According to the BBC,  a bottle of 1811 Chateau d’Yquem was bought for 75,000 pounds sterling by French collector Christian Vanneque. Depending on your point of view that kind of expenditure is either highly disturbing or makes you secretly envious, wishing you had that kind of money.

A few years ago, the Boston Globe ran a story about the average worldwide income which was pegged at $7,000 a year. It would take the average worker 17.6 years if he or she saved every last cent to buy that bottle.

This isn’t a rant against the rich and how they spend their money. It is an essay about how deep desire for status, recognition and approval. And how these desires are partly responsible for the economic reality of our time—1% of Americans own 40% of the wealth and 20% of the income. It also an essay about the efforts people go about in using money to gain status and recognition in the global community. Pay that kind of money for a bottle of wine and people around the world will read about you, they will know your name, the name of your restaurant. As a marketing ploy, it is quite brilliant. That bottle of wine also highlights how all that wealth which is supposed to go into creating new jobs, is just as likely to find new and novel ways to display status.

Criminals are a diverse lot with manifest motives and intentions. The criminal class includes the eleven year old who steals a loaf of bread because he’s hungry. Hunger doesn’t exclude him from being a criminal. In the 18^th century, he might be transported to Australia. We tend to have sympathy for criminals driven by necessity.

The man driving his mother whose has had a stroke at high speed to a hospital, runs red lights, hits a couple of parked cars, but manages to get her to the hospital before she dies is also a law-breaker but we have a different feeling about the ‘culpability’ issue than say a teenager who gets drunk and does all the same things as the man going to the hospital. Yet we have no problem thinking the teenager should be punished and taught a lesson.

Necessity drives certain impulses that lead to criminal behavior. In an emotional rage, someone gets out of their car and stabs another motorist to death. Or someone kills their spouse, neighbor, friend over a remark, insult, or slight. That is, someone has questioned their ‘status’ and that activity is always dangerous. In a face culture like Thailand, where status is of paramount importance, slights to status invite retaliation.

We want status. Perhaps it is a need like food, water, shelter and sex. Status motives people. Give them a ribbon, decoration, trophy, or gold star and they will fight and die for you. Competition for status makes short cuts tempting. And short cuts are the slippery slope to criminal activity. When thinking what drives someone to commit a crime, examine the underlying impulse that was the motive for crime. Was the conduct done because the criminal is starving or his mother is dying, or will the result of the crime evaluate his or her status?

I steal a loaf of bread because I am hungry isn’t the same as I steal a Rolex not because I want to tell the time but because I want to impress my friends. Or I invite a government official to dinner and pop open a bottle of wine that cost 75,000 pounds sterling before asking them to grant me a telecom, mining, or shipping concession.

Criminal law fences off status acquiring activity as well as actions to acquire goods owned by others without paying for them. Prisons are filled with criminals who failed in their quest to gain status through illegal means. And they bunk with those whose illegally acquired goods, also mainly to achieve status, failed.

The large crimes needed to pull off big time; international status takes us into the realm of banking, finance and journalism. If you can elevate your status sufficiently high, you can influence the police, courts and government that your activity is socially useful and not criminal. You can support changes to laws and regulations that would block your ambitions to increase your status even more. Hedge fund managers, CEOs, bankers have leveraged their status by organizing politically and reducing any attempts to control their behavior or to tax their gains.

Of course, these status seekers know that others are unhappy with the lopsided way that status is assigned to them. They also know that by cooking the books, they can stay ‘legal’ while the vast majority of the population struggle for the scraps of status and may find their activity ‘criminalized’. The protected class, which has most of the status horde, is quite happy to imprison the status seekers below. It teaches them a lesson about life. Status seeking as a goal is limited to a tiny number of winners. Once they enter the winner’s circle, they are content to lock the door.

Criminal law is what we use to control the losers in the status race. The winners pay governments to write that laws to constrain the activities of the also-rans. The fundamental problem, as the current budget crisis in the United States suggests, is that unless governments control status seekers in the top 1% of the population, that class will own them, control them, and ensure that the prisons are filled by those who fail to play by the rules as defined by them.

We want our star football players, singers, actors and Nobel Prize winners. The problem are these winners are used as a beard by those with predator business talents that enrich without corresponding benefits to the larger community. Hedge fund managers, finance moguls and CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies (who make up the bulk of the .01%) of top income earners aren’t rock stars nor are they coming up with a cure for cancer. But they have the skill to skate close to the boundaries of the laws, rules and regulations that govern their activities, sometimes skating over the line; and if they can, fund a politician to extend the line.

