I lifted the spray can and wrote a big, blue P. The letter bled and blurred. “Closer to the wall, Matt,” said my friend Walid. No problem. I just moved onto the next section of concrete. Unfortunately, there’s plenty of wall.

Miles and miles of it, in fact, winding as far as I could see. It ran down the hill from where I stood among the rubble and trash at the edge of Aida Refugee Camp, past an Israeli guard tower to the main checkpoint into Bethlehem. As I always do when I wander these militarized hinterlands, I wondered if there was a soldier with his gun trained on me. I sprayed the rest of my graffiti: “Playgrounds for Palestine.”

It’s the one act of “vandalism” that none of my nice bourgeois friends would click their tongues and frown over. In fact, it’d raise a grin and even boost my street cred. So much street cred that you’ll probably want me to do it on your behalf (read to the end of this post to find out why…) I was spraying the name of a US charity which brings swings and slides and merry-go-rounds to Palestinian children. Spraying it on the 40-foot-high concrete barrier that Israel built in the last decade around many Palestinian towns; in this case the birthplace of Jesus.

I didn’t go to Bethlehem this week just to spray the name of this group, worthy though that would’ve been. (If you want to know how worthy, check out their site and see the work they’ve done for kids in the West Bank, Gaza, and refugee camps in Lebanon and Syria.) I had decided to make a short video telling the story of some of the kids who’ve enjoyed Playgrounds for Palestine’s Bethlehem facilities.

It was in Bethlehem, in a school called Dar el-Kalima which stands on the ridge above Dehaisha Refugee Camp (home to Omar Yussef, the detective character in my Palestinian crime novels), where the group’s first playground was built. The project started a decade ago when Susan Abulhawa, a Palestinian-American writer, brought her little daughter to visit Palestine and discovered an almost total lack of facilities for children’s play.

Since then Abulhawa, who lives near Philadelphia, has published an international bestseller, “Mornings in Jenin,” an emotionally wrenching saga about the tragedy of a Palestinian family which she turns into a love story that will stay with you forever. With the help of Playgrounds for Palestine’s volunteers, she has also managed to construct 15 playgrounds for Palestinian children.

How important is this? Well, the Bethlehem area is home to 180,000 people. There are two public playgrounds. Neither of them is very big. In fact, you wouldn’t look twice at them in an American or British park. Both are mobbed on weekends and aren’t in easy walking distance of places like Aida Camp which, I should add, abound in children.

Other Palestinian towns are even worse off.

That leaves Palestinian kids playing on the streets. That’s a dangerous option anywhere. The kids I interviewed for my video each had tales of friends injured or killed while chasing balls into the road or run down by truck drivers who were yelling into their cellphones.

It also gave them some fun in a place not renowned for good news (at least, “good news” that isn’t 2000 years old). “This playground really saved my childhood,” 13-year-old Aida Moussa told me, as she perched on the bottom of the corkscrew slide. Think of it: when Aida was 2, the intifada began and her town was one of the most dangerous places in the world. Yet she is one of the most positive, giggly girls I’ve met and looks forward to a career in science. Who knows how many of those smiles she owes to this playground?

Playgrounds for Palestine is holding a fundraising dinner May 21 to celebrate its tenth anniversary. If you’re near Philadelphia, go and see them. If not, you can donate anyway.

Drop me a line in the comments section of this blog to let me know that you’ve made a donation to Playgrounds for Palestine and I’ll go back to Bethlehem and spray your name on the wall.

Some of the worst readers of words are the people who wrote those words in the first place. There are notable exceptions of course but organizers of events assume the big names will give life to their writing. Audiences love to hear the books read by their authors, they say. But I bet you half the audience is there to take the piss. They couldn’t criticize the written word so all they have left to harangue is the lithp or the stuttutter or the downright amateurity. Reading aloud is a skill every bit as profound as creating beautiful prose. And most of us don’t have it. No matter how hard I try, I cannot stop myself sounding like Joyce Grenfell when I read from my books. Joyce was a very popular comedienne in England whose most famous character was a nursery school teacher. Against the odds in a class full of monsters, Joyce keeps her stiff upper lip whilst parodying every kindergarten teacher in England. I taught primary school for a number of years which perhaps explains why I lapse into, ‘You! Stop fidgeting there at the back.’ or ‘I’m going to ask you questions when I finish so I’ll know if you’re paying attention or not.’ And all my characters sound like the three little pigs or Rumplestilskin (Spelling check didn’t help at all with that one.)

So it’s good to know that a process is in place to cull awful readers like me and leave us with only true thespians. It’s called Literary Death Match. I first encountered this franchise in Shanghai. It was one of the highlights of the week, they tell me. Despite the fact that it wouldn’t be at all difficult for one to organize oneself, the LDM compare was flown all the way over from New York. In her little blood-red dress and her stilettos she brought a leggy glamour to the previously dusty literary stage of the restaurant. And here’s how it works. Four writers, presumably those who don’t know what LDM is, are called to the stage. These may be writers of any genre, preferably genres which are almost impossible to compare, like poetry and Honda Civic owner manuals. At the toss of a coin the writers are paired off and go head-to-head reading their most electric work (which must come in under seven minutes.) After the first two readers have read, we arrive at the judging. The three judges are supposed to be as ridiculous as possible whilst criticizing content, performance and intangibles respectively. The poet’s hairstyle might come in for a scathing, for example while her verse is left virtually untouched. The judges then select a winner from the contestants who will go on to round two.

The second pair then reads and the judges select an opponent for winner one. Anyone who goes over the allotted seven minutes is shot with a plastic plunger gun. And here is where I found the process to be a little disappointing. Plastic plunger guns hardly hurt at all. Were I organizing a LDM I would introduce the use of actual handguns. If the performance was truly awful, using the same principle as the Gong Show, the contestant would be mowed down in a hail of bullets. Yes, there may be gratuitous fatalities at first but it wouldn’t take long before word got around. In fact I think I’d make literary readings ‘open season’ on bad readers. Listeners could bring along their own weapons, perhaps we’d give a prize to the member of the audience who packs the most impressive piece.

But, back at the pansy version in Shanghai, the losers are still alive and they watch the winners go on to round two. Luckily, we are spared another reading. The competitors merely play a game. I was told that the games sometimes involve balloons and Jello. But as this was a sophisticated gathering and there was a camouflaged representative of the Ministry of Culture in the back row, the two winners were given a quiz. From a huge screen they had to identify whether the character in the photograph is a poet or a serial killer. Thus, recognizing the face of Anne Bronte and not confusing her with Cutthroat Razor Ethel McGuire would be to your advantage. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? But you’d be surprised how many poets look like serial killers. There’s probably a high crossover rate.

I’m not stupid; I know that anarchism means, basically, government with no rules. This is generally perceived to be of a peaceful nature (according to those who promote such values via earnest debate in university politics departments across the world). The route to anarchism, – anarchy – may be of a violent nature, it’s true. But what I’ve never thought that anarchy/anarchism involved at any point however, was prissiness. It’s a shame that the so-called anarchists who took part in the March Against Government Cuts in London last Saturday didn’t appreciate that either. Masked and, in some cases, quite clearly pumped up for a scrap with someone, they cut a disturbing swathe through an otherwise good natured protest that consisted of Trades Unionists, students and members of the public not prepared to see their local services go down the toilet.

David Cameron’s Conservative government took a stand against public spending early on in their administration and we are now on the very edge of these horrors first bite. Don’t get me wrong, this country needs to cut its expenses and pay its bills, but how this is being done and who is going to suffer by it, are quite wrong. Our politicians have the idea that cutting public sector jobs while at the same time removing any semblance of culture for the ordinary man and woman will help. So called ‘wealth creators’ (industrialists, bankers) can of course buy as much culture – or not – as they feel they want or need. The fact that Manchester City Council will soon only provide one, instead of nineteen, public toilets in the centre of the city will leave them unaffected too. Unlike the rest of us they will not need to be catheterised in order to be able to leave the house safely. I’m sure these ridiculous limos they ride around in have built in loos, and anyway people like that are far too fragrant to have bodily functions.

But back to the so-called anarchists. I was marching happily along the Embankment with family and friends as well as with a load of theatre people. Unlike the smart looking firemen and the National Union of Teachers folk up ahead, we were a rather flappy and frivolous little band, I admit. Some of our banners were quite far removed from good taste, but then so are government cuts to public services. However there was one banner, which alluded to the notion that some of the government ministers’ wives might like to withdraw certain sexual favours in protest against the cuts, that caught a lot of attention and provoked much hilarity. Unfortunately for us though, not everyone was amused.

Seemingly out of nowhere a gang of masked anarchists flew into action and attacked the girl holding the banner. In spite of entreaties to them to stop what they were doing because we were all on the same side, they tore up the sign and shouted ‘sexists!’ As they left, still roaring with indignation, people yelled ‘So why do you cover your faces? Afraid to be identified with your “cause” are you?’

Later that evening a group of these “anarchists” attacked shops on Piccadilly and set fires in Trafalgar Square. In effect they completely hijacked what was a very peaceful and yet at the same time very significant march. Most people you speak to in this country believe that while cuts are necessary; they are proceeding too quickly and far too deeply. Mass unemployment, physical and cultural poverty loom for millions while those at the top are not expected to do anything beyond getting richer and fatter every day. But because of a few idiots these points have now all been lost. The government, as we knew they would, concentrate solely on the public disorder that happened on Saturday because it suits their purposes to do so. That hundreds of thousands marched peacefully is irrelevant. Let’s concentrate on a couple of hundred individuals who like to think that they’re anarchists.

I’m so angry. From what I could gather through the muffling of their masks, few of the “anarchists” were anything but upper middle class. They certainly talked a lot “posher” than I do! How dare they press their opinions on people through violence! More concerned about a so called “sexist” banner than they were about the success of the march, they ruined the day for everyone and put a massive great spoke in the wheel of the purpose behind the event. Oh, God wouldn’t you just love to live in their world of blind hatred for ironic and humorous comments? A sort of hard-line theocracy without God? Great.

The only thing the anarchists did that was positive was point up something about the police on duty that day which may or may not be true. Basically the police have been criticised by the government for not protecting property. In the past they have been very enthusiastic about this. But then as my husband pointed out yesterday what sensible person would risk injury for the sake of business premises at a time when the government are cutting their numbers? An injured policeman is a natural target for redundancy and so why go there? If that is the case, then I applaud them. Even if it isn’t, I felt that the police were with us in spirit on Saturday anyway. When we smiled, so did they, and when we shouted and booed as we passed number 10 Downing St, they just let us get on with it. Everyone is worried these days and no one likes what is happening here – except perhaps the “anarchists”.

Last Thursday 17th March, we launched an anthology titled: Bangkok Noir. Six of the twelve authors were able to attend the launch at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand. We had a full house to an enthusiastic audience of expats and Thais. As the editor of Bangkok Noir, I had some comments about the ‘noir’ movement worldwide.

Here’s a partial list of cities which currently have a volume of short fiction published about and set in the city in the title: The noir fiction: Manhattan, Berlin, Los Angeles, Brooklyn, Boston, Queens, Bronx, Seattle, Wall Street, D.C., San Francisco, Chicago, Phoenix, Baltimore, Haiti, Delhi, Barcelona, Paris, London. Havana, Dublin, Mexico City, Rome, and Moscow.

Bangkok Noir includes tales of love and betrayal, the supernatural, the far distant future, hitmen and gangsters. Stories in this collection include: Tew Bunnag’s The Mistress is free, Vasit Dejunkorn’s The Sword, Burdett’s Go East, Cotterill’s Halfhead, Hallinan’s Hansum Man, Leather’s Inspector Zhang and the Dead Thai Gangster. There are hired killers and jazzmen, drunks and dreamers, corrupt cops and ticket scalpers and junkies.

Left to right: Dean Barrett, Colin Cotterill, John Burdett, Tew Bunnag, General Vasit Dejkunjorn, Christopher G. Moore, Collin Piprell.

Why has noir fiction become popular worldwide?

A case can be made that crime arises from the lowest groups in a society. The middle-class finds a way to express political discontent with protest and demonstrations. Criminals have far less faith in a system that offer them few advantages and opportunities. Crime has mostly been thought of as a short-cut to gaining inside a system stacked against the criminal and people in his/her class. Crime has also jumped the class line into banking and finance. Greed knows no class boundary. Only the opportunity presented for the big score is class-defined. If a ruler runs a country without any accountability or transparency, the magnitude of crime registers 9.0. As we see in the Middle-East, the dictators become the new ‘noir’ criminals who seem to have no way out. So yes, we love noir for different reasons than earlier writers and readers. And that is because we have a new idea of who are the real criminals.

There are noir readers who still love the classical noir story. In these books, we follow criminals who appear from dense urban areas where an underclass is left to languish. Many of the stories in noir fiction are hardboiled crime stories. There is a ray of hope that something good can emerge from the chaos and suffering. Crime in this world is upward mobility and status for those locked out the political system and living in grinding poverty. We watch such a criminal struggle, and ultimately find his/her efforts come to nothing as he/she is pulled back under the waterline in true noir fashion, or that person survives to fight another day.

Crime fiction also taps into the race, religion and ethnic divisions. These divisions in the third-world are a source of resentment, anger and hatred. These ‘hot’ emotions feed anti-social behavior against the ‘others’ who live on the other side of the racial, religious or ethnic divide. It is much easier to steal from, murder or rape the ‘others’ who because of skin color, faith, or ancestry, are different.

Criminals are not the only ones who feel alienated in the modern world. A lot of people feel frustrated, shut out, marginalized and hopeless. Crimes stories draw upon our deepest fears that there is no way out. The old perception is that the police and courts and politicians act for a narrow class of people and repress anyone bold enough to challenge their interests. The new perception is the ruling class has become a dangerous criminal class. In the old noir there is no escaping the fate of the criminal who is also a victim. In the New Noir, it is old powerful elites who are trapped and looking for an escape. It is that sense of doom, uncertainty and dread that many people are curious to read about. Where the hunter becomes the hunted, the tables are turned. In the New Noir, the attention of the world is on whether the old criminal rulers will suffer a similar fate.

And how is noir set outside the Western world different in content, story, and conflict?

In the West, as imperfect as the press and governments are, there remains a base-line that is only rarely crossed. In flawed democracies—and there are many examples—the daily disappearance, extra-judicial killings, torture, illegal detentions ten years ago would have barely registered in the consciousness of most people. With the rise of social networking, this harsh, brave new world of power that operates with immunity and impunity in many parts of the world is accessible and visible. Modern noir fiction set in the so-called third world have helped many to understand the cultural stage on which the actors parade private violence, corruption and cheating.

Crime fiction sows the seeds that criminal behavior is a label used by ‘criminal’ regimes to repress those who challenge their authority. Crime is always a challenge to authority. By its very nature, crime is subversive undermining the existing order and intuitions. But if the authority itself is involved in criminal behavior and isn’t viewed as legitimate, the moral force against crime is lost. This absence of consensus about values and norms leaves a vacuum and it is filled with instability.

There is another reason ‘third world’ New Noir is gaining a worldwide readership and it has do with the problem of dictatorships and the growing sense that democracy may not ultimately succeed as the model for the future. Modern social networks remain in their infancy but all the evidence suggests digital communications may be the pushback chance against dictatorship. Dictators have historically succeeded in isolating people inside their private fear and that keeps most everyone docile. Those who don’t toe the line are branded ‘criminals’. That consensus held together by fear is breaking down just about everywhere.

Real criminals have never been docile and dictators hire thugs to be their secret police and prison guards as it is better to co-opt the violent criminal class for the dictator’s purposes than to fight them one-by-one, hoping that somehow they don’t wake up one morning and find they gathered into a low-grade insurgency. People and criminals are manageable, as long as are atomized, broken up into individuals, estranged from each other, permitting dictators to sleep easily.

Crime fiction is about criminals who to varying degrees employ plans, organization and violence to achieve gain or revenge. In the end, though, is a message that such people aren’t ever going to succeed. The larger powers will destroy them. We love Noir fiction because it dares. Hard men and women act in subversive ways and defy authority. Thinking about a class of criminals as low-grade rebels against an overwhelmingly corrupt system gives the reader the thrill of going against the system from the armchair.

The challenge of New Noir is for readers to imagine criminals as victim but the kind of victim that refuses to submit to dictatorship but goes down fighting. If these political struggles end in blood and tears, is it better to die on one’s feet than to live on one’s knees?

Fear has always been the dictator’s best friend. If they have the guns and bullets and show the willingness to use them ruthlessly against those who rise up, an isolated, frightened population will fall back into religion, consumption, or hedonism. Or they might pick up a crime fiction and discover the exploits of a new underclass of criminals trying to break free of a system that forced them into crime. A lot of readers can relate to that impulse and in the New Noir they see the possibility of courage to defy.

In less than two months, my next novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA will be published in the UK (the US publication date is November). This means I have to start thinking about publicity.

Naturally I’ll be doing the usual kinds of things that writers do these days. The promo video is already made and can be seen on www.mattrees.net. It will be particular hit with you if you want to see me wearing a powdered wig and silk stockings; it also features my adorable three-year-old son dressed as Little Mozart. One for the ladies, I’d say.

I shall be Facebooking, guest blogging, even tweeting perhaps, and sending emails to everyone who ever wrote an email to me. But all writers do that stuff.

So I shall also be adding some truly ridiculous publicity stunts to my “online presence.” Given that some of the other things necessary for publicity are a bit of a drag, my only criteria for my ridiculous stunts is that they ought to be fun.

For example, stay tuned for readings from MOZART’S LAST ARIA and some of my previous novels by major celebrities such as Michael Caine, Richard Burton, and Sean Connery.

Good publicity, eh? But surely expensive, you say.

Not if you work on your impersonations. I have Caine and Burton more or less down pat. My Connery is getting there. I’ll read a little from each. Perhaps I’ll even have them interviewed about how much they love my work. Then I’ll post it on my website with some stills of the men themselves, and we’ll see if anyone can resist my books after that…

A teaser: It’s possible that Winston Churchill, Yasser Arafat, and Dame Edna Everage might also be speaking out on behalf of my work, if the first couple of recordings are a success.

Now it’s over to you: I’d welcome other publicity ideas for the books. Let me specify that they must be ridiculous or, at least, silly. I believe I’ve set the bar pretty high here, but I know you’re up to it. Ludicrous ideas to the Comments section please.

It’s almost impossible to tell from her books but S.J. Rozan is only 37cms tall. She’s the same height as her suitcase. S.J. Rozan arrived in Shanghai. Her suitcase didn’t. We were appearing at a literary luncheon together but she didn’t have any clothes. I offered to remove all mine and call it the Naked Lunch but New Yorkers are inherently modest when it comes to sharing their attributes with strangers. I, on the other foot have nothing to be ashamed of. The volunteers at the Shanghai Literary Festival are called ‘elves’. I was surprised how many elf jokes I remembered from primary school and how quickly people tired of hearing them. S.J.’s elf was a two-meter tall American lady. She kindly brought along samples from her wardrobe obviously believing that S.J. was the literary giant she’d heard about. It was like dress-up day at the crèche. We had to burrow through the enormous cloths until we found S.J. tucked down between the folds. This obviously wasn’t going to work.

S.J. sprinkled one more layer of talcum powder on her unmentionables and we headed off to the luncheon. Fortunately the stage was set well back from the front table of diners. Being a literary lightweight my job was done with the lunch but S.J. had to appear at a formal evening event. I recalled a Doris Day movie where all her clothing was ripped from her nubile body by a sex-craved, machete-wielding maniac in Central Park. Doris had an evening appointment with Rock Hudson – probably the one where he tells her he can’t marry her because he’s already living with a teenaged Pilipino houseboy in crotchless leather biker gear. Of course, Doris doesn’t know this yet so she wants to look pretty for Rock. She comes across a city traffic cop sunbathing topless during his lunch break and makes off with his shirt. With a discarded dog leash as a belt she turns the shirt into something glamorous. With her well-formed calves highlighted by her high-heels, Rock is immediately mesmerized by the sight of her and abandons all that homosexual nonsense and they get married. (Damn. What WAS the name of that movie?)

Which brings us back to S.J. at last. I travel with my lucky festival shirt. It’s bright blue, doesn’t need ironing, and beer just seems to roll off it like milkshake off a sheep. That’s why it’s lucky. You never have to wash it. In my lucky shirt, tied at the waist with a length of rubber shower hose, her shapely calves highlighted by her orthopedic cowboy boots, S.J. converted more than a few gay men that night. I smiled with pride as I watched her being tossed from one TV interviewer to the next after the event. She was the media darling.

On my morning walk today I noticed two things. In Bangkok, if you step into slow-moving traffic to cross the road, the drivers brake. In Shanghai they accelerate and run over you. I was run over several times. But as I convalesced by the roadside I couldn’t help noticing just how many Chinese women were shirts tied at the waist with rubber tubing and orthopedic cowboy boots. Such is the pull of celebrity.

I Didn’t Mean to Eat the Ornamental Fish and Other Blunders in China

Ever since I was a teenager I’ve had addictions. I’ve gone through times in my life when just the thought of a day without a drink, a packet or cigarettes or any number of pills and potions has been unthinkable. I’m not like that anymore, except at certain times, namely when I’m either worried or nervous.

Next week I have to do something that I find scary. I can’t go into it in a public forum like this, but it’s nothing dodgy or illegal, in fact it is something that I have good reason to feel very righteous about. But I’m frightened and because I’m frightened, an addiction has swung in. Not a biggie. I’m not quaffing bottles of gin. No, this time it’s my only food addiction: chocolate.

Oh, lord what can I tell you about chocolate? With most foods I have an ‘off’ button. I can only eat a very limited amount of meat or fish and anything else I just get bored with. But not the demon choccy. Yesterday a friend bought me a big bar of coffee flavoured chocolate which I shoved done in one and then went and had a chocolate mousse, a hot chocolate drink and a milk chocolate chaser. Even after all that I still found myself poking around looking for more. I mean I know that many women, hormonal creatures that we are, do have to do the old sweet things shuffle at certain times of the month, but I am excessive.

When times are hard a lot of people like to consume I find. Whether it is via ‘retail therapy’, raiding high street shops for handbags and pairs of jeans you don’t need, smoking up a storm, getting rat-arsed in a pub you don’t know or shoving food down your neck, there’s something about excess that brings comfort. Maybe it’s the ‘I don’t care’, fingers up to the world thing? It’s defiant. You can take my livelihood, my home and my cash but even if I have to beg for money, I’ll get monumentally wrecked anyway. Take that, whoever you are! Then again maybe it is just the comfort that comes from surrounding yourself with stuff and things. Food comes into this of course, in fact food is probably the most primitive commodity we can pad ourselves out with. In times of trouble our cave dwelling ancestors probably derived a lot of comfort and security from having the odd stash of Woolly Mammoth meat hanging around the stalactites at the back of the cave. There’s chocolate in the fridge and a stack of bars in the larder too and just knowing that they’re there makes me feel better.

Of course what one is or becomes addicted to is very individual. Why chocolate? Who knows? Maybe I was an Aztec in a previous life and came from a city composed of pyramids with lots of the letter ‘x’ in its name? Maybe when I was an infant I was deprived of sweet things? Of maybe I’m just a greedy git with an addictive personality? I don’t know and quite frankly, at the moment, I don’t really care much either. I’ll do anything and everything I have to in order to lessen my anxiety and if that involves stuffing down loads of chocolate, then so be it. For a time, at least, I have two patron saints and they are the Blessed St Cadbury and St Lindt of the Swiss Alps (which, if you’ve never noticed look remarkably like a giant Toblerone bar!)

It is easy to take the act of writing, the pleasure of reading for granted. As easy as it to presume the liberty to speak, the liberty to listen, the liberty to weave disparate views into a workable and strong social fabric. But freedom of speech and the associated freedoms that come with it – the freedom to hear disparate views, to challenge to power, to name abuse – can never be taken as given. They are rights that have been hard won in every country where citizens have the right to speak out. In countries where freedom of expression is denied, it is always the first step towards democracy. When Aung Sang Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in Burma in November, 2010, her first statement paid tribute to the fundamental importance of freedom of expression.

This past Sunday, March the 20th, the Berlin-based Peter Weiss Foundation of Art and Politics commemorated of the Anniversary of the Political Lie. (The first political lie was the weapons-of-mass-destruction whopper that led to the invasion of Iraq.) There is a surfeit of political lies to choose from each year, but this year coordinated worldwide readings were held to pressurize the Chinese government to release Liu Xiaobo, the writer and activist.

The South African PEN Writers in Prison Committee and Poetry International South Africa joined with more than 90 organisations around the world to protest Liu Xioaboa’s ongoing detention. A number of South African writers with firsthand experience of prison shared their own writing.

Liu Xiaobo is currently the world’s only winner of the Nobel Peace Prize still held in detention. In 2009, after co-authoring ‘Charter 08’, a manifesto calling for greater freedoms and democracy in China, He was sentenced to eleven years in prison on a spurious charge of ‘inciting subversion of state power’. 1936 was the last time neither the winner, German journalist and pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, nor any of his family members, could go to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize. They were all barred from leaving Nazi Germany. This is an uncomfortable historical twinning.

Liu Xiaobo’s family and supporters have been continuously harassed since the prize. His wife, Liu Xia, has been under house arrest and has, by all accounts, suffered great psychological stress. The poem that was read around the world on Sunday was a moving and intimate tribute by Liu Xiaobo to his wife’s suffering and his own deep loneliness.

You sit there all day long
Not daring to move
For fear that your footsteps will trample the dust
You try to control your breathing
Using silence to write a story.

What does it mean to show solidarity with writers who are not free to say what they want, whose stories are told in enforced silence? What is the point of gestures? Liu Xiaobo wrote that ‘in a dictatorial country, open letters signed by individuals or groups form an important method for the civilians to resist dictatorship and fight for freedom.’

The voices of writers are quieter and more measured than the klaxon blare that is the voice of the repressive state. It is this persistent quietness that undemocratic governments cannot tolerate. In China, in Apartheid South Africa, in Turkey, in parts of South America, in the swathe of protesting countries in the Arab world, in Russia, the voices of writers, of journalists, of citizens have been met with brutal and incommensurate force. . Like the bully in the playground a government that as turned on its own people will drive its boot into the face of those it has temporarily felled.

Writing that comes from the thinking heart has a great the power of reflection. A measured voice, the considered quietness that comes from writing and reading and speaking the truth is not silence. It mirrors injustice and that enrages parasitic, brutal and paranoid governments.

Writing delineates the villainy of tyrants as it reveals the poignancy of intimacy, normality, gentleness experienced as a miracle. Liu Xiaobo’s poem to his waiting wife does just that. No wonder the Chinese government is afraid of him.

Just let yourself fall asleep in the dust
until I return
and you come awake
wiping the dust from your skin and your soul.
What a miracle – back from the dead.

The new breed of crime writers

Anyone who has been to law school knows the dirty little secret of what is on offer. Three years of studying thousands of short-stories, hardboiled domestic dramas, murders, corporate fraud, corrupt cops and politicians, greedy heirs, disloyal partners, wives, siblings, beatings, traps, smacks alongside the head, crashes and smashup and that is just the first year.

By the time graduation time rolls around the average law student has been immersed in the hardball, hardboiled, noir world where lawyers play their role as fixer, facilitator, advisor, draftsman, advocate, and confidant. With this background, it shouldn’t be a surprise that some lawyers break off formation and join the crime writing business. John Grisham made it look easy. Small town lawyer writes best sellers, rides into the sunset a rich, famous man. What’s not to like? As a role model to pursue an alternative career that wasn’t dependent on billable hours, Grisham single-handle effort to empty law offices never quite happened.

The core of a legal education is a far more powerful engine than any creative writing degree programs, and it is a surprise that more lawyers aren’t working the hardboiled roads to publishing.

There is, though, an explanation. It is very hard to find a traditional big name, big money publisher. There are only a handful of them. In contrast, the average lawyer can make a pretty good living in a law practice. People need wills. They need someone to get them that divorce or to represent them in a custody hearing. Contracts for the sale of a house or a small business requires a lawyer most of the time. Drunk driving, possession of drugs, or running over a neighbor’s dog is going to mean an appointment with a lawyer. So there is a constant stream of work for most lawyers. There is a large pool of potential clients. Chasing ambulances is easier than chasing readers. Only a handful of lawyers or judges can make the transition to writing fiction as a living. If law clients are like fishing in a well-stocked sea, finding a publisher is an over crowed puddle with tens of thousands of lines with bait on the end. And the fish don’t bite that often.

Judges are also lawyers. But unlike an ordinary lawyer, what they write is ‘published.’ Not by Random House or Viking Press but published in vast volumes of legal cases. The stories they tell are read by law students, academics, other judges, lawyers, policy makers, law makers and lobbyist. They read to make money not to be entertained. They are a highly specialized audience. It doesn’t matter how rotten a judge’s prose, his audience has no other choice but to read what he’s written.

Their judgments can’t be downloaded from Amazon onto your Kindle or bought in Walmart or Costco. And there is a reason for that limited market. Most judgments read like they were written for ‘lawyers’ and in a style and language that excludes those outside the profession. There is a reason lawyers are paid to read court judgments. You need a legally trained mind to figure out what they mean and what they have to do with you.

That is so an example of 2000 era thinking. Canadian judges are leading the way to update the style and form of legal judgments, bringing them into the mainstream of story-telling.

One day a couple of judges must have been shaving looked in the mirror and said, “Why don’t I write a real story. One that has all the emotion and drama of The Wire or Deadwood. Why not write in the style of Raymond Chandler or Dashiel Hammett?”

Why not, indeed. Lawyers started as ‘scribes’ so why not journey back to the future and reclaim the authorship mantle?

Ontario Court of Appeal Judge David Watt is a judge who has taken the plunge into the water of creative writing in a court judgment.

Examples (Courtesy of The Globe and Mail) of Judge Watt’s prose include:

“Early one morning in June, 2006, Melvin Flores closed the book on his relationship with Cindy MacDonald. With a butcher knife embedded in Cindy’s back. Fifty-three blunt force injuries.”

In a murder case last year, his judgment started: “Handguns and drug deals are frequent companions, but not good friends. Rip-offs happen. Shootings do too. Caveat emptor. Caveat venditor. People get hurt. People get killed. Sometimes, the buyer. Other times, the seller. That happened here.”

The Canadian legal community is divided between those who think Judge Watt’s is breaking new ground with this noir styled judgments and the conservatives who question the propriety of a judge who uses his audience to ‘entertain’ the reader of his judgment. Our judges are supposed to keep those eyelids slowly closing as they read and try to comprehend he judge’s verdict.

Judged Watt’s has a fellow paperback writer in Ontario Superior Court Judge Joseph Quinn who in a bitter divorce wrote.

“Paging Dr. Freud, paging Dr. Freud,” Judge Quinn wrote in the judgment. “Here, a husband and wife have been marinating in a mutual hatred so intense as to surely amount to a personality disorder requiring treatment.” In that same case, Judge Quinn wrote, that Larry, the 38-year old husband in the divorce/custody proceeding, possessed “a near-empty parenting tool box,” and sent his estranged wife Catherine insulting text messages and flipped her ‘the finger’ as he drove by her home. “A finger is worth a thousand words and therefore, is particularly useful should one have a vocabulary of less than a thousand words,” Judge Quinn added.

Catherine, the wife/mother in this drama, had all the characteristics of a paperback writer’s dream character: She had warned her children several times that if they telephoned their father, they would go to jail. She sent a text message her daughter while she was on an access visit to the father to ask: “Is dickhead there?”

The problem with judge’s writing crime fiction is that they are pretty much stuck with the dialogue of the parties that appear before him. A judge can’t just make up any old dialogue because it is more effective, sharper, a better indicator of character; his job isn’t to be original or creative in putting words in the mouth of the characters before his bench. His job is to support his judgment from the evidence he’s been given. He’s a prisoner of other people’s stories and the vocabulary they used to tell their stories.

As the above dialogue suggests, this limitation can work against the artistic goals of the author. “Is dickhead there?” won’t likely win the judge any literary awards. But I bet he felt a lot better writing the judgment that allowed him to bring that timeless prose into the larger story and reveal the character of the wife/mother. This brings up another problem with judges writing fiction. They can’t get out of what is presented to them. They can’t give a character like Catherine a credible backstory, one that might give such a line irony or poignancy. Also, he can’t kill off the characters that the reader would like to see dead.

With these problems, crime fiction writers have little to fear that this small vanguard of Canadian judges will put professional authors out of work. Crime fiction writers are judged by the quality of their imagination and that can take the author (and reader) to places that judges can never visit. Judges are given the facts, mostly conflicting, in the ‘he said,’ but ‘she said’ category—and he is allowed to choose what ‘truth’ is found in whose version of what happened. The judge, like the lawyer, is a captive to resolving other people’s conflicts. He or she is supposedly detached, objective, disinterested and fair in reaching the final decision. Judges and lawyers hide their emotions as if these aspects taint their legitimacy. But emotions, hot and wild, uncontrollable and inevitable, are the fuel of fiction.

Forget about Chekvo’s gun and other literary devices. You aren’t your own free agent as a judge. If you think both sides are lying, you can’t go out and do independent research, kill off characters who need some killin’, leave a cliff hanger as the ending. None of that will do. You just get to decide whose lies are more credible.

Also, in law there is the idea of precedent. That means the judge’s verdict is binding on other judges. You not only have to read his story. You must follow it and apply it to a similar story if one should come before you on the bench. In other words, you’re not free to just make up things as you go along. You need to put the story you hear into the framework of all the hundreds of other stories that share the same characteristics of the one you are judging. Or you, as judge, are overruled. That, in authors’ terms, is the ultimate ‘bad’ review.

The best of crime fiction examines actions and behavior in a larger social context of the community; novels about crime draw upon the psychological, cultural, and political realms, which wrap like invisible netting around criminals and victims.

What brings the reader to a novel is to witness the dance between those with power and those who seek protection, justice and fairness. Inside this drama, as hope appears and disappears before the reader’s eyes, the tension is played out as to whether there are larger truths and values worth holding on to, fighting for, believing in, and that takes the author and reader beyond the shallow and narrow interest of resolving one set of problems for a couple of the parties.

Judges must decide who wins or loses. They can’t leave the end hanging. Someone walks free; someone pays. Crime fiction authors know a dirty little secret that isn’t taught that well in law school—for a lawyer your story needs only to be just good enough to be better than your opponents, and most of the time neither story is totally plausible or even all that interesting to anyone outside of the dispute. The lawyer’s job: to make the most from the evidence at hand, and a judge’s to take that evidence, turn over, look for the expiry date, and choose one bad penny over another and move on to the next case. Now you know why very few lawyers are among the ranks of crime authors. Judges write different stories, for different reasons and for different audiences. Fear not the competition from the new class of writers wearing black robes. And worry not about their welfare. Their pay has never been linked to the size of the audience they can command. Now, there’s an interesting idea.

Listen to Christopher G. Moore talk about his years of living and writing in Bangkok here.

My taxi pulled up at the traffic lights on the way into Jerusalem late Sunday night. A half dozen Breslav hassids were bouncing up and down in front of the traffic, waving signs and grinning with the exultation of wedding party dancers. They were singing, “Death to the Arabs.”

Welcome home, I thought. Something dark descended on me. I’d been away for a week attending a literature festival in Dubai. I’d become close – quickly, as can often happen at a conference which keeps you within the confines of a hotel for many days – with a number of Palestinian writers who initially wanted to chat with me about my Palestinian crime novels. As the car beside my taxi honked its horn in time to the murderous chant, I thought of those writers, those beautiful, intelligent souls, and soon enough I found a way out of the darkness.

I’ve made a bubble for myself in Jerusalem. I’m neither Israeli nor Palestinian. I admit that I don’t really participate in either culture. I’ve enjoyed that detachment, because it leaves me to focus on my writing, free of distractions such as caring what the hell happens around me.

In this case, the bubble burst. I had to decide what I would let in through those fractured defenses. Would it be negativity, anger at the jumping scum at the traffic lights whose idea of a response to the slaying of an Israeli family in a settlement near Nablus two nights before was to call for more blood? No, I knew I could fill the space with the books of the Palestinian writers I had met while I was in Dubai.

The sensitive creativity of Susan Abulhawa, whose “Mornings in Jenin” is as powerful a rendering of the disasters of recent Palestinian history as has ever been written, with a universal, human quality of great rarity. The poetry of Nathalie Handal, politically committed and yet mystical. Or Raba’i al-Madhoun, who wrote “The Lady from Tel Aviv,” engaging with Israel and what it has meant in his life, rather than wishing for death to its people.

Thanks to them, I’ve never felt more strongly that literature is the power in my life. Because its subtlety overwhelms the ugly, one-way thinking of politics.

Graham Greene wrote that “when you’ve lived in a place for a while, you cease to read about it” (“The Quiet American”.) That had happened to me, too, here in Jerusalem. It’s been a while since I read much Palestinian or Israeli literature. I think that was a mistake. It meant that my perception of the people who lived around me was too much colored by the stupid politics, by the bouncing fools who want the other guys to die so they can do as they wish.

That won’t happen again.