A pretty girl on an autopsy table in Cape Town.

Newly budded breasts.

A pink hair slide in her braids.

One hundred and two identifiable stab wounds on her slender body.

Not much of her left, really. She only weighed a hundred pounds.

When I first started writing about South African crime, I did so because the sheer number of victims flooded me. The horror of them, the sameness of them, the blankness of these mute bodies scripted with violence. The language of the perpetrator.

Crime and violence are highly sexualised, particularly in South Africa. But everywhere the most mesmerising crimes (in terms of TV coverage, movies, crime fiction) are committed against women. The battered punctured corpse that surfaces in the newspapers, in our public minds, in our fearful collective unconscious is almost always a woman’s body, a girl’s.

It drives me crazy, this casually murderous misogyny and how it silences the living. Erasing depth, personality, difference, life.

As a journalist, you can list a never-ending series of facts, but in crime fiction I have found that one can at least start to scratch at the truth. Crime fiction parachutes one – writer or reader – into a dramatic moment in the present. Writing is a way of re-ordering the terrible rupture in time that violence, itself chaotic and beyond language, creates.

So, how to write about that girl murdered by her own father? A man who had raped her since she was seven and finally she had told on him?

Where do you start?

What do you say?

There are strong taboos against the representation of violence. The painter Marlene Dumas, one of South Africa’s most famous exports, argued it this way:

‘It has been said that addressing or depicting subjects like sex and violence is the easiest way to attract attention. This is hard to deny, but as far as painting is concerned, it’s not entirely true. For a long time, trend-setting painters thought that the most respectful and intelligent way of dealing with this, was simply to ignore it…’

This is true, I would argue, of writers too. Many literary writers turn away from the subjects like sex and violence and raw power. But just as Dumas paints sex and violence, I wanted to write about sex and violence and power directly. I want to understand them using the representational tools of the twentieth century.

The imagery, the sense of foreboding and feminine as corruption of film noir; the conventions of suspense and revelation of crime fiction; the salaciousness of the tabloid press; the forensic ferreting of modern science that carries with it a desperate belief that its revelatory powers will vanquish death by explaining how it happened. The form of crime fiction, with its set limits and containments seems to me as much part of modernity as crime itself. Just as the modern, alienated city has spread across the globe, so has the form of crime fiction.

The end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th saw the birth of the detective in the fictional form of Sherlock Holmes. It also shepherded in the actual detectives who went after the first and defining serial killer, Jack the Ripper. He came to life with the tabloid press’s love affair with the sensation of his frenzied misogyny, perhaps the hallmark of crime fiction since them.

This was time too of Freud, the first profiler, who invented or discovered the unconscious. That dark site where secrets lurk and us writers and readers ferret for answers to apparently inexplicable crimes. It is the time of the birth of brutal modernist cities – the Gotham cities – evoked by crime writers who set their books in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, London, New Orleans and Cape Town.

In these mean streets strangers lurk and prey on the innocent. It is here that the serial killer, the ultimate stranger without conscience stalks. His is the inner voice that is never still and small. It tells him what to do and he does it. Ordinary people like me and you, the potential victims have a conscience that tells us what NOT to do.’

And it is into these streets that the crime writer slips the lonely hero (ine), to walk these streets our behalf, to investigate the darkness and put it to rights. In a sense, the hero (ine) of crime fiction is a prosthetic eye/I who can look at the medusa-head of crime, the psychic drive behind violence and fear, and not be turned to stone.

But this is not a monster to be slain. In much contemporary crime fiction, the dragon often wins. Crime fiction with its compulsive and endless serial novels – only partly driven by the dark desires of publishers’ marketing departments – is that return to the moment of rupture, the murder. In Freudian terms it is the compulsive return to an originating trauma, the return of the repressed, that patterns compulsive behaviour.

It is impossible to integrate violence, no matter how many times one tries (the source perhaps of profit for publishers of crime fiction), but as a reader and as a writer one does get some temporary relief. As you well know when you get to the end of a good thriller you sigh in satisfaction as the evil-doers get their just desserts and our lonely investigator gets to settle down at the bar with a double scotch, if (s)he’s unlucky. And finally gets laid if (s)he’s lucky. And crime fiction has produced some of the sexiest, most fuckable women in the literary canon. Who better to smoke in bed with than Elmore Leonard’s raunchy broads so direct about shedding their kimonos?

A little note here on the problem of women. My lead character is a woman. And she spends time out and about alone. She must. She has murders to solve, victims to rescue. All that.

The twentieth century city produced two kinds of street walkers. One is male, the flaneur who walks endlessly, is able to everywhere. Walter Benjamin’s man of the crowd, the PIs like Philip Marlowe and his many cousins. The other street walker is the flaneuse, the prostitute. A woman alone on the streets at night is always suspect, always a target. Especially where I live.

This is the problem that a female lead throws up.

The city is different for women, your presence on its mean streets means that you are both dangerous and endangered. It is an interesting place to write from.

But it has not helped me find a way to write about that dead child I saw in the mortuary that Monday morning.

She was thirteen.

Laetitia, was her name.

I write about crime. I’ve been writing for more than twenty-five years. That’s an average life sentence for murder. I believe that criminals and the criminal justice system are a window into our values, morality, and the way we define ourselves. Over a dozen of my novels are about crime in Asia, mainly set in Thailand. The world in which I started to be published with His Lordship’s Arsenal in 1985 has changed in significant ways. It is time that as a writer I sit back and assess what the world of 2011 looks like from the point of view of an author who has been riding the literary train for a quarter of a century. What is derailing that train can be summed up in one word: internet. The place where you are reading this: on a computer screen, a smart phone, an iPad, or another of the long list of devices that make you feel the experience of real time.

I’ll start with tradition and history. Artists such as painters, writers, and musicians come out of the Renaissance tradition, which celebrates individual genius, original composition, and creative insight. Our culture has been built on the collective efforts of such labour. (The 1874 second edition of Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man is filled with acknowledgments to the many letter he received—in the three years from the original publication.) We viewed such men and women as exceptional individuals. In a time when individual accomplishment and genius had reached its high point in almost every culture where such people were allowed a degree of freedom to work.

Charles Darwin

The internet has changed the fundamental nature of how we view artistic workers. What is interestingly clear is that we’ve always been connected to a local hive like bees. Artists would go out and bring back pollen and the nectar would be drunk by a section of those inside the hive. It was never anything other than nectar for a small cross section of those living inside. We fool ourselves thinking otherwise.