This group redefines what is a crime in order to better pursue their personal interest.
When those outside of government achieve status above those elected to government, and those in government owe their position to the wealthiest citizens, the laws no longer reflect the majority of citizens. And the majority of citizens no longer understand that their view and opinions have been shaped and distributed by those who wish to use them for their own ends.

Redistribution of wealth is one way to combat status hoarding. But redistribution is a loaded, nasty taboo word. So let’s think of this concentration of wealth like the pollution that poisons the atmosphere and contributes to climate change; let’s not redistribute wealth or income. Let’s talk about “cap”. This is something we are familiar with. There’s a cap on the speed limit. You can’t go as fast as you want. There’s a cap on the chemical and toxics you can dump into rivers, lakes, canals and the ocean. There are caps on carbon emissions. The one common feature that caps have: is they don’t redistribute speed, chemicals or carbon, but they do place a limit on making a profit from driving at high speeds (truck drivers) or from polluting the air, rivers, forests and oceans. We have no problem saying the community-interest overrides the self-interest. Society already agrees to criminalize certain selfish behavior committed by individuals even though it may deprive them of more income or wealth.

Why not put a ‘cap’ on income and wealth? And for the same basic reason, that a concentration of a large percentage of the wealth in the upper one percent is detrimental to the rest of the community and damages them. Anyone who doesn’t believe that such damage doesn’t spread across a large range of other people’s interest haven’t been watching the James and Rupert Murdock show on the BBC. Or have already forgot about the financial crash of 2008. Say cap income at the current rates the rich pay on the first $12 million dollars a year. Most people could scrap past on a million a month. Then start progressive taxing the additional income until it hits $24 million a year and then let the tax be 90%. On wealth, the first $250 million, old rules apply, after that it goes back to the community. Even if the community doesn’t need it; the money should go back. There is a good policy reason: income and wealth concentrations at the current levels in the United States threat the fabric of representative democracy, and the policing and judicial system.

If we are honest, the arguments for unlimited wealth and income concentration are about keeping people moving ahead with incentives. The reality is what moves people to continue to excel and push the boundaries is they want recognition. More than want it; they crave recognition and to show a higher status. Our problem is “globalization is big money” has become universal status measuring stick. The consensus we once had that allowed for share meaning and structure has fractured into cult-like enclaves where debate, reason and dialogue no longer are welcome.

The Forbes list of the richest people is translated, read, studied and talked about in every language on the planet. If we could find new status measuring sticks then money would matter less. Those who hunger for our community (and more importantly their peer’s) recognition can have airports, squares, and parks named after them; give them awards, medals, citations, knighthoods, and gold bars to wear on their lapels. Revise the Forbes annual list to include the number of gold stars, red ribbons, or public declarations by MPs as to their worthy contributions.

We are at a crossroads politically, socially and economically in finding the political will to win this battle. Unless we dismantle the unregulated status consolidation at the top, the democratic system will collapse into warring cults and when that happens the scramble to maintain order will overwhelm even the best of legal systems. Let people strive for status. But let it be known that there are limits as to how much status any society can reasonably allow to fall into a few hands.

And let’s recognize that without caps on pollution and income the whole ecosystem is threatened. The rebalancing of community interest with self-interest has never been easy; and it is a kind of work that never is finished. All we can say looking around us is that self-interested income generation and wealth is no longer remotely in equilibrium with the larger community interest.

As for those who open that bottle 1811 Chateau d’Yquem and pass it around, they might want to think about how far we’ve come in the last 200 years. And ask themselves who will be buying a bottle of 2011 Chateau d’Yquem in 2211. And at what price and what will their world look like?

Give some thought to that nice gold star. Say one star for every $15 million in tax paid. Wouldn’t that invite envy from friends and colleagues, the attention of beautiful women, the admiration of civil society? I know what you are thinking. I can get one of those gold stars for a 100 baht on Khao San Road. Maybe. But it will still be difficult to pull off the counterfeit billionaire trick at the guesthouse.

One hundred blog posts ago, I began my contributions to Reality Check with a whimsical piece in which I nominated my fictional Palestinian detective Omar Yussef as President of Palestine. As I reach this blogging milestone, I thought I’d examine what has changed since those distant days of 2009.

This blog has changed, of course. Barbara and CGM both beat me to the century (not due to laziness on my part, but mainly because I missed a posts when I was traveling for publicity or research). Colin took up his post as Blogger Emeritus when he had written 66 times, thus falling short of the key 69 figure which as a resident of saucy, steamy Thailand he would probably want to have attached to his name. We’ve gained new contributors who’re adding “content” to this site and bringing new perspectives.

Omar Yussef continues to be my pick for President of Palestine. Back in 2009, I noted that Omar didn’t expect to be elected. Not because he’s a fictional character, but because Palestine is fictional. Also because while Palestinian elections will be crime fiction, they’ll probably have a broad comic touch, and Omar’s far too gritty for that.

Nothing’s changed there. Palestinians and Israelis continue to think that the world quivers in anticipation of the putative September UN vote on Palestinian statehood. Over the weekend, Palestinian and Israeli leaders both suggested they’d throw out their 1993 Oslo agreements if the vote didn’t/did go through. Meanwhile, events in Oslo itself signaled that even the Norwegians have more important things on their minds these days.

I’m glad to be distant from such pointless diplomatic wrangling. Three years ago I was still dabbling in journalism, though I rarely committed the crime of journalistic research. Mostly I wrote off the top of my head. Which didn’t sit well with me. As a fiction writer, I prefer to know what I’m talking about. So I ditched journalism entirely and have found myself mentally healthier by far.

I was chatting with someone recently who finds it impossible to concentrate on her day until she has read the newspaper. Though she also finds that the newspaper is a negative distraction from her focus on real life. One might say that blogs perform the same function, except that one can make one’s own blogenda (and blog words), rather than having to contend with whatever lands on your doorstep.

Since I nominated Omar for the fictional position of President of Palestine, I’ve watched as the world economy has peeled itself down to the bone. Now we know that Marx was right. Not that our governments are behaving accordingly. Wall Street raped the world and, like many a victim of trauma and abuse, we insisted on following their rules to protect ourselves from the threat of further sodomy.

One result has been the collapse of the “European idea” (at least, if you read the newspapers, which have to make everything about a concept, rather than just about what’s unfolding without a plan). So I’m nominating Nannerl Mozart, heroine of my latest novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA, as President of Europe.

Nannerl isn’t a bureaucrat or a politician. She hasn’t worked for a bank and has no ties to financial-industry lobbyists. She has no cellphone for British tabloids to hack into. She has been dead almost 200 years, so she could “do no harm,” unlike the gravy-train buffoons in Brussels. She knew Europe, having traveled all over the continent as a pianist. She had no need to make grand schemes spanning the continent, and 2,000 florins were enough to set her up for retirement.

Which is why, despite all my reservations about the blogosphere, I’m happy to have written 100 times for this blog: the media, the banks, the politicians, all the people who think they run the world, are unable to touch this one particular space. It’s mine. And yours. That’s rather valuable.

See you next week.

Scandinavian crime fiction stormed the world when the Swedish writer, Stieg Larsson, unleashed the anorexic and tattooed revenge-hacker, Lisbeth Salandar, and the chain-smoking left-leaning journalist Blomqvist. Jo Nesbo, Larsson’s Norwegian partner in crime fiction, describes similarly bizarre murders that, to a South African, could seem comical at times in relation to the regulated tolerance of the liberal, feminist social democracies of Scandinavia.

But the warning was there, crime fiction when done well, can be both sharply and prescient of the gathering social storms that cause the smooth surface waters of a society to eddy into violence. Larsson’s books, like many of the Scandinavian wave of crime writers, carry in them the spectre of the far right, something dark, furtive and violent prowling on the edges of these novels and on the lunatic fringes of society.

That was until last Friday when a truck packed with a fertiliser bomb detonated in central Oslo. The gun-jump of the western media was startling. The attack was immediately, and without reference to any facts, assumed to have been perpetrated by Muslim jihadists, that familiar and comprehensible enemy without. This was to be Norway’s 9/11. But then the reports started coming in of a man shooting scores of beautiful children attending an island summer camp. The axis of comfort and assumption convulsed when the realisation spread that the meticulously ordered killer was a muscular, blonde Norwegian man.

Difference, challenge, defiance, discussion – all the things that result from the melting-pot cultures that result from immigration, travel, migrant labour, globalisation, the unassailable facts of the world we all inhabit, threaten the narcissistic individual when they change (for better and for worse) previously homogenous societies.  The narcissism of Breivik, the perpetrator, is chilling. Hidden away in his manifesto– a weird jumble of medieval Christianity, machismo, violence, and xenophobia – is a fetish with his appearance, his bodybuilding, his visits to the solarium in the period prior to the attacks, his sense of superiority to others. But anything that is different, that is ‘other’, is perceived as a threat because it disturbs a rigid and fanatically held sense of self. This psychotic and fragile vanity, his explosive narcissism, seems to parallel his politics of racial purity and exclusion.

Breivik’s meticulous planning appears so sane, if one measures sanity by the ability to plan ahead and foresee consequences. His crime is one that both feeds off and is fed by the media and social networking, weapons that extremists and murderous lunatics of all persuasions have used to their own purposes. However, Breivik’s final moment of glory was scuppered. The judge ordered that Breivik’s first hearing happened behind closed doors, saying that he would not allow him the opportunity to use the court as a global platform to spread his anti-Islamic message. Denying him the chance of making a supposedly heroic statement from the dock was the only consolation that could be offered to the bereft survivors of the massacre.

I watched the TV footage of Breivik arriving in a blood-red sweater for his court appearance. He looked so ordinary.  It brought to mind Hannah Arendt observing Eichmann’s trial for war crimes in Jerusalem in the 1950s. She wrote then about the banality of evil. She wrote of how impossible it was to correlate the insignificant man in the dock with unimaginable suffering that he, as a Nazi, as a human being, had caused with such zeal and efficiency.

Breivik’s crime is at once so stupendous and so banal, that it too defies correlation.  How does one fashion the chaos and pain into a narrative that restores individuality to the dead and makes sense of this rip in our collective soul? A collective death makes for collective suffering but assuages none of the pain. Every death is uniquely felt; it is endured alone by each bereaved mother, father, sibling, lover, friend.

How does one write about this? A violent narcissist – like the serial killers who have taken centre stage of so much recent crime fiction – has at the heart of him an aggressive absence rather than a soul. This absence of humanity at the heart of a human being fascinates us, but it is humanity that has been the subject of the novel since its inception two hundred years ago. So if I were to write about these young, wasted people, each one would be a bildungsroman rather than a crime novel. Each novel would be named for each one of the dead, 70, or 80 or 90, however many they count in the end.  I would unfurl their truncated lives, charting each one’s stolen course of small happinesses, small tragedies, broken and mended hearts, gardens, travels, the children that will never be born. I would make sure that none of them ever met Anders Breivik.

That is all the consolation I can offer. But I know and you know, that nothing will help.

For all sorts of reasons, today is not a good day. This is nothing to do with my already well-publicised depression, this is just life. No point going in to it all. But if you can picture Rupert Murdoch’s face when he’s happy, you’ll get a little of the measure of how this misery is making me look right now. Pretty it is not. If I had some rope and some sort of gallows I’d probably have a go at hanging myself. Even simpler than that, I could find everything I would ever want to know about hanging myself on the Internet with just a couple of clicks of my mouse button. Fortunately my disapproval of such sites is so intense, not even the promise of blessed oblivion would make me even begin to look for such things. And of course, there is also the knowledge that this feeling I have, however ghastly, will pass. By this evening, I could be dancing the Cancan in the street (or not). My point is, that although some people are plagued by thoughts of self destruction, for most of us, suicidal thoughts pass.

When I used to work in psychiatric hospitals and special units, we had our fair share of suicides and suicide attempts. Even if people are not mentally ill, when they are locked away in any sort of institution the chances of their harming themselves increase. Human beings do not take well to incarceration be it physical or mental. Frustration and hopelessness can drive people to all sorts of extremes, suicide being just one of many.

Most of the time, people do not act on such feelings. And even when they do they often, almost immediately, regret it. The ‘oblivian gate’ out of a certain situation is never the right route and people who try this generally end up just making a frightening dash to a general hospital. That said, sometimes, of course, people succeed. Those left behind, wonder why they did it and agonise about what they might have been able to do to prevent it.

One phenomenon that is common knowledge in psychiatric hospitals is the very dangerous time that occurs when a deeply depressed patient is beginning to recover. The person is far from well but possesses just enough strength and motivation to be able to take their own life. One case that I am still haunted by now involved a woman who seemed to be doing really very well. So well was she in fact that she was allowed to go out of the hospital for a few hours with a nurse. The nurse drove her to a local shopping centre and parked up in a multi-storey car park. The patient got out of the car, and, as the nurse was locking the vehicle, she made a break for it and threw herself over the barrier and into the street below. I was actually on my way home from work when this happened and so, like hundreds of other people that day, I was delayed by the police cars and ambulances that came to attend the scene. I found out what had happened later on that evening.

Then, as now, I wondered whether, had she taken just a moment to think about what she was doing, that patient would have killed herself. Her situation was not good, she was very ill indeed. But she was getting better, she did have people in her life (including a son) and she was an engaging and intelligent person. But in that moment she just couldn’t take any more. I lay no blame on her at all here. But I do still think about what she would have felt like in the following moment, had she taken it. I may be wrong but I think she may well have changed her mind.

This story is an account of a suicide that happened without outside assistance or encouragement. One of the least edifying sides to the Internet is that which actively encourages people to take their own lives. In the UK the law states that to assist a suicide is a criminal offence. There are no exceptions. You may have a relative who is terminally ill, in pain and begging to die, but if you help that person you will be arrested by the police. And yet, at the same time, complete strangers can instruct a person on the mechanics of how to kill themselves and then encourage and even chivvy them to do so on line.

Far be it from me to advocate censorship in any form. It is anathema to me. But the suicide as well as the pro anorexia sites that now proliferate, do make you think. If someone encourages another person in the UK to kill themselves, even if they are 3,000 miles away in who knows where, is that not still an offence? If we arrest those who kill out of compassion and love, why are we not arresting those who kill by proxy for kicks? I don’t know and I have no answers to these questions but it is a debate I think that we as a society, as well as our lawmakers, should be having. If a vulnerable person is persuaded to take his or her own life by someone with capacity and with ill intent, is this not murder?

My day has not improved but, as I predicted, I have put the mental gallows and rope away yet again. Nothing, however dark, is ever worth that.

It is hard to defend a number of law enforcement practices in Thailand. I write a crime series. In the process of writing, I’ve researched the Thai police realm from investigation to laying charges. The feature of Thai policing largely—for better and worse—in each of the 12 Vincent Calvino novels. I also was a law professor for ten years.

My background gives me a perspective on Thomas Fuller’s NYT article titled Thailand’s Irresistible Attraction to Fugitives that leads with deadline Bangkok:

Bangkok: Give me your drug dealers, your money launderers, your felons on the lam yearning to breathe free. …

Thailand has never advertised itself as a beacon for fugitives, but the world’s wretched refuse—to tweak the noble words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty—seem to show up here in droves.

Foreign fugitives “in droves?” It makes Bangkok sound like there’s a foreign gangster on every corner. If that’s the case, they are well hidden. As far as I know there is no Index that ranks countries according to bolt-hole attractiveness for those on the lam. Fuller’s speculation is that Thailand would top that list. I doubt it. I seriously doubt that Thailand would make the top twenty in such an Index.  And I’d wager that the USA would have a higher ranking (more about that later). What’s the evidence for this influx of foreign fugitives? A WikiLeaks cable that came out of the US embassy in Bangkok. And some news reports of foreign murderers and child molesters arrested over the past couple of years.

A popular fall back rationale for all of these fugitives in Thailand is that the police and immigration officials are corrupt. No one could say with a straight face that that corruption doesn’t exist in the police force in Thailand. That’s separate issue. The question is whether corruption is a credible explanation for all of these fugitive criminals hiding out in Thailand? Even as a fiction crime writer, I would find it hard work to show how the cops would find where these criminals were hiding. Of course they could stop every dodgy looking farang on the street and run them through a series of questions about crimes they might have committed. Obviously that might be fun to contemplate, in reality it is a non-starter.

You might ask, why not catch these criminals as they try to sneak into the airport in Bangkok? The tourist presents her/his passport as an immigration officer examines the passport, then the tourist, before asking:

IM: Mr. Tourist, do you have any outstanding conviction against you?

Tourist: No.

IM: Do you have any suspicion of anyone about to lay charges against you?

Tourist: No.

IM: Sure?

Tourist: Well, come to think of it there was that murder in Chicago.

There’s a perfectly good reason this line of questioning—and with that ending—just won’t happen. First criminals would lie through their teeth. Second, about 20 million tourists are expected to visit Thailand this year. It would take a countless hours, and the additional recruitment of thousands of personnel, not to mention new software to process a due diligence investigation on each person. After six months of queuing at the airport, the annual holiday would be over for most people only to be told when it was their turn, they’d already overstayed their visa and were subject to deportation.

Let’s say that we profile people who look shady. Twenty million Tourists is still a pretty large number. What is the pay off for looking for people who have broken a law outside of Thailand?

Some facts. That Wikileak US Embassy cable indicated that over the period of 30 years, 135 people were extradited from Thailand to the States. That works out to 4.5 criminals a year who were returned to the States. This isn’t my definition of ‘droves’ foreign criminals or any other species. Try finding 4.5 of something in a vat of 20 million something and see how easy that is. When I lived in New York City in the mid-80s, 4.5 criminal acts per hour would have been closer to the mark. And most of them looked pretty foreigner, and I suspect they were all wanted back in their home countries for some felony or other. So now 4.5 American fugitives hiding in Thailand per year is new threshold for news from Thailand to get reported in The New York Times.

And talking about the American system, of course a foreigner getting a visa can be a problem, but the daily traffic of people sneaking in from Mexico and Canada into the States no doubt includes people running from the law. And I suspect those numbers are substantially in excess of 135 people over a 30-year period—people who have committed crimes, who have been convicted of crimes, and who are on the run. Of course we have no way of knowing for sure.

Mexico isn’t likely firing up a room of lawyers to request return of their bad guys. They’re probably glad to get rid of them. Let the Americans deal with them. That wouldn’t be a bad policy. Saves the cost of prison, courts, and prosecutors. There are laws against dumping of goods, but as far as I know there’s no law to prevent one country dumping their criminals into another one. Over 30 years, I suspect more than 135 Thai nationals have elected to hide out in the USA rather than return to Thailand.

Stories like the NYT article circulate for a while and die. A couple of years ago according to the BBC,  Brazil was the international haven for criminals on the lam. Some websites feature top ten lists of criminal hiding places. Anyone can play the game. Some seem to have a better grasp of how the world is organized than others. Here’s one with Canada in the number one slot and Wisconsin at number 10. Someone at the website must think that Canada is a state like Wisconsin is a state. And suspicious countries like Thailand, the Philippines, Cuba find their places somewhere on the list.

No doubt about it. The world is a shrinking place for international fugitives. Modern technology will wipe out the usual hiding places. Fugitives will have to disappear deep in to whatever jungle remains and live in caves. Where we can reach consensus (at least among our friends) are the people we’d personally like to put on a fugitive wanted list and who is hiding out and scratching mosquito bites and heat rash.

Make your list. Sleep on it. Then tomorrow send it to The New York Times. I am certain they’d be happy to print it.

I’ve tried to do everything the characters in my books do. I’ve roamed the alleys of Bethlehem’s refugee camps. I’ve had clandestine meetings with gunrunners in Gaza. I’ve risked diabetes to eat syrupy Palestinian desserts and made them key to the plot of “The Samaritan’s Secret.” I learned piano for “Mozart’s Last Aria.” I picked up oil painting and dueled with a rapier for the forthcoming “Caravaggio’s Madonna.”

The manuscript I’m about to start will include a little gunplay. So it was time I learned how to shoot. Naturally, I’ve had a blast. (Okay, that’s the only gun pun I’ll allow myself.)

I’m not sure how many crime writers actually shoot a gun. Perhaps it depends on their location. Growing up European, I’d be as likely to have experience with a gun as I would to have owned a Rembrandt. Perhaps it’s different for American writers. In any case, I live in Jerusalem, and there are plenty of guns around here.

I’ve watched people fire guns, as a foreign correspondent covering wars in the Middle East. I’ve had guns pointed at me by masked Hamas men. But when it comes to touching guns, I’ve barely done so. Near the Jerusalem bus station some years ago, I saw a bullet from an assault rifle on the ground. I picked it up gingerly and gave it to a nearby soldier as if it might go off in my hands. He regarded me with the look macho men give to sissies.

So I went along to the range with my pal Alon Tuval, an Israeli whose hobbies appear to be on the macho end of the scale (knives, high-speed go-karting, smoking), and an American foreign correspondent who shall go unnamed here due to the fact that he doesn’t work for Fox News and therefore might be considered somewhat suspect if his liberal-media-elite bosses discovered that he liked guns.

The “range” is something of a misnomer. It was a moderately large basement in the area of Jerusalem where I go to shop for cheap furniture and on the very street where I take my wife’s 15-year-old Toyota to bribe someone to pass it as roadworthy each year. (This is the Middle East, after all.)

We loaded our magazines with a rather expensive selection of bullets. Then the instructors, Elliel and Dani, gave me a rundown on the guns I had planned to shoot: a small Beretta, a Glock, an Israeli Bul, and Dirty Harry’s Colt Magnum. Elliel liked us so much that he gave us a special treat. He ran off to get a Tabor – an Israeli invention which turns a Glock handgun into a laser-sighted assault rifle.

I assumed the position – legs bent, weight forward, elbows locked – and started to fire. I moved steadily up in caliber until the Magnum’s kick started to bruise my left thumb. (Sissy!) My shots were a little high and left at first, but I must say I started to cluster around the bullseye pretty quickly. Quicker than I’d have expected. When Elliel changed the targets so that they now appeared in the shape of a man’s upper body, I felt the blood lust awaken in me. I almost charged the target, emptying my magazine as I went.

I didn’t, because they take safety seriously on a gun range, for some reason.

Then Elliel handed me the Tabor. And I put 30 shots, all within an inch of the bullseye. It seemed hard to miss. All I had to do was get the red laser dot in the right place and squeeze slowly on the trigger. Like a fine automobile or an expensive whore, it took away all the effort and left only the pleasure.

I suspect I might use that line in my next book. But I won’t have the hero say it.

I’m free! My new book, Gallows Hill, is done and is being dusted by my editor. The final stages of a novel require solitary confinement, so I disappeared down my writing tunnel. But I’m emerging back into the world, so last week I fetched the modem that I had exiled to my brother’s house and ventured back onto the Internet. Marriage, the second most-popular theme for novels after murder, still has the world in its grip.

The last time I paid attention to global events was about the time that Kate & Wills were being transformed into the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Both of them had looked so pleased with themselves and their clothes and the weather that I thought I had better check up on the state of their wedded bliss. Kate looks radiant, happy, smiley and beloved as she should. She has singlehandedly saved the economy of the English High Street– that hell zone where teenage mothers smoke Silk Cut and buy on credit – by buying shoes, frocks and having beautiful rich-girl hair.  Some Americans have already made a film made about them – quite possibly the most stomach-turning schmaltz of all time – in which a girl flicked her hair around a lot in meadows. Not quite rags to riches but close enough for a world inured to soap opera and reality television. There was enough there to fill a decade of Hello! magazines with tasteful glitz.

But the beautiful Kate has been eclipsed by Rebekah Brooks. The former editor of The News of the World, this is a woman with bad morals, bad judgement and a bag boss, but ball-crushingly great hair. Every picture I see of her she seems to be shaking her blood-red locks like some kind of demented media Gorgon in a sea of little grey hacking men.

Brooks’s union with Rupert Murdoch, whose reptilian smugness makes me think of Harry Potter’s archenemy Voldemort, is sinister, like some kind of diabolical marriage between a father- and daughter-in-crime. The treachery, the lies, the money, the collusion between the tabloid press, Scotland Yard and cloned politicians that scamper around Westminster. The dissolution of what seems like a long and enduring relationship is bringing down all the cards that housed the British establishment. The divorce is not going to be amicable.

British scandals, like their royal weddings are mesmerising and I needed to break the spell.  As you can imagine I was thrilled to discover that we can also lay claim a royal wedding complete with in-house studio commentators, in the form of the Benoni-meets-eurotrash-wedding of Charlene and Mr Potato Head, aka Prince Albert, of Monaco. Sadly though it was an event in which glitch overwhelmed the glitz when the bride tried to run away as a rash of illegitimate children meant Albert had to be subjected to more paternity tests.

Monaco was once famously described by Somerset Maugham as ‘a sunny place for shady people.’ He could have been talking about South Africa. The story that really caught my attention was a Machiavellian marriage that has, for the moment been thwarted

The South African government tradition of intimate tender relationships has spawned the unholy alliance between Minister of Public Works, a Ms Mahlangu-Nkabinde and the chief of police, one General Bheki Cele.

A noxious ante-nuptial contract (or ANC as the lawyers call them) is now open for scrutiny in any newspaper you care to open thanks to the Public Protector. This cosy little documents the tender cash, the siphoned off state property, the backhanders, the firing of civil servants who refused to approve the vastly inflated rental deals for new police headquarters in Pretoria and in Durban. The buildings, it turned out, had been sold cheap-cheap by the Minister to the groom’s best man, one Roux Shabangu, who was going to collect the billion or so rands in rent. A brilliant scheme.

The ‘bride’ is a woman with the tact and sensitivity of rhino and she, despite all objections, bulldozed the union all the way up to the altar. But in all weddings there is a moment in which officiating marriage officer calls for any objections. This is usually a formality, but in the momentary hush that follows that question Thuli Madonsela, the Public Protector said, ‘No, stop. Everything is wrong with this.’

Madonsela’s refusal to allow this venal and incestuous coupling, despite the attacks on her integrity and threats to her safety, has shone some much needed light into the murky corners of our political closets. She has put some very powerful people on the spot and the strain shows in her face.

I’ve been wondering who is going to play the part of titian-haired Rebekah Brooks in the ultimate rags-to-bitches flick. It will require an actress with balls. Equally I was wondering who else, other than Thuli Madonsela, can play the role as the bravest person in South Africa.

Margie Orford
margie@margieorford.com or find me on Facebook

Referring to the recent News of the World scandal here in old blighty, esteemed Geordie comedian Sarah Millican remarked that in future people would freely own up to reading tabloid newspapers just ‘for the tits’. This is in complete contrast to how things have been in the past. People enamoured of newspaper pictures of scantily dressed young women would routinely say that they read publications like the News of the World (NoW) and The Sun not because of said unclothed women, but because they liked the editorials and the stories. Most people, especially men, would judiciously try and avoid ‘the tits’.

However, at a stroke, all that could change. It makes sense. After all what would you own up to? Reading a story based around the plundered data from a dead soldier’s phone or drooling over someone called ‘Danielle’s’ tits? I’m a heterosexual woman and I’d go for the tits every time. But then maybe, until recently, I was in the minority.

The way the ‘gossip’ ( I won’t call it journalism) industry in this country has developed in recent years is not what anyone could really call healthy. Why, after all, would I want to know whether or not some Z list celeb has cellulite on her bum? Why would I want that part of her body highlighted in the fuzzy long lens photograph of her on the front of a magazine? Why, when I have my own cellulite to deal with, would I give a toss?

To be fair, the whole celeb thing is probably the least worrying aspect of this whole affair. Celebrities have been of interest to the rest of humanity since time immemorial. I imagine Helen of Troy was probably stalked by unscrupulous artists wanting to paint a quick picture of her while she wasn’t looking. Public interest goes with fame and, while I don’t think we should see inside every celebrity handbag, posing pouch or nappy, I do think that at least those press ‘victims’ are well remunerated for their pain. Joe Public isn’t, even if some members of  Joe’s gang seem to be very keen to get the more salacious details of their lives into print.

There are entire publications now dedicated to ‘real life’ stories written by ‘real people’. Typical fodder includes accounts of horrendous suffering due to illness, domestic violence, plastic surgery gone wrong and disturbing psychic visions of the late Princess Diana. Grisly accounts of how now deceased children met their maker abound as do harrowing tales of sexual abuse. Amusing though titles like ’25 stone sister sits on men’s faces for money’ may be, it’s all a bit unsavoury isn’t it? The truth is, that ‘yes it is’. But the further truth is that we’re all far too used to this sort of thing to notice.

I am not a person who believes in censorship, nor am I one who wishes to get the NoW and it’s ilk off the hook. But what psychologists call the ‘latitude of acceptance’ for stories that ended up including the phone records of dead soldiers and murder victims has been widening rapidly. Back in the 1980s we had the Princess Diana watching frenzy. ‘Look!’ the headlines would shriek at us, ‘She’s going to the gym! She looks a bit tired!’ Just like ‘us’! God, I was bored to tears by that! But a lot of people weren’t. A lot of people found that fascinating and wanted more. It was ‘reality’ and soon we had other celebrities indulging in reality too. ‘Look! There goes Mariah Carey! And guess what? She’s got a bum too! Look, she can eat, just like us!’ It was only a question of time before ‘we’ wanted a piece of the action ourselves.

‘Reality’ magazines and shows like The Jeremy Kyle Show became just part of people’s lives. Truly appalling behaviour began to get you on TV and all sorts of wife beaters, anti social kids and truly misguided people who needed help came out of the woodwork for Joe Public’s entertainment.

How long is the jump between an account of some thick head beating his girlfriend to a pulp because he has ‘issues’ and the plundering of a dead soldier’s mobile phone calls? It’s such a sort distance it can barely be measured. I say throw the book at all of those responsible for hacking phones, causing misery and breaking the law. But like Sarah Millican I call on the British people to curb their enthusiasm for the goriest of gory details and get back, if such things please you, to the tits (or in my case, a nice photograph of Johnny Depp).

Like Christopher a week or two ago allowing himself to be sidetracked by ghosts, I was determined to write something crime-related, but ElfGate shines such a bright light on the psyche of Icelanders that it was just too good to ignore. Citizens of a fishing village in Iceland’s Westfjords region have fallen foul of the Hidden People.

Bolungarvík sits right on the north-west tip, a day’s drive from Reykjavík and was for many years at the end of a tortuous and hazardous road that snaked around the coast from Ísafjördur, the nearest town. A trip to Bolungarvík, especially in spring with melting snow loosening the hillsides, was always a nervous experience with one eye on the road and the other on the slopes above, looking out for tumbling boulders rattling towards the road.

Life in Iceland, especially in remote areas, is something of a battle, not so much a battle with nature but a battle to stay in harmony with your surroundings in a country where avalanches are not common, but do happen and the Westfjords have seen more than their fair share of tragedies as coastal villages have been swamped by deadly snowfalls. A few years ago the old coastal road to Bolungarvík was finