graphics showing that without doubt this anti-religion monster had lied about the age of the earth in the United States—it may be older elsewhere—but in America it’s 10,000 years old. He would be vilified on Fox Network for his atheistic views broadcast during the most holy of holidays.

But this is Thailand. And no one here seems to have a fixed position on the age of the earth or the age of the ground that is called Thailand. Geology, the age of the earth, and earth formation are part and parcel of the forces that create tsunamis. In case, though, the Meteorological Department’s reliance on science doesn’t give enough comfort to tourist thinking of their Phuket beach holiday, there is a second arrow to the government’s bow.

The provincial governor, according The Bangkok Post story urged “people not to panic” over the fortune teller’s prediction, as he said the province had disaster preparedness strategies, warning systems and evacuation plans in place. This appears to be official fence sitting. Unlike the Meteorological Department’s position which could read as dismissive of the fortune-teller’s predictable powers, the government official’s fall back position is we have a way to get everyone off the beaches in time. You know, just in case the tsunami hits on 30th December.

Come to Phuket. The fortune-teller was wrong. I can say this with confidence the tsunami prediction was wrong as this is Friday and the seas are calm. Of course, it might be next Thursday and the fortune-teller got the week wrong. Once the seed of doubt is sewn, it is human nature to phone of the travel agent and ask if there is a nice beach somewhere in Malaysia, Vietnam or Cambodia that they would recommend, and by the way, doubt check to see if any local fortune-tellers in those countries have issued any high tide alerts.

Happy New Year to All.

My new book MOZART’S LAST ARIA will be out in the UK in May. Naturally this means a revamp for my website (coming soon) and a new promo video (coming about the same time) to be posted to Youtube. You know, all the stuff writers actually get into the business of writing in order to do. That, and cashing the massive cheques, of course. Oh, and the groupies who throw their panties at you at book-store readings. And the drugs.

Anyhow, that’s enough digression, even for a blog post. So back to the point: All my previous video clips – which can be viewed on my website – have necessitated no more than a jaunt to Nablus, Gaza or Bethlehem, where I’ve been filmed chatting about the latest adventures of my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef. This time, I have to recreate the world of Vienna, 1791, for my historical mystery.

For the novel, creating the atmosphere, the details and the locations of Vienna during Mozart’s time brought me to amass a few shelf-loads of research, to learn piano so I could play some Mozart, and to travel in Austria and Central Europe.

The video places a few more demands. This week I’ve been getting into costume.

I found a theatrical costume shop on a tiny alley in the oldest part of West Jerusalem just off Jaffa Road. Run by a delightful, bustling French lady named Francoise Coriat, the compact store is packed up and down (hanging from the ceiling too) with pirate suits, musketeer costumes, and every other period-wear you’d ever need. Mostly Francoise hires them out to theaters.

She kitted me out with two big flouncy dresses for the two female musicians who’ll feature in the video and three frock-coat suits for the men. And a Little Mozart costume for my three year old son.

Then it was time to figure out exactly how to film it. My videographer pal David Blumenfeld produces new equipment each year when it’s time for me to get a video done. This time he has a little slide to mount on top of his tripod; put the camera (these things are so small these days) on it and you can make a dolly shot that looks positively cinematic. His lighting is increasingly creative too. So I was sure it’d look great.

I worked up a script last week, aiming to make the video seem more like a movie trailer than the more documentary/journalistic style of most of my previous promos. Why? Well, first because MOZART’S LAST ARIA isn’t based on a topic you’re used to seeing featured in the news – whereas Palestinians, unfortunately for them, are very much in the news. Morever, it seems to me people are used to reading novels which are like movies – almost entirely visual, very little of the internal narrative of novels written a century ago – so perhaps book promotional videos ought to be that way too. This is how we think of stories these days.

True, said my friend Matthew Kalman, a journalist based here in Jerusalem who’s also a filmmaker. But beware, he said, that you don’t expect amateur actors to…act.

A good point, and one David and I bore in mind as we figured out just what we’d need to shoot. We didn’t want to put too much pressure on the musicians who’d be in the video by asking them to express emotion and to have it pass across their faces in the restrained manner of film acting.

The main thing, of course, is that I got to dress up in silk stockings and wear a wig. Just so I could look like Mozart, you understand.

Well, more on all this next week when you’ll hear how the actual shooting went.

By the time you read this, provided you can be bothered to tear yourself away from the fire/beach/brandy, Christmas will be over and we will be looking forward to 2011.

Unlike the Scots, the English don’t really make a big deal out of New Years Eve. Some people do have parties, but generally only young people. As a friend of mine said recently, ‘What is the point of a party when you’re no longer that fussed about copping off with anyone?’ So true. At twenty I can still remember getting very exciting about New Year parties. I’d put on tons of make-up, dress like a sugar plum fairy (or a Soviet soldier, it depended on my mood) and wonder who I might meet.

Beyond forty things are different. It it’s a party involving old friends, you live in fear of that bloke who always used to get pissed and drop his trousers when you were at college together. New people are just scary in general and works ‘do’s’ plumb levels of embarrassment that take having your bum photocopied ten times as their starting point. So New Year, at it’s best, involves hanging around the fire in slippers and fleece blankets trying not to succumb to the temptation of making resolutions.

I prefer to think about New Year ‘hopes’ rather than resolutions. In 2011 I hope that our government finally sees sense and doesn’t cut all the services that make this country something approaching a welfare state. I hope that somehow, conflict in the Middle East ratchets down a peg or two (I would like to see lasting peace, but I have to be realistic). I hope we as a family can make a decent living and have a bit of fun and happiness in our lives and I hope that my son will be able to find a job. I hope that everyone either stays healthy or gets better and I hope against hope that 2011 will not stink in the way that 2010 did.

Fingers crossed, as we say here in the UK. Next time I blog it will be 2011 and then we’ll see. In the meantime I hope that everyone has a bit of a rest, a lot of nice hopes and, at least, the joy of a new pair of Christmas socks to enjoy!

My first book, Like Clockwork, was born out of a series of images that I collected through my interviews with South African cops and forensics experts. Here is one that has stayed with me.

Imagine a cold Monday morning.

A drying rack that looked like a deli fridge in the medical forensic labs in Valhalla Park on the Cape Flats. Inside were panties. Big, small, expensive, washed over and over, Woolworth’s beige, a lovely wisp of bloodied lace. And one tiny red pair from Pep Stores. It had a label: age 2 – 3. And one unravelling thread that floated above it. I asked a cop who was showing me around what this was and he shrugged.

‘That’s Cape Town on a Monday morning. Those are the rape cases.’

The writer’s gift: the small detail that evokes the whole. It provoked in me a sense of deep moral outrage: somehow I had to find a way of restoring those panties to their owners, of finding the intimate pulse of their lives, of making them back into human beings again. Not these pared down metonymies of degradation and pain.

Here is another: A question this time.

A beautiful, shattered woman I interviewed in a shelter in Atlantis, a godforsaken township forty kilometres outside Cape Town. She had been trafficked from Goma, had escaped, and was looking for her daughter stranded in a refugee camp. On the day I spoke to her, she just had her HIV test results that day. She was negative. She answered my questions patiently and the she said she wanted to ask me something.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Anything, ask.’

‘Why,’ she said, ‘Are there women in South Africa who will hold down the legs of their own daughters so that their husbands or boyfriends or the man next door can rape them?’

That was a moral question that I needed to answer. Yes, I had a serial killer in my first novel, Like Clockwork, but the way I had structured the novel it was to do with a warped mind, the terrifying exception of the stranger with dark dreams. What I needed to address was the social malaise that allows people in the most prosperous African country to prey on its weakest and most vulnerable members. That woman’s question pointed out to me that the location of the most violent betrayals lie in the heart of the family – both the blood-family and the family that is the nation.

It was not an easy thing to address in fiction. It is at the same time central to crime fiction.

Wittgenstein said ethics and aesthetics are one and the same. Tricky that. The writer places you, the reader, alongside the writer in that murdered body, under her permeable skin that will be stabbed, shot and marked for the cops, then the pathologist to read, the bereaved mother to wash and love. That is where I put you. This creates empathy with her, but it also gives you the feel of the killer that you, like our investigative hero want him dead.

In my first book, my victims are beautiful, nearly innocent. Beloved but (briefly) unprotected by their mothers. The trope of femininity and death is close to the surface of our cultural memory. It is there in the paintings and literature of the 19th century; in the films and television series and pornography of the 20th. Edgar Allen Poe’s formulation that the most poetic subject is the death of a beautiful woman holds true. Can one short-circuit the erotic charge of the damaged female body, the building block of pornography, desire and crime fiction?

The research I have done has showed me that the most common victims of violent crimes are men. There are few women in the carnage that is Salt River Mortuary in Cape Town on a Monday morning. And yet, unless that male body belongs to someone you know it is not that easy to get worked up about them. They are mostly young, have often been drunk and fighting: the collateral damage of the mean streets of this century and the last. Dead men don’t mean all that much in literary or cinematic terms, which means it is not easy to write about them either.

In my second book, BLOOD ROSE, I learned the hard way that in crime fiction one must pick one’s bodies with care.

This book was also born out of a single image, a single event. I was working on a film about Walvis Bay in Namibia, a film commissioned by the Town Council. While I was shooting, a fifteen-year-old boy was murdered. His mutilated body was tossed over the fence of a school where he was discovered in the playground on a Monday morning. Beyond the school was a dumpsite with an incinerator that spewed black smoke into the mist and fog that constantly envelops Walvis Bay.

Who killed him, who tortured him and sodomised this child, splitting him open, was never revealed. His body floated there on the edge of my consciousness for a long time, the ease with which his death was allowed not to matter. He was just dead – cleaned up, cleaned away, and everyone shrugged their shoulders and said it was probably a fisherman on one of the boats who’d left port that morning.

And that was that.

It did not seem right to leave this unremembered dead boy on the sand at the bottom end of the playground, that liminal childhood space of bullying, violence and the furtive exchanges of sexual favours. So I decided to imagine his story, stitching it into Namibia’s violent and un-discussed past, unaware of how much literary trouble it would cause me. Because my chosen victims, homeless teenage boys who live on a dump site were a challenge to the easy aesthetic, the tested conventions of crime fiction which likes its plot triggering victims to be innocent, or at least attractive.

Unlike the death of a young woman, the killing of someone male and marginal is not an easy thing to make readers worry about. When you kill a young woman, you bring years of artistic conditioning around pathos, reproductive value and innocence. You kill a delinquent boy and you’ve tided up the street. I had to make these dead boys alive in the text as a beloved child lost, an individual snuffed out, a little chap who had just stepped out of childhood in order to make the plot and your pulse race. I had to create a sensory affect of smell, of proximity, of childishness, of a sense of responsibility in the reader for these dead children. With one boy, I showed his outgrown spider man pyjamas – a child’s garment that carried the imprint of his little body before his death. I had to make the reader care and in the end, it worked for me, the writer. I could bring those marginal boys, those shadows that lurk beside your window at the traffic lights – begging, stealing, unloved – to life in fiction.

Which has meant that in life when I see them on the street I can imagine where they came from, the damage, the loneliness, the danger. And see them for what they are – abandoned children.

So anyway, this foreigner goes into the Lang Suan branch of Tesco Lotus with a machete and makes straight for the Christmas decoration counter. But does he commit havoc with the balls and baubles? No, sir, he doesn’t. He heads straight for Santa. Santa’s been bopping and nodding to Christmas carols since the end of November and I just don’t think he saw it coming otherwise he would have ducked. The foreigner, what we refer to here as a farang, only needed the one swing and Santa’s head was nodding and bobbing along the floor, decapitated. I have to guess the farang had been practicing on coconuts, so adept was he. Little children screamed, although they had no idea who that jolly headless midget in the red suit was. Cashiers in red Christmas hats with little bells on screamed and ducked behind their registers. The farang stands over Santa for a few seconds until the final circuit shorts and he smiles with satisfaction. The teenaged security guards in their scary uniforms have all mysteriously vanished. Tesco Lotus hadn’t needed actual security before. What they signed up for was the uniform and the opportunities it offered up with regard to the procurement of young girls. A mad westerner with a machete wasn’t in the job description.

The farang turned, walked calmly to the door and across the car park to his truck. And off he drove, being sure to smile at the security camera as he left. This, at odds with what the average overseas person might think, is not an uncommon event in Thailand. Some of the more ambitious department stores begin their Christmas carol background torture at the end of October. In order to Asianize the songs, they have them recorded by Thai singers, although not, I fear to say, in Thai. So our nervous farang shopper is greeted with, WEE WEE SHOE AMARI KISSMUTT, I SAW TREE CHIPS, AMWAY INNER MANAGER, WIN A WON A LAMB and the fact that Rudolf, perhaps due to the effects of globalization, HAD A VERY CHINESE NOSE. Is it really any wonder that our foreigner, already too unstable to live in his own country, feels a swirling sensation in his gut every time he goes shopping? That one day he and/or she might snap?

I’m not anti-Christmas myself. I just don’t believe it should be allowed to follow you around the world. I can’t recall the staff in our local Safeway in Wimbledon putting on a tagiya at Ramadan, nor was there any ball throwing during Hmong New Year. Christians comprise some .0004% of the population in Lang Suan and most of us are flagging, if not completely supine Christians. In fact I was born Church of England which is a sort of Catholic Lite. The religion you select when you really have to write something in the application form and you don’t want to be tested during the interview. I’m not offended religiously that Tesco plays badly sung hymns to urge me to buy Myrrh which is on special during the festive season. I’m offended that they bombard Buddhists and Muslims with Christian propaganda in an effort to increase spending. Nothing like a festival for dipping hands into pockets.

So, when the two officers came by last night and asked me where I was on December 20th, I told them I’d been at home watching re-runs of The Santa Clause on cable. They asked me if I owned a machete. I told them I didn’t. That was the extent of the investigation because naturally I couldn’t speak Thai and my wife wasn’t home to translate. And anyway, they were Thai police. If they’d been, say, Norwegian, they would have noticed we didn’t have a satellite dish, that my machete with a slightly charred blade was on the wall beside my chainsaw and my Norman lance, and that my wife was in the kitchen making mince pies. Fortunately, all of us farang look alike. So, yes, I do believe in Santa Claus, with or without a head. And I have no intention of wishing you all a Merry Christmas cause I’m mentally unstable. Fortunately, I’m a mystery blobber so you have no idea who I am. If you haven’t seen it already, here’s my Christmas present for y’all..

Have a nice Lithuanian Elk Patting Festival

Crime fiction pulls back the sheet and looks at the bodies. People commit acts of violence against each other. Government commits acts of violence against people. The occasional shark eats a person, or a grizzly does. But the large scheme of violence, such incidents are rounding off error compared to human against human carnage. When it comes to violence against other species, most cultures draw distinctions between a gold fish and a dog. You won’t likely win any hero awards for flushing your gold fish down the toilet, but intentionally killing a dog is an order of different magnitude.

In the West most people are raised to believe that a dog is man’s best friend. When you think about it, that is quite a compliment. Yet it is embedded in our culture. We form Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals as well. When someone commits an act of wanton brutality against a dog, the authorities in many countries would intervene and arrest such a person.

Thailand is not the West. And the East and West go separate ways when it comes to the dog. A good place to find out what a culture thinks about a dog is to look at the language used in that culture, idioms or expressions commonly associated with the animal. If someone in London or New York calls you a skunk you have a pretty good idea that this wasn’t intended as a compliment. As far as my research indicates, there is a fairly small, thin margin of people in the West who would be willing to think of skunk as their best friend.

A Thai blogger Kaewmala who writes about Thai language and culture has written about the many Thai idioms that refer to dogs. She says, in Thai culture being called a dog is a ‘curse’. The Thai idiom is ไอ้ชาติหมา /âi châat mǎa/ (or อีชาติหมา /ii châat mǎa/ if female) or the person is condemned to lead the “life of a dog” or is a [cursed] “reincarnated dog.” Playing dirty invites another insult in Thai เล่นหมาๆ /lên mǎa mǎa/ lit. ‘play like dogs’. If you’ve made an unforgivable error of judgment or displayed a major character flaw; you’ve really done something that makes you an outcast so that no one wishes to associate with you, then you’d invited the Thai expression: หมาหัวเน่า /mǎa hǔa nàw/ lit. “rotten-headed dog”

These three idioms represent only the tip of the cultural iceberg of deep-seated suspicion, hatred and mistrust of dogs. There are many more such idioms and virtually all of them are negative about dogs. The cultural attitudes about dogs shape the way many Thai think about dogs and how they treat dogs. In the past twenty years, I’ve had two dogs poisoned by locals. I know this is a common occurrence in Thai. One shouldn’t be surprised as we’ve seen the low esteem that Thai culture holds dogs, there is little of the built-in cultural restraints that prevent the helpless creature against the boot, the gun, the knife, the vial of poison.

Poison is quite popular as it allows for an extremely twisted version of Buddhism, allowing the assassin to soothe his conscience by telling himself he didn’t kill the dog, the dog through its own volition chose to eat the poisonous meat and killed itself. Probably tells himself he’s done the dog a favor. The belief being this is karma earned as the result of some transgression in a previous life for which the dog paid for by being born (and poisoned) in this life.

The consequences of these cultural views are real and the horror stories of mistreatment and abuse of dogs are daily fair in Thailand. On Tuesday evening, according to Thai press sources, a Thai woman arrived at police headquarters in Bangkok to collect 11 dogs. She’d found a home for them somewhere outside of Bangkok. When she arrived Tuesday evening, she found the dogs had been poisoned with blood coming out of their nose and mouth. It seemed that the prime minister was expected to visit the next day, and having a large assortment of dogs hanging around the police headquarters might, under Thai culture, raise all kinds of questions. Such as they probably were in the shape of street dogs and therefore not pretty. Also they wouldn’t have been Hi-So breeds but ordinary mixed Thai breed dogs. And lastly, one may be forgiven to wonder if it might imply a curse if such a band of mangy dogs are wagging their tails to greet the prime minister.

Of course, the police have announced an immediate investigation. No one knows nothin’. No one ordered it done. No one did it. Poison arrived at police headquarters from a UFO? Sometime next life, an answer might emerge, but that would likely be late in the afternoon of the next life. Or maybe in a couple of years, the next batch of WikiLeaks.

Attitudes, perspective, point-of-view are shaped by our culture, history and language. It is unavoidable. If you are taught something is a taboo, that feeling stays a lifetime causing guilt and shame for transgressions. If there is no taboo against murdering dogs, and the idioms, if anything treat it like flushing a gold fish down the toilet, you end up with a lot of dead dogs. And those doing the killing simply don’t understand why a foreigner would make a fuss over a cursed animal such as a dog. The irony is that I know a number of Thais who are horrified at the local attitudes. They remind me that it could be worse; the dog could be born in Vietnam or Korea where they eat dogs. One day I would like to unearth Vietnamese and Korean proverbs about man’s best friend and compare them with the Thai ones.

Remember, not all Thais are heartless dog killers. That would be a mistake. Many Thais love dogs as much as anyone in the West and are as upset about what happened at police headquarters. That said, the idioms say something that we need to pay attention to; these is the well where idioms are pulled up and that well goes straight to a person’s view of the world.

Around the same time someone was poisoning dogs at police headquarters, the military cornered a Thai man in Chiang Mai, said to be a leader of the Red shirts, and shot him 18 times in the chest. It is hard to know if that is a record but it must come close to one. Normally after a couple of chest shots the target is on the ground. I haven’t seen an explanation as to how this happened. Oh, and the military found 7 ya baa pills clutched in the dead man’s hand. I would defer to a physicist to confirm that a human body being hit 18 times in the chest correlates with the target clutching a handful of pills. It seemed the dead man was a supporter of one political faction that is out of favor, and his anti-government views were intensely held. What does appear to, at least on the surface, correlate is that political outliers and dogs had better watch their step. Because killing them is not a taboo.

Samuel Johnson wrote that “When two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather.” The good doctor wrote that in 1758, long before the conversation of Englishmen was informed by the hyperbolic outrage of London’s present tabloids. Just lately it seems he might amend his phrasing to “their only talk.”

The British are in a weather frenzy. Snow has shut down Heathrow Airport essentially for five days. Other airports are stuttering, trains are barely operating, roads impassible. The newspapers – and not just the tabloids – accuse the airports authority of dreadful failings, while others curse an unprepared government and the swinging temperatures caused by global warming.

What we writers ought to focus on is the opportunity for unleashing our creativity presented by such extreme conditions.

A writer should seek out extremes. Within himself, of course. But how to uncover those extremes of emotion? External extremes impinge on what goes on in your mind and heart, so that in the end they promote an understanding of the deepest feelings. And it’s deep feeling that makes a novel memorable, more than swish style and zippy plot.

I realized this during the Palestinian intifada. Not because of the extreme weather – though the battles I saw fought out in a rainy January in the West Bank or a sweltering July in Gaza were unrestrained – but rather because I was able to witness people in extreme situations. Surrounded by immoderate violence I saw the worst and best of people. In turn, that evoked my understanding of the best and worst in me.

I came to think of this experience in terms of color. If your everyday life is pretty good, let’s call it green. You get used to seeing green and, even when you change location, you prefer something in a similar shade of green. Then one day there’s a burst of scarlet, and then comes orange, and just as you wonder what that’s all about, your vision is splashed with turquoise. Suddenly the green seems different.

John Lennon wrote that “When the rain falls, they run and hide their heads. They might as well be dead.” He was right:  Rain or shine, “The weather’s fine.” If you’re in tune with your surroundings, accepting of them, you can feel your own responses on a deeper level.

As always, newspapers and cable news cast things in a superficial unthinking way. Thus I read that today thousands of Britons are “stranded in Paris,” unable to return to the UK by air or by train. Some of those newspaper editors ought to be stranded in the middle of a desert or on a lonely island and forced to stare at their stupid copy. Strand me in Paris any time you like.

The job of a writer is to do the exact opposite of what journalism tries to accomplish. That doesn’t mean parsing the idea of being “stranded” in the most cultured city in the world – that’s rather too undemanding. Instead, we ought to look at the opportunities in experiencing any emotion, even if that emotion is frustration. If you reject the weather and wish for something else, you’ll reject emotions, too, and then you won’t be able to enter into them when your characters need to experience them.

Last week, Jerusalem was engulfed in a dust storm. For three days, visibility was low. I slept with the taste of dirt on my tongue, as it blew through the cracks around my windows. When it eventually rained for a half hour to break the storm, the meeting of dust and precipitation dropped a layer of mud over everything.

Every time I experience this muddy rain, I know why the Bible was written in what we now call the Holy Land. A dust storm seems so apocalyptic, it’s no wonder the prophets wrote of the end of the world. The sun is shut out; the earth whips through the air; your breath is short as the dust settles in your lungs, and you cough. Yes, and then it rains mud. It sounds like one of the 10 plagues.

So the Bible – whatever you think of it, definitely a great work of literature – grew out of extreme weather, I believe. That’s what we should see in the snow storms or the heat that descends upon us now as a result of changes in global weather patterns.

Just don’t tell your non-writer friends. They won’t understand. They’ll think you’re smug.

But you’re safe on this blog. The comments section is open for you to write about how happy it makes you when the weather sends everything to hell.

So it’s Christmas week again. Oh Lord. It was in Christmas week last year that I fell down the cellar steps and broke my leg. Amid pieces of cold Turkey and broken ginger biscuits that had been destined for the freezer, I lay for several hours waiting for someone to rescue me, contemplating the sight of my foot at an impossible angle to my calf. Fun it was not and was followed by months of pain that still hasn’t really gone away.

Since my accident, I’ve only been down to the cellar three times. Once in the summer, when I went down there with my husband and ended up weeping hysterically. The second time I went down alone but with someone else in the house, the third time I went down I was entirely alone and it was nighttime. That was a bit mad.

Why did I go down the cellar on my own, in an empty house in the middle of the night, I hear you ask? Well, it’s for the same reason that the virgin always goes down into the crypt where the vampires are said to have their coffins in old horror films. It’s because it’s what you have to do. Going down into the cellar with your whole family holding your hands is very nice but it’s about as hard, street and gutsy as a guinea pig in a tiara. Falling down there was ridiculously stupid. Being hauled out by a team from Mountain Rescue was, if not humiliating, not what Jean Claude van Damm would want and, being a bit of a soldier, as I am, it was tough to bear. I don’t do being helped very well at all and so I had to prove to myself that I could go down there and then get back out again with no help from anyone else.

I’ve not been back down there since. I’ve proved I can do it if I want to, but I’m in no hurry for a repeat performance. The freezer isn’t used that much these days and we’re going out for Christmas Dinner this year and so we won’t need to stow loads of uneaten food down in the depths. For all sorts of reasons, this is going to be a rather frugal Christmas and I think that it will probably not be bad because of it. Via a combination of empty pockets, shed-loads of snow and a general ‘can’t be arsed’ demeanour, I have so far almost completely managed to avoid Christmas preparations. We’ve no tree, few presents, no decorations and no wild, festive lights all over the front of the house. But then epic displays of Christmas lights on people’s houses do seem to be down this year. Maybe it’s the recession or whatever the government are calling whatever economic thingy we are supposed to be in at the moment?

Five years ago, when I think that the whole outdoor lights thing was at it’s height, you could barely move for illuminated snowmen and life sized model reindeer. My personal favourite was the inflatable Santas you could buy to perch on your roof. The slightest gust of wind sent these hurtling towards the ground, stopped only by the cords that held them to the guttering which eventually ended up suspending poor Santa by his neck. Suicidal Santas. I could relate to them. If you do really do Christmas to the maximum of the commercial incarnation, you end up more than a little bit crazy. Wandering around soulless shopping centres looking for something that Auntie Mary a) would like, b) isn’t allergic to, c) hasn’t got or d) won’t fling back at you in a fit of insanity is a mission worthy of any astronaut/cosmonaut. Not that any of the above is relevant to me in any way.

This year no one is ‘decking’ anything and we’re all going to just lurk around the house pleasing ourselves for a few days with no pressure at all. Devoid of Christmas Dinner and elaborate present anxiety, hopefully we will be able to relax and, possibly even avoid accidents and upsets for a few days. It will make a nice change. Whatever you’re doing, I hope it’s no strain or pain on any of you either.

Shortly after the publication of BLOOD ROSE, my second Clare Hart thriller, a relative of mine asked when I was going to write a ‘proper’ book. This is a fair question. Murder, rape, organised crime, collapsing state institutions, street gangsters, pathology labs, broken hearts and a couple of quickies along the way are not, as Raymond Chandler pointed out in his famous essay, the Art of Murder, proper. I assured my disapproving relative that I had started out trying to write a ‘proper’ book. I had outlined a very literary book that involved (of course) a farm. All books by literary South Africans seem to involve farms with frustrated women immured on them.

But it was a bird without wings and it did not fly. I wanted to write about Cape Town, the cruel and beautiful city I live in. I wanted to write about dislocation and violence, about the survival of love and hope. I wanted to write about South Africa as it is. Urban, fractious, shifting, uncontained. I had no interest in writing about how it was meant to be.

I returned to Cape Town with my family in 2001. I had left South Africa in 1988 when the country was in the throes of an unacknowledged civil war. I went to live in London, then that peaceful backwater, Namibia and finally New York.

The country I returned to a decade ago was at once utterly familiar and yet unknown. I felt besieged by the extravagant violence of the place. I took the fact that we have the highest rape and murder rates in the world very personally. Here the murder of women is so common and fits so neatly to a pattern that it is referred to as femicide. This is a dangerous country for women and for girls and I had three young daughters. I needed to find a way to live here, fully engaged, and the barricaded suburbs patrolled by armed response vans did not do it for me.

I was an investigative journalist and had made enough documentaries in my life to know what to do if there’s a question that bugged me.

Go find out.

So, in order to understand the paradox of the Rainbow Nation – its brutality and its kindness – I turned my lens to crime.

Reporting crime at first. Ferreting around, trying to find the impulses, the logic, the tactics, the effects of the criminal assault that convulsed the country.

It felt like a war. As if the civil war of the 1980s war had been sublimated into the body, into the family, into the vary fabric of the society. I researched gang initiations, special police units, rape crisis centres, organised crime, the sex industry. I started interviewing cops, pathologists, ballistics experts, crime survivors. Trying to get to grips with the victims. Because at the dead centre of crime – real and fictional – are the victims.

South Africa certainly offers up plenty of those. I was flooded by victims, the horror of them, the sameness of them, the blankness of these bodies scripted with violence, the reduction of human being to corspe.

Here, as in most places, the most mesmerising crimes are often those committed against women. The battered punctured corpse that surfaces in the newspapers, in our public minds, in our fearful collective unconscious is usually a woman’s body. It drove me crazy, it drives me crazy, this casually murderous misogyny and how it silences the living, erasing depth, personality, difference, life.

The way I tried to counter this was to turn my own investigative eye, the defiant observer’s eye that looks for truth, back at this invasion. I reported crime to get below the hard glass skin of violence and find the voices of the brutalised and the dead. I studied autopsy reports of the victims and interviewed their heartbroken relatives.

But what to do with them once you hear the clamour of these mute voices in your head?

You write fiction.

As a journalist, you can list a never-ending series of facts, but in crime fiction I have found that one can get at the truth.

All my novels have their origins in my responses to particular, real crimes. Although my books are not about those crimes in any literal way, they are responses to both violent ruptures and the resilience of survivors.

Crime fiction has surprised me in its flexibility and in how it works for South Africa, a country that is embedded, like a stray bullet, both in my head and in my heart. In all countries, but in South Africa particularly because of our segregated past, cops and journalists are the only people who can plausibly navigate through this fractured and stratified society.

Crime fiction parachutes one – writer or reader – into a dramatic moment in the present. Writing about that moment is a way of re-ordering the rupture in time that violence, itself chaotic and beyond language, creates. It reflects a world that has been permanently fractured, it tells of beleaguered individuals disconnected from the ordering comfort of family and clan. It describes a dystopian world of crowded, dangerous modernist cities filled with violent, if not murderous strangers. It is not a pretty picture but it does allow one to put things to rights, to analyse and rationalise specific crimes and to mete out some kind of justice – if only a literary one – for the victims.

Having said that, however, writing crime fiction is essentially killing for others. It is making a living, like so many of my more literal-minded and armed compatriots, from a life of crime. Crime fiction, despite or perhaps because of the enormous levels of violent crime in South Africa, is a recent literary phenomenon. I am often asked about the ethics of writing crime in a country at once so traumatised by crime and so blasé about it.

The answer lies for me in where you take your reader (and yourself) after that first thrilling spectacle of violence that gets the story going. It lies in what you do with the response – yours and your readers’. One option is the pornographic display of violence, a written down version of the slasher movies. And for that you can read South Africa’s startling tabloids.

Or one can go the other way, taking the reader towards an understanding and a catharsis of the violence; the punishment of the perpetrators, and an at least temporary restoration of order.

We are a map drawing species. To get from A to B in a strange land requires a map, a local guide, or the investment of considerable patience and trial and error. Maps have long been part of our world. And maps are a medium in themselves; classifications, terrain, and borders. We are familiar with such geographical maps. The map we talk less about is the map that charts violence, danger and instability. Most of us try not to stumble into the middle of a civil war when our attention is to sign on for a holiday.

Crime fiction authors provide a map of societal violence and the characters who commit such acts, their victims, and the collateral damage to families, neighbors, and the community. We are the Welsh miner’s canary and we chart the depths of places, map them, and our travels through the nightmarish landscape of violence is read by others. In our crime novels, the connecting theme is the loss of empathy. When it falls apart, the consequences are violence and instability. Criminal acts are institutionalized. The government is under the control of psychopaths. The dominant feature of a society drained of empathy is hopelessness. It is a society based on naked power and fear—the essence of a pure noir. At that point, no one needs to read a crime novel to understand what it feels like to live in a noir environment; it surrounds them, leaving them no hope of escape.

As we tend to live inside a relatively safe and secure bubble—this is the privilege of the middle-class—our reading of the violence map comes less from personal escape than from the nightly TV news, Internet feed, crime novels or newspapers. Given the huge steel and glass cities that we inhabit soon forget that like other primates we are inherently dangerous animals. When I attend mystery/crime fiction conference, I rarely encounter anyone who has witnessed violence up close and personal. When that happens, the sense of anger, fear, and heart pounding terror leaves a mark. Most of the time violence happens to other people far away from our daily lives.

Look at our closest cousins the chimp and you find a ruthless, brutal, violent disposition well suited to bullying, assaults, rape, and murder. The good thing about chimps is they size of their male troops is small: usually under a dozen of males. Not that a dozen chimps can’t do a lot of damage to a solitary chimp from a neighboring territory, the fact is the violence is constrained by the absence of planning, organization, delegation of authority, recruitment and, of course, weapons.

One of the by-products of the WikiLeaks disclosures—and we’ve seen only the tip of the iceberg—is exactly how very dangerous and unstable our species is and the nuts and bolts that hold the lid on the violence is forever slipping off. The truth of the matter is that WikiLeaks is a mixed blessing—as are most blessings. One cheers the little guy who stands up to power and exposes the hypocrisy, deceit, dissembling and nastiness that colors diplomats, intelligence gatherers, officials, and others inside the great political game. They lie. They are crooks. They are two-faced. The litany of charges fly thick and fast from all directions.

There is another darker side to contemplate. The forces of violence are kept in check by larger forces. The Americans have been providing that service (and there is no question self-interest is involved) by mapping the danger zones. When things flare up in places like Thailand, embassies around the world issue travel advisories. That is diplomatic language for potential primate rampage and if you get caught in the thick of it, you might get yourself injured or killed.

I subscribe to the Hobbesian view of the world. Our population is about as domesticated and controlled as is possible without a vastly larger prison system. It isn’t just the power of countries with military might that keeps everyone else from tearing off the limbs and poking out the eyes of the tribe next door. We have two things that other primates lack and that makes all the difference in the way we map violence.

We have language and we have a capacity for empathy fueled by language. Empathy is often overlooked as a major factor in human relationships. In other words, we can see ourselves, good and bad, in others. To see yourself in another person humanizes them. It is far more difficult to commit an act of violence against someone with whom you feel empathy for. When you stand in another’s shoes, it is difficult to cheat, rob or murder them; steal their possession, spouse, enslave their children. That is why in time of war, the combatants and their governments do all they can to extract empathy from its soldiers and civilian population and convert the enemy into an ‘other’ who is less than human. Someone who has no shield against violence. Empathy is what we feel when our friend’s father or mother dies. Or when we see a child in distress. Rather than violence, we give comfort and care, if only through our words. Words do matter as they are the carriers of empathy from person to person.

When we map violence, we are looking for areas where empathy among people has broken down. The early signs are again found in language: hatred and hate language tears down empathy and makes violence possible. We don’t need an embassy warning to judge the level of hatred inside a community. People who spread hatred use TV, the Internet, posters, newspaper columns, to communicate that the object of that hate is outside the bounds of empathy. In the case of terrorism, those fighting for a cause dehumanize the other side. A suicide bomber, if nothing else, is someone who has been emptied of the capacity to feel empathy. Such acts are the deep primate violent streak that breaks down the empathy gate and once that is down, it is murder and mayhem.

So long as empathy is widely practiced and accepted as a central cultural norm, governing a large population becomes easier. But power corrupts and the first thing out of the box is preferential treatment or double-standards which push aside empathy based conduct and replace it with ‘me first’ and everyone-else-second attitudes. As power continues to coil up in greed, self-interest and corruption, the absence of empathy trickles down and others take up the same game. At this juncture, it is the opportunists who fill in to fill their bank accounts with the spoils of easy plunder. In other words, power in a governing authority is best used to check the conduct of those who have no sense of empathy—the psychopaths and those on the border who will take advantage if empathy starts to fail in the larger community. But what if the government takes on the psychopathic traits of the most dangerous members of society? We enters Hobbes world.

In Thai culture there is a phrase translated as ‘Water Heart’ or Nam Jai. It is used to describe the small acts of courtesy, politeness or helpfulness to another person. That person is a stranger. It is, of course, easy enough to be polite and nice to one’s friends and family and classmates but quite another for a stranger to be the beneficiary of our small acts of grace. I’ve written a book about the heart words in Thai, and often have been asked when is my favourite jai phrase. I always circle back to nam jai as it symbolizes the essence of empathy. That one quality that makes it possible for millions of people to live, play and work in close proximity in huge cities like Bangkok.

Thai culture is changing, though, as cultures are changing everywhere. Nam jai still exists in Thailand but it has been frayed and torn in recent years. The small acts of grace happen but less frequently. There was a breakdown in April and May 2010 when finding nam jai in the streets that cut across the color divide was nearly impossible. With more violence, comes more instability and uncertainty. We live in a world, which seems permanently stuck in the Orange Alert stage; a tick or two from the Red Alert. That small difference matters as it is the difference between being able to live in relatively normal way, secure in one’s person and property, and hearing gun fire, watching columns of smoke rise after a booming explosion.

The world is a far more dangerous and unstable place than we wish. Without a concept such as Nam jai or empathy, though, the map where violence is the norm will continue spreading, until we have a new empire replacing the American empire. That won’t be necessarily a pretty or safe place. We might know a great deal more in such a world but we will also be far more exposed, afraid and in danger. The risk is that our worst primate impulses will no longer be restrained by the humanizing influence of culture, language and empathy. The psychopaths and opportunists have nothing to fear in such a world as they are the ones in power. Transparency is a wonderful goal as it allows us to monitor the danger signs in those exercising power. Evil can come out of good just like good can come out of evil. If the result, though, is a world where dangers overwhelm daily life, openness will have very little meaning.