The reaction to the internet has turned shrill and gone from the defensive to attack mode. We are warned of the dangerous possibilities of the internet. Authors, professors, pundits, psychologists—the industry of knowledge workers—are coming out to condemn the new world order brought in by the internet. New technology often causes a backlash especially among those with a vested interest in the existing system of information distribution, assessment, gathering and analysis.

Laura Miller writing for The Guardian observed:

It is what the internet lures out of us – hubris, daydreams, avarice, obsessions – that makes it so potent and so volatile. TV’s power is serenely impervious; it does all the talking, and we can only listen or turn it off. But the internet is at least partly us; we write it as well as read it, perform for it as well as watch it, create it as well as consume it. Watching TV is a solitary activity that feels like a communal one, while the internet is a communal experience masquerading as solitude.

Not long ago Laura Miller’s views would have circulated in a narrow circle and transmigration to the larger world of writers and as a result would have been remote. In 2011, I can follow up on a blog, adding to the conversation, becoming a contributor, a participant, and a collaborator. The significance of the internet is the notion of collaboration. Even if not requested or wanted, it appears on the internet where communities exchange ideas. Those comment boxes that follow articles are read as avidly as the main article. Often the article of the main article returns in the comment section to reply, defend, explain or amend his or her original article. That’s how collaboration in cyberspace works.

It is taking the author an adjustment to the format, style and function of the internet. The inter-reaction aspect is forceful and immediate. Minutes after an article appears, a comment may follow. As soon as advanced copies of books are circulated, opinions, comments and review appear on blogs and readers comment sections of Amazon and Barnes & Noble. There are places for comments by other readers of reviews on Amazon. Readers are encouraged to share their views. If I tell you that I liked Pico Iyer’s Video Night in Kathmandu face-to-face, you might tell another person or two. But if I post a review on Amazon, LibraryThing, GoodReads, and many other places online where booklovers meet, the chances are that my views will be read by a great many other people that I don’t know and who wouldn’t otherwise learn my opinion on the characters, story, plot and authenticity of the setting.

Of course, what I liked and didn’t like would say as much about my preference in reading than about the book. That is the nature of literary criticism. Only now rather than a handful of literary critics, there are thousands, sheltered in a wide number of different online communities. They talk to each other, to authors, and those struggling to write or publish a book.

The authors suffer from being dethroned from the center of the literary universe.
We now orbit around a system of other powerful forces, people whose views appear in the same space online as anyone else. A lot of writers hate the internet because they find it humbling to no longer occupy the high cultural ground. There is no space left to hide once you are socially networked. The isolated self vanishes.

There is also not a little of disdain of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks. The naysayers see them as media that destroy our ability to focus and concentrate on books that may be demanding, and require the kind of attention that is incompatible with multitasking. I recently visited a friend in hospital in Bangkok who had undergone a 6-hour operation. The operation was a complete success. My friend is well. We discussed how anyone would have wished to go under the knife if the surgeon was multitasking, checking emails, text messages, replying to a Facebook friend while doing his medical work. We both agreed that no one would be happy with such a distracted doctor.

Human Brain

I wonder if we might be making some dubious assumptions about the human brain. Neuroscience tells us that the brain has plasticity. As I understand that term—and I am no doctor—plasticity means the brain continues to form new neural networks, establish new connection throughout adulthood as the person learns a new language, takes up a musical instrument, or other intellectually stimulating activities. These activities change the brain. Experience and expertise also change the brain. Professional chess players use more than one module of the brain when looking at the board. According to the New York Times, “What set the experts apart was that parts of their right brain hemispheres—which are more involved in pattern recognition—also lit up with activity. The experts were processing the information in two places at once.”

Frankly we know very little about the properties that fire on a sub-neural route. We might be surprised to find in another generation or two, that children who were raised from the beginning with multiple channel inputs will be able to switch back and forth between frequencies with great skill and ease because the early plasticity of the brain is much greater than in an adult brain, and, in theory, it is possible that this data input may structure the way of thinking about information, understanding it, storing, accessing and applying such information that does permit multitasking in ways to us would seem impossible.

Bee hive

The internet is an ongoing experiment in a couple of divergent though seemingly connected areas. The way culture is acquired, discussed, discarded, revised, merged, defended and exported from one human hive to the next, and how the growth of super hives, have caused instability and conflicted in many parts of the world. No hive is able to maintain the original integrity of input and this has caused the rulers of such hives to react with fear, anger, and force.

Add the cultural bulldozer that the internet is making through one hive after another, the developments in science are teaching us new things about human consciousness and also teaching a process or way of thinking about causation, evidence, truth, doubt and process that spills over into the cultural realm.

What is capable of knocking down cultures built on local ideology or religious doctrine also stands to demolish the foundation of the arts, including literature, which has until recently been pretty much an inside view of the social, economic and political development within the local hive. What is ‘local’ will never be the same in literature, war, or science. The lid of obscurity and secrecy has been removed. We also know from “neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology that we create our “selves” through narrative.” We are a product of our pattern recognizing “selves” and what seems like a unified whole is likely a diverse number of modular units smoothed into a continuous narrative. Given that we process information on a human scale, we learn to accept a fair amount of deception and flaws are inherent in the input and output links. Our “self” is distorted as a result. That is what it means to be human and is the subject for countless books.

WikiLeaks has been sandblasting secrecy inside global and local hives, exposing the secrets that big bees had pretty much kept to themselves. And obscurity isn’t quite what it used to be either. The randomness of fame is reinforced by YouTube viral clips of double rainbows or dancing dogs. What touches or moves people to laughter or tears is played out daily in cyberspace. Everyone gets an audition. And no one knows who the masses will select. It could be vampires or a school for magicians, or a treasure hunt. The internet celebrity is as much worthy as a celebrity (and as fragile) as one chosen in a more traditional way such as a movie star.

We don’t like that our lives are far more deterministic than we wish to believe. We clutch to our freewill like a drowning man to a life buoy. Even when the fact is that our social organization is much closer to bees and ants. Like most inhabits of a changing landscape we want to stop the engine of change, we want to step back to the world where we worked inside our hive, and you worked inside yours and no one cared about your opinion inside one of those foreign hives. That’s all gone.

The evidence shows a correlation between the brain structure and the particular brain function. There is no suggestion that brain structure can be matured in different ways thus influencing the final brain function. Function follows structure, and the structure is being altered. A lot of people are quite happy with the old structure of brain maturation. What are the consequences we can expect arising from these changes?

Nicolaus Copernicus

Our special place or our privileged position in the new restructured global hive has been lost. The internet is our version of Nicolaus Copernicus. We’ve adjusted quite nicely to the fact that the earth isn’t the center of the universe, and later to the fact the sun isn’t the center, and more recently that there is no real center. As writers we are still smarting from the Copernicus moment and it is making us unsettled. While we feel ourselves to be stable, substantial and real, we will learn to come to terms with the fact it is fuzzy, blurry and uncertain. Approximations of reality have always been good enough for survival. There is no reason to believe that will change.

We should understand that not being the center doesn’t mean we won’t have a role, that our voices will be lost, but our aloneness, our solitary, isolated existence where those who read our books won’t be readers or fans in the old sense. They will be our collaborators, and our work becomes more than a solitary activity for others, but something that creates a space for others to occupy, a place for community to form and discuss, and we will find ourselves altering the notion of when a book is finished because in the new world ahead books will never been finished, or films or paintings, they will become something beyond our wildest imaginations.

Who knows, perhaps inhabiting a space inside the brain of the surgeon who is performing that 6-hour operation, and rather than act as a distraction, some element of the parallel processing of the mind may enhance the skill, accuracy and focus of the man holding the knife.

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Christopher G. Moore’s most recent book is collection of essays under the title The Cultural Detective. Kindle/Amazon. UK and Kindle/Amazon. USA.

A writer needs to enter the characters in his novel. I’ve talked about this with other writers, but also found it useful to discuss it with artists from other fields. Two movies I saw in the last week, “Black Swan” and “The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town,” illustrate just why it’s so important.

“Black Swan” revolves around the dilemma facing Natalie Portman as a ballerina cast as both the White Swan and the Black Swan in “Swan Lake.” The White Swan is no problem for her – she’s virginal and precise. But the seductive Black Swan is beyond her – she can’t loosen up and seems to be going crazy in her subconscious determination not to do so. Her director tries to drive her beyond the mere dance steps necessary for the role. The cliché would be to say he wants her to inhabit the role. But actually he wants the role to inhabit her.

That’s what makes the movie so compelling to watch as an artist. Because that’s the way it has to be. A writer has to be invaded and driven by his character. The other way around is too shallow, too distanced.

For a dancer like Portman’s character, there’s only one way to make the movements of your body convey emotion, and that’s to experience the emotion. To dance the Black Swan, you have to be able to step forward and say, “I’m the bloody Black Swan, dammit,” and for it to be true.

It’s the same for a writer. In the moment of writing about a particular character, all the writer’s reactions must come directly from the connection between the writer and the emotion at the heart of what he’s writing. If I ever experience a weak connection or a break, I can tell immediately: the words don’t come; or the most obvious character reaction suggests itself and instantly feels false.

I’ve developed techniques for entering into the character. They involve meditation and “breathing” through the heart, rather than the head. It opens you directly to the necessary emotion.

But how to set a broader mood for writing? In other words, beyond the individual characters to the tone of the novel overall.

In writing MOZART’S LAST ARIA, my forthcoming historical novel about Mozart’s death, I talked with classical musicians about how they prepare to play. I needed to know this, so I could convey how Nannerl, Mozart’s sister, ought to approach the pieces she plays in the book. As it turned out, I discovered an interesting technique for my own writing.

Some classical musicians begin by identifying the color they associate with the piece they’re playing. Then they might ask themselves, “What season does this make me think of?” Before they play, they’ll have that color and that season in their head. It makes them receptive to the emotion with which they must infuse the piece.

Try doing the same thing when writing. It’ll take you beyond plot and any sense of what the chapter you’re writing ought to be “about” – those are just details — and leave you with the essential emotional content.

I was struck by a similar idea in “The Promise,” a new documentary about the making of my favorite Bruce Springsteen album, “Darkness on the Edge of Town.” In the documentary, which includes contemporary interviews and footage from the studio back in 1977, the man who mixed the album recalls the instructions Springsteen gave him. The Boss didn’t say, “I want a lot of bass on this track.” Nothing that specific. Instead, for example, he described one song thus: “In a movie, there’s a scene where you find the dead body, and there’s a shock to it. This song is that dead body.” The documentary cuts straight to the startling, jarring guitar riff that opens the song to which he was referring, “Adam Raised a Cain.”

So it seems Bruce Springsteen thinks in terms of a tone poem “behind,” as it were, his songs. I think that’s a profitable way to think of writing. Each chapter or section ought to have an image with which you associate it – one that isn’t necessarily taken from the events depicted in the book. It’s a way of anchoring you to the emotional tone you want to put across. It’ll keep you closer to the emotions of your characters. And it’ll make the book true.

Last week, at the Golden Globe Awards in America, the British comedian Ricky Gervais made a bit of a gaffe. Mr Gervais, the compare for the evening, is well known for his sometimes cringingly cruel humour and so everyone was expecting shots at people like Robert Downey Jr about his drinking, drug convictions etc. What no one could have anticipated however was what Gervais said as he finally left the glittering Golden Globe Stage for the last time. ‘Thank God for making me an atheist,’ he said. It was a throwaway remark that was greeted by murmurs of shock and open-mouthed disbelief. This was then followed by a slew of complaints to the network.

Ricky Gervais has been ‘big’ in America for some years now. In fact he spends more time there than he does back here in the UK. Unless he deliberately wanted to put his career in jeopardy he should have known better. In the USA one doesn’t ‘dis’ God and one certainly doesn’t publicise one’s atheism if one wants to be liked. Although officially a secular nation, the USA is actually a very religious country. The UK, by contrast, and in spite of actually having a state religion, is a very secular place indeed. Over here a crack like ‘Thank God for making me an atheist’ would attract peals of laughter. No one would complain about such a comment and the number of those shocked by it could probably be counted on the fingers of one hand. In common with our other western European neighbours, the UK is a country where religion is viewed as something that is a matter of individual choice and belief. Only on rare occasions will you be judged and criticised because of your lack of religious faith and, in some spheres of operation, secularity will actually be encouraged.

As well as Ricky Gervais’ gaff we also had ex-Prime Minister Tony Blair having his moment in the great sun of cringing embarrassment this week. Called back to the inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the Iraq War, Mr Blair was pushed even further towards the admission that, should it ever inadvertently slip from his lips, will have people in this country baying louder than ever before for some sort of retribution. He told the inquiry that the UK entered the war alongside the USA because he personally had promised ‘our’ support to George W Bush. He was only a whisker away from going into his ‘divine destiny’ shtick. Oh my God.

Mr Blair has always been very open about his Christian faith. Not everyone was comfortable with that as British politicians, unlike their American counterparts, are not supposed to ‘do God’ publicly. In spite of the state religion thing, we are a multicultural nation which means that our Prime Minister must represent not only Christians, but Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans, Atheists and Agnostics – you name it. Basically he or she must show his or her impartiality.

I think that most of us would have forgiven Mr Blair ‘doing God’ if he hadn’t taken this country into war. For his friend George W Bush, the war in Iraq was a mission, a crusade laced with religious rhetoric and images of noble Christian warriors freeing the oppressed peoples of the Middle East from their barbarous dictators. It was, as now even the most Bushophile of all Bushophiles must know, a massive error. If, as Bush has said openly and Blair has implied, God was indeed guiding their efforts, what was He thinking?

As a woolly agnostic of course, I haven’t a clue. But one thing I do know is that feelings and opinions about God do not travel easily to and fro across the Atlantic. Here in the UK we may share a common language with most Americans, but our cultures and especially our religious conceptions are very, very different. ‘Do’ God too much in Western Europe and, more crucially ‘do God’ and mess it up royally and you will end up, like Tony Blair, looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. In the States, don’t ‘do’ God and be very public about that and pay a heavy price. Blair and Gervais are very different people but they both, basically, made the same gaffe for exactly the same reason. They both entirely misread the cultural norms of the people they were ‘playing’ to. Of course ego played a very big part in this too as did, I imagine, some misplaced feelings of invulnerability. But both Gervais and Blair were wrong. No one is as ‘big’ as whoever and/or whatever God may be and no individual can possibly trump a whole nation however witty and clever he or she might be. Europe and the USA are two great continents separated by, amongst other things, their very different conceptions of the Almighty.

It’s always the little things that give a crime away.

That credit card slip from a stolen lunch with a lover, the famous dog that didn’t bark, a single cell phone call triangulated off a mast, a single trace of DNA left on a cooling corpse, pollen residue on a killer’s shoes.

In one particularly chilling case in 2004, a pretty blonde girl called Leigh Matthews was abducted from her university campus in Johannesburg. It was just days before her twenty-first birthday. She was held for ransom, which her heart-broken family paid, but instead of being released, she was executed. It was some time before her killer dumped her body. It was some time before it was found.

The police had a suspect, a fellow student called Donovan Moodley, in their sights. But they had no concrete evidence to place him at the dumpsite. There was, however, one silent witness.

A tiny spider, endemic to the Highveld, had spun her intricate web on the underside of Leigh’s body. Shaded, protected, she had then laid her neat package of eggs. The attentive investigating officer had noticed this little creature. He called in a spider expert. She could give him an almost exact time as to when the spider would have started to spin her web.

The detectives then worked through thousand of cell phone records. There was a flurry of calls from their suspect that placed the suspect in the area. They had their man. And the spider woman’s evidence was one of the many little keys that locked Leigh’s killer away for life.

This is the way crime is often solved, through the careful attention to detail. Satisfying and rare in a country where most murders are unsolved.

In crime fiction it is those little details that create verisimilitude and the feeling, for the reader, that they are in a ‘real’ world of crime and investigation. Movies are the same – their success lives and dies in those devilish details. They are hard to get right. And when they are wrong, they seem oh so stupendously wrong.

Take the Swedish film adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, The Girl Who Played With Fire. All very hard core with extreme Swedish torture/sex/weather/computer hacking/Tank Girl action.

One of the bad guys in the movie is a blonde giant who rips people limb from limb without batting an eyelid. He also has a medical condition that makes him impervious to pain.

All well and good when you read the book. You can sketch in the unwritten details with your own imagination. But in the movies everything is sketched and styled for you.
So picture this:

There is a scene in which Lisbeth Salandar, the actual girl with the dragon tattoo, is holding a taser to his balls.

He feels nothing.

He fights like a maniac.

But all the time he is wearing a dove grey jersey with a fashionable rollover collar. It jarred.

But, I say to myself, perhaps muted cashmere is the sartorial choice of Swedish psychopaths. I have never been to Sweden. They have, outside their fabulous crime novels and the odd prime minister, no crime to speak of.

So I suspend my disbelief.

But next comes the car chase.

All the bad guys jump into the car (a Volvo no doubt, the ultimate family sedan) and they….put on their seatbelts.

Their seatbelts?

These are meant to be men who kill for fun and feel no pain. What’s with the seat belts?
But I get myself over that one and they hurtle off, safely buckled up, into the Swedish night….

At the speed limit.

Come on!

Once doubts about the badness of the heroes’ adversaries set in – the soft sweater, the seatbelt, the speed limit – the tension is gone. The movie just seemed comical after that.

I try to work through this.

Maybe the details just read differently from this southern African perspective of mine. The likelihood of seeing a gangster with a neat collar and his seatbelt buckled are about zero. Things are a little wilder here than they are in Sweden, for example. Life is a little cheaper. There are not enough seatbelts to go around. Even in the movies.

And real life and true crime does offer up some wonderful details. Not all of which are usable. My favourite one is this: a couple of cops who have helped me out over the years. Advice, tip offs, reality checks. I would love to use them in a book. But who would believe me if I put them in a story.

Their names (truly) are Engel (Angel) and DeVille.

Given the vast collection of regulations, administrative rulings and laws, sooner or later just about everyone has committed a crime. As in Orwell’s Animal Farm where all animals aren’t equal, nor are all criminal equally subject to be being processed through the criminal justice system. A case can be made that Pareto Principle applies to crime. That is the bottom 20% of the socio-economic population represents 80% of those who are imprisoned. Class and crime go together like a glove and hand. Criminals thrive on ambush and secrecy. In the days of Wikileaks, CCTV cameras, tracking of cell phone, emails, and so on secrecy is on the way out. Like an evaporated river bed we are starting to see the bottom for the first time.

The word ‘crime’ evokes the list of murder, robbery, hijacking, kidnapping, and rape. Our collective fear is violent crime committed by violent, ruthless people. Understandably emotions run high when there is blood on the floor. Though, in reality, the level of absolute violence in society is a mere fraction of the historical average where homicide among males resulted in a consistently large percentage of the male population. Whatever the shortcoming of the worst criminal justice system in most parts of the world would not come close to reproducing the 33% casualty rate of our forager ancestors.

Identifying, processing and punishing criminals depends on a number of often conflicting cultural components. Murder is a crime in South Asia but honour killings have long history of authorities looking the other way. Getting away with murder happens in other cultures, too. For those who grew up on the Godfather, the idea of Mafia killers getting away is not new information.

Setting aside, violent crimes, there is a vast criminalized set of behaviors ready for about every occasion. These crimes are a bit like crowd control. It is a good way to settle scores, keep troublesome competitors, or critics at bay. In Pattaya, the authorities are looking to enforce rules restricting sound in entertainment venues. Violation of the noise control law subjects the offender to a fine and/or imprisonment. As far as I know, no one has ever been imprisoned in Thailand for making a noise beyond that allowed by law. Crime is the continuum that stretches between murder and playing Lady Ga Ga at 120 decibels.

In Thailand, the nak lang and jao poh are often viewed in romantic ways like the 1950s icon James Dean. The nak lang is a tough guy but with an underlying morality, a kind of Robin Hood, who gathers baramii (personal power, charisma and influence accumulated over time from favors, protection and patronage) by helping out others—and those are usually the powerless, defenseless villagers subject to unfairness and abuse by the powerful. In reality, when a (low-level) nak lang beats up someone for defaulting on a loan shark’s loan, he is hardly upholding the idealized role a nak leng is supposed to play. But that’s just business. Nothing personal, as they say.

The myth and reality fight with one another, mix and unmix like oil and water. Many Thais still believe that nak lengs mainly resort to violence or other crimes as a way to balance power confronted by the ‘little guy’ in a weak legal system that would otherwise ignore or crush him.

The jao poh is a strongman who operates inside and outside the law in a community that relies upon him to look after their interest. Jao pohs, the bosses of the nak lengs, oversee an empire that runs from construction and road building to gambling, loan sharking, hire gunmen, trafficking of illegal immigrants and drug distribution channels, among other lucrative enterprises that fall outside the law.

As a rule of thumb, jao pohs are immune from criminal prosecution. A telltale sign of a jao poh’s involvement in a killing is the police report that theorizes the victim died as a result of a business or personal conflict. Not much headway is made in most of these cases. But if a jao poh crosses the wrong person (meaning even a bigger jao poh or someone more powerful) it is usually a political challenge and the loser rather than imprisoned goes into voluntary exile. The jao pohs are an example of the top down criminal system. The jao pohs are usually very rich. The street thug who robs a 7-Eleven convenience store is the classic case of those at bottom of the societies barrel breaking the surface to take what they can. In Asia where harmony is highly valued, a gang of cowboys robbing and killing creates chaos and the authorities come down hard on these modern day bandits.

Thai jao pohs evoke fear through their use of violence. They’ve figured out if you want to control people the short cut isn’t love but fear. They have brought that lesson more recently in the political sphere and have found it yields profits. Jao pohs operate not unlike feudal warlords over their turf. In the world of Thai politics, both the nak lengs and jao pohs have played an important role. In a culture where patronage plays a central role in social relationships it is easy to see how it happens. The formula involves an ambitious jao poh who has an amoral view of power relationships (based on self-interest) coupled with lots of money.

The jao poh is equipped to dispense threats and favors with the skill of a kick-boxer, to reward supporters with security, punish his rivals, and to strike deals and form alliances with other jao poh who carve up the pie and divvy up the crumbs. People vote for the jao pah, his wife, brother, son, etc. as they are grateful for the big man’s favors and protection. Jao pohs are said by the Thais to have a “big heart” (jai kwang). A jao poh must not only take but also give – especially when it’s needed.

The Thai patronage system is weaved out of the holsters of gangsters. Thai jao pohs have evolved to become media savvy—better suits, dental care, and hair styles—and cultivate a more polished, attractive celebrity like public image. You could almost forget they are jao poh. But that is the idea. Forgetting (or at least overlooking or ignoring) their crimes is the end result of this grand delusional scheme.
As Wall Street has shown us, in terms of real damage the adverse economic damage caused by white-collar crime is far greater and far less visible than the violent crimes. It happens in boardrooms, offices, luxury hotel suites, mansions and yachts and becomes almost impossible to track. Crimes of violence or crimes based on paperwork—which movie would you go to see?

WikiLeaks has announced its intention to the public the confidential tax details of 2,000 wealthy and prominent individuals, who were clients of Swiss bank Julius Baer. The promise is that the information will contain evidence of money-laundering and tax evasion.

The Pareto Principle acts in a recursive fashion. The top 20% of white-collar crime also has the top 20% as does that top 20% and so on until you reach something like 2,000 people who collectively have accumulated a vast amount of ill-gotten wealth.

Julian Assange (L) receives CDs containing data on offshore bank account holders from Rudolf Elmer. (Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters)

Authorities in the United States have been working around the clock, covertly and overtly, to haul Julian Assange into the American criminal justice system. The 2,000 wealthy individuals at Julius Baer would no doubt support the American effort to put a stop to the way the world finds out about crime, defines who are criminals and processes them as such. Julian Assange is, in an odd way, a kind of global nak leng, perhaps even jao poh, who is seeking to redress perceived imbalance in the justice and political system. But there is a big difference.

The Thai jao poh tend to be team players, they form alliances, coalitions, and become part of the system. Challenging the actual structure of power is dangerous. That is how power is institutionalized, arranged, connected, networked and co-ordinated is masked behind the powerful individual personalities who appear daily in the media. We tend to think of only power as having a human face at the top. We overlook a central feature of power, which like crime, disperses along a thickly veined socio-bio system that leads to ever smaller capillaries. Power nourishes a large political-corporate body, circulating the life-blood of wealth, opportunity and status.

Crime follows a similar trajectory and often the players overlap. That’s what makes writing and reading crime fiction popular. The crime author is doing a literary autopsy by peeling back the veneer and examining the underlying correlations connecting crime to the larger society.

At the end of the pipeline in a criminal justice system, we have a way of measuring the policy of a country about convicted criminals. Every year, most countries release statistics on the number of people in jails and prisons. We can find from the statistics a lot about criminals and their crimes and the appetite of governments to use prison as the main way to deal with crime. Remember, they are numbers stripped of their cultural context. Comparing one legal justice system against another risk missing important factors not revealed in the raw numbers.

Still we all love comparisons. We can’t resist raw scores and drawing all kinds of conclusions from the numbers as if reading the weekend results from the Premier league.

Wikipedia says, “According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) 7,225,800 people at yearend 2009 were on probation, in jail or prison, or on parole—about 3.1% of adults in the U.S. resident population, or 1 in every 32 adults.” The United States has less than 5% of the world’s population and 23.4% of the world’s prison population.

Thailand comes in at 313 per 100,000 is 33rd on the list of international incarceration rates squeezed between Lavita and Chile. Compare that with the world’s number one in incarceration the USA at a whopping 748 per 100,000. Malaysia is ranked 108th with a 130 per 100,000, Vietnam ranks 114th with 122 per 100,000, Cambodia ranks 145th at 94 per 100,000. Of course, there is Burma ranking 117th at 120 per 100,000, which may illustrate the problem with such a chart. However you define ‘imprisonment’ a case could be made that the authorities in Burma keep locked down a population 42,000 per 100,000.

At the bottom of the ranking chart are Nepal at 215th and Timor at 216th with respectively 24 and 20 per 100,000 of their population behind bars. What these number show is that imprisonment rates don’t tell use a great deal about the overall crime rate, detection of crime, enforcement of laws, or cultural considerations that exclude classes of criminals and criminal activity.

Crime like power or religion diffuses or filters through the larger population according to the cultural constraints of the system. Some places have more crime but few people in jail; while other places have a lot of people in jail and lower rates of serious or violent crime. Something to contemplate next time you decide where to spend a holiday. Next time you see the celebrity or high profile criminal and think about what forces in that culture sacrificed this person and what were their motives for doing so.

Every politician, lawyer and judge will tell you they follow the rule of law. That has been true enough so long as you remember the caveat: those who rule make and enforce the law to sustain their power and position. This traditional way of power having the monopoly over crime is under threat. The trend line suggests that WikiLeak like information may encourage people to take matters into their own hands. This recently happened in Tunisia after disclosure of vast corruption by WikiLeaks. The streets in Tunis were filled with outraged citizens. What happened next is still being studied but it is a kind of reverse polarity of fear where the bottom of the social heap pushed back in the face of official violence. When people are willing to gather in mass crowds against guns of tyrants, the fear reverses. The tyrant fears the demonstrators.

The Zeitgeist of secrecy required for crime at the highest political levels is vanishing before our eyes. The smell of fear is rising from the top. But before anyone becomes to romantic and heralds a new dawn, it is wise to revisit the Pareto Principle. One unrealistic expectation is that the Pareto Principle will be buried in Tunisia or anywhere else where demonstrators seek a new political beginning. What is likely is that once the pieces are picked up in the wake of shattered secrecy, a newly assembled 20% minority will have found a new cloak to gather, justify and sustain their power and immunity. They will be a new generation of jao poh nonetheless and the cycle of history will start again.

This week a collection of my essays has been published under the title The Cultural Detective. You can buy a paperback or ebook copy here.

The editing is all done. Voice overs are recorded and slotted into place. And so here it is, the video promo for my forthcoming historical crime novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA. I hope you’ll take a look.

The capacity for authors to develop videos for their books that are compelling, dramatic and filmic is increasing all the time. Largely that’s due to technological developments in digital video and editing.

I’ve done a video like this every year for the last five years, each one to introduce potential readers to my books and to give existing readers some insights into the locations behind the books or the music that plays a role in the plot. Each time we come to do one of these videos, I’ve noticed that my videographer pal David Blumenfeld has an almost completely new set of equipment.

On the one hand, it’d be hard to keep up if, as a non-videographer, you tried to do this yourself, because things are changing so fast. But it does mean that if you get a professional to work with you, you’ll have a video which frankly looks like a movie.

Memory is just one of the many tools that a writer employs in his or her work. It isn’t always of great importance, it depends upon what one is doing. But it is, in my experience, never wise to ignore it. Almost all my books contain some elements, if not whole plots, that derive from some fleeting or very detailed memory. That said, some memories leave one out on a limb and not entirely sure where to go. A memory that popped into my head yesterday is a case in point.

I grew up in the 1960s and 70s in London which, at that time, was the biggest city on the planet. Heaving with people who lived in often uncomfortable, damp and sometimes squalid conditions, it was not a city for the faint hearted. I lived in the poorest part of this city, in the east end. My parents, who had work, were nevertheless hard up. When I was a young child we had no central heating, no telephone, no washing machine and no carpet. Our house was nearly always cold and I can remember very clearly getting ill every winter with chest infections, ear infections, vomiting and the like.

Luckily for me however, by the time I was born the UK had a public health system (the NHS) that was completely free to all. In addition many of the diseases that had terrorised previous generations had finally been conquered. Principle amongst these was polio, a terrible ravaging of the body that could result in complete paralysis. Like all of my generation, and every generation since, I was vaccinated against polio at a very young age and so I knew that I could never fall victim to it. However many people had not been so lucky and, although I was fully aware of my own safety, I also shuddered at stories about older people less fortunate than myself. More specifically I grew up underneath the shadow of a device called the Iron Lung.

This was a machine, a vast metal tube, that allowed polio victims paralysed from the neck down, to breathe. The patient would be inserted into the tube and basically locked inside with only their head left free at one end. A mirror above the head allowed the patient to see themselves, others and some of the room that they were in with ease. In the 1960s thousands of British people lived like this.

I can’t remember when I learned of the existence of Iron Lungs, it was so long ago. Mentioned in whispers by parents and grandparents, it was a fearful spectre that still hung over people’s lives, a relic from a bygone, far more dangerous age. I first saw an Iron Lung when I was about six and it was that memory which, for some reason I cannot explain, came flooding back into my mind yesterday.

My mother had taken me to the London Hospital in Whitechapel to visit an orthopaedic surgeon. I had (and have) claw toes and, at the time, this deformity was looked upon as something that needed correction. Plans were made to break my feet and then reset my toes in a more ‘normal’ fashion. Luckily for me my parents decided, against medical advice, not to go through with this procedure for which I am eternally grateful. However while navigating what was then one of the largest hospitals in the country, I passed an open door that transfixed me. Inside were a series of long metal tubes which made strange noises and which had human heads sticking out of them. I knew instantly what they were and I was both appalled and fascinated by them. My mother, horrified that her young child should suddenly come across a rank of Iron Lungs pulled me away and began talking nervously of other things.

But that image, that memory, remained with me for many years and yesterday, out of the blue, it came back to me. Why, I don’t know. What I may or may not do with such an image I don’t know either – yet. The only thing that is certain is that at some point I will do something creative with it because now it is back with me I just can’t get it out of my head.

This is, as I said at the beginning, some of what writers do. We remember and then, like the good recyclers that we are, we put what we have found to some sort of use a second or even third time around. All I can say for the moment is ‘watch this space’.

Late last year a beautiful young woman called Anni Dewani visited South Africa. She was here with her new husband, bride and bridegroom on honeymoon. They did the classic tourist triangle. Jo’burg. Kruger Park for the big five, then Cape Town for wine and sea and sun and good food.

But on the 13th of November, a Saturday night, the taxi she and her husband were travelling in was hijacked. The taxi-driver and the husband were forced out of the car, they claimed.

The hijackers –there were two, maybe three, it was unclear – abducted the lovely bride.

The husband, distraught, knocked on one door and then another. Eventually someone opened up. The cops were called. They arrived.

They searched for the VW Sharan.

It was daybreak before she was found. Shot dead. The bullet fired at close range into the back of her slender neck.

The husband appeared in the press, distraught.

Another victim of the horrifyingly random violence of South Africa.

And yet…and yet.

I watch this grief stricken man and I think no. This is not making sense. This is not adding up. Because the body – poor dead lovely bridal Anni’s body is found in the car. On the back seat. There’s blood all over the show.

I know hijackings. There are so many here in this country whose murder statistics make most wars look feeble. Why, I ask myself, would someone hijack a car and kill a woman and not take the car. Why would they kill her inside the car? It is messy. That makes it harder to sell.

The widower talks to the press. Anni, he says, had wanted to see the ‘real’ Africa. He had tried to dissuade her but she had insisted. So they had driven through Gugulethu in search of a Mzoli’s, a restaurant that is on all the township tours. A restaurant the Jamie Oliver visited and sat on a coke crate in the sun and said how delicious the freshly slaughtered meat was…

And I think why would a man whose wife has just been shot like a dog imply that it was her fault. How unchivalrous.

Gugulethu is notorious. Why would the taxi driver take them there? Mzoli’s closes at sundown. Because of the crime in the area…

There were other things that did not make sense to me. The husband , forced through a window , was unscathed. Not a scratch. The same with the taxi driver. South Africa is a violent place. It is not easy to be left unscathed.

The stories did not add up. The words did not match the events as they unfolded in the press.

Why not?

Partly because there is so much crime here – one learns to read it, to interpret the events, the evidence, the comments made by police. Partly because you want to avoid trouble – don’t drive down that street; don’t stop at those traffic lights.

But also because there is, I believe, a grammar to violence. It is a language. A conversation. Not one we might not choose to have, but one that we understand nevertheless. There is a syntax of pain and fear that is etched into the cells as much as it is etched into our hearts.

And one reads it instinctively, this dialogue of terror.

This grammar that is written in the bodies of victims.

This particular language of violence.

Ours.

South Africa has a notorious reputation. Our murder statistics make most wars look silly. Rape is pervasive. Domestic violence the norm rather than the exception. Robberies, muggings, assaults rarely warrant a news report. Car hijackings are frequent, always accompanied with the threat of violence. Who argues when there’s a gun pressed against your temple?

It is a morally painful thing to make sense of violence. So it is usually dismissed as random, senseless, incomprehensible, and mad. But it isn’t.

It makes sense.

And what this distraught husband was saying did not.

He flew back to England just as the whispers of disbelief swirled into the press. He was looking less and less innocent as cops and journalists picked apart the sequence of events described and the statements Shrien Dewani had made.

Then the taxi driver was arrested. He pleaded guilty and, in return for a reduction of sentence – eighteen years instead of twenty-five – he said that the groom had paid him to organise the murder of Anni, his new wife. The judge accepted this verdict and he got his eighteen years. Not a nice thing in a South African prison.

Dewani was accused of murder. Shrien Dewani hired Max Clifford, a British publicist whose presence brings a whole new language of spin and obfustication to bear on a complex situation. The South Africans are seeking to extradite him. I am sure Dewani will be standing trial in Cape Town very soon. The trial will, I am sure, rivet South Africa as much as it will fascinate in the UK and elsewhere.

What did Dewani; if he is guilty, not understand. What did he misread, because he was right about a couple of things.

It is true that South Africa is a country where you can hire a killer for a few thousand rand. Firearms are cheap and easy to find. To someone unfamiliar with the particular grammar of violence used in South Africa would be right in thinking that it would be easy to find a thug or two to take somebody out.

What was misread was this: randomness, especially random violence, is very hard to fake. And just because a great number of people are murdered every year does not mean that those deaths are senseless.

The language of Anni Dewani’s murder did not ring true. The crime scenes did not read like a hijacking. The statements given to the cops by those involved did not cohere.
Those same cops – goaded as they were by the press frenzy unleashed by the murder – were determined to find out what happened. To rework the components of this horrible murder into a different sentence.

The question I get asked most often is why, in a country stalked by violence, do I choose to write about it. My answer is always the same: writing about violence, looking up close at the victims, the perpetrators and the cops, has made me understand that the violence we experience is part of a social discourse and that we can make sense of it. And that when you speak its language the violence is far less frightening.

But for Anni Dewani and her family, there is no sense. She haunts me, that beautiful young woman shot dead in a Cape Town street like a stray dog.

An election must be close in Thailand.

The Thai government recently announced plans to reduce crime by 20%. As an election will be called this year, an anti-crime campaign is popular. Voters like the idea of the government cracking down on criminals. No one has thought to ask how those in government arrived at 20% as opposed to 17.5% or 22.3%. Maybe they just like nice round numbers. A fortune-teller’s consultation might be another possibility as numbers are often selected in this fashion for the lottery. And when anyone talks about reducing crime, they are in the same realm as predicting the winning lottery number.

My friend, math savant, Professor John Paulos might occur that the obvious conclusion is that the general public suffers from Innumeracy. In a nutshell, governments can make such promises knowing that mathematical Illiteracy is the norm. Professor Paulos’ book Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences on the subject should be required reading.

It is like promising to reduce government waste by 20% or the number of road deaths over the New Year holiday by 5%, it gives the appearance that the government is doing something. It has a goal, a projection against which citizens can judge the effectiveness of government policy. In theory, that is. How many people are asking why the government missed the 5% reduction in people killed over the 7-day New Year holiday period. That’s yesterday’s news. People have forgotten by the third day into the New Year. The government can move on and choose new targets in the confidence that like road deaths, no one is likely to come back and ask for evidence of the 20% reduction in crime.

Let’s assume for a moment, the government wants to turn over a new leaf and is serious about reducing crime. There are some questions already being raised about the government’s plan. When the policy was first announced, people were under the impression that it was to be nationwide. Then the backpedaling started. Apparently it was revised to apply to crime in Bangkok, and a senior cop has gone on record as saying, no, what the colonel really meant was not all of Bangkok subject to a 20% haircut, just certain sectors in Bangkok. There is a little vagueness about where the sectors are located. It might finally come down to a 7/11 store parking lot. And talking about things left unsaid, high on the list is exactly how are the government is going to go about hitting the 20% reduction? But there is one idea.

Think high-tech.

Think CCTV cameras.

That’s right putting up cameras is the bright idea that will reduce crime by 20%. No one has any evidence that positioning cameras in any city in any country has made any sizeable dent in the crime rate. As far as I can tell, no other country has announced their cameras have reduced crime by 20%. Could this be part of the warranty that comes with all of those new cameras? Hopefully, the new CCTV cameras are coming from a different source than the GT200—the hand held bomb detecting devices that had a form of technology that didn’t seem to lend itself to finding bombs. A minor problem, as they say.

Rather than trying to reduce crime, the government ought to try to get a handle on procurement and that might translate into a 20% reduction in spending, which could be used to fund education, training and job creation; and those things might actually work to reduce crime.

Of course, you need a base line and the cops have suggested a rolling three-year criminal statistical rate to judge whether the 20% reduction has been achieved. It is likely that in a month or two this pledge about crime reduction will be forgotten. But let’s pretend, just for a moment, that this is a serious, long-term goal. Other than cameras, what other measures will the government take to reduce crime rates? And how will the police and other officials respond to such a government program?
The authors on International Crime Authors Reality Check write fiction where crime is a central feature of the story. Crime, in a manner of speaking, is our bread and butter. We have something at stake here. Our stories can be harrowing, dark, moody contemplations of modernity or comedy capers with smart people, a couple of ghosts, or wise-cracking private eye hell bent on justice for a nobody squeezed by powerful forces.

In my Vincent Calvino series, I often draw upon actual crimes that occur in Thailand; and there is no shortage of nasty, vicious, senseless, stupid and arrogant criminals to choose from. The best of crime fiction takes the reader beneath the skin, explores the psychology, motivation and gives context and perspective. A tall order. One that authors always aim to achieve but often falls short.

The short-list of best crimes in any given year would keep a hundred crime novelists in Thailand busy year after year. In other words, the imagination isn’t needed to ‘invent’ a crime worthy of a work of fiction, the creative part is to select the best from a long, varied and bloody list where the criminals actors deliver outstanding performances.
We share that distinction with a lot of other people: cops, prison guards, probation officers, prosecutors, judges, etc. Crime is an industry. In the United States this has been privatized. Jails and prisons have entered the capitalist maul like a salmon into the waiting jaws of a grizzly. It is no surprise there is profit in crime and it isn’t only the criminals who’ve figured this out.

For the government, taking a year or more to get behind the life of the person involved in crime isn’t tall order; it’s an impossibility, a bridge inside a dungeon too far. Instead when millions of people decide on a course of action that is criminalized, then the default is for the government to use suppression, surveillance, informers, and force as the basic day-to-day mechanism for containing criminal activity. Most of this doesn’t work to stop, contain, reduce or otherwise shrink, the ranks of criminals.

In fact, this likely has just the opposite effect. The high-tech stuff means more people are caught breaking the law, more people are put in prison, and as the high-tech precision increases, this is one of the true growth industries in the world. Crime can remain the same but detection can become more effective, meaning more people are processed as criminals.

No doubt the day will come when the private vested interest will lobby against bills that reduce crime. Without a steady stream of ‘criminals’ the bottom line of an entire industry would be at risk. Arguments will be made that government has no business in wasting money on stopping criminals.

Some candidate will surely argue that the government should simply let the free market intervene and before you know criminals subject to the bean counters who count the number of beans on each prisoner’s lunch plate (cutting out lunch is always a popular option with shareholders) will soon need a new set of thin man/woman clothes. Never mind, convicts upon their release will see the light and foreswear a life of crime.
Want to reduce crime 20%? A country will do well to repeal the laws against possession of pot, prostitution or gambling. You might get way past 20% but that approach would rob the criminal justice, public and private, that feeds on crime increasing to maintain their budgets, profits and status.

When the time comes to stamp out crime, no crime writer has to worry that his or her world will collapse. Remember what a top cop in Bangkok said, “It’s impossible.” There’s comfort in knowing, as a crime writer, that the authorities will promise crime reduction because it is a voter getter, and will pass even more laws to criminalize behavior, employ more high-tech gadgets to catch law breakers, and the über-rich can rest in peace in their beds that their high walls, security systems and guards are really a fancy prison but the kind of paradise that free markets bring in a game where the winner takes all the loser goes to jail.

The Thai government can always send a study team to Nepal and Timor to find out the secret of why their prison populations are so small compared to other countries. Government officials like such trips (though Nepal and Timor-Leste may not be so prized destinations). Next week I will blog about imprisonment rates in those countries and neighboring countries.

Meanwhile, we can wait and see how Bangkok’s crime rate will change over the next year. I wouldn’t bother checking back with the government, though. By January 2012 everyone will be too worried about the Maya prediction that world will end to care much about reduction of crime. It might become every man, woman and child for themselves as with the world ending we finally understand the criminal mind lurks inside all of us when we have absolutely nothing to lose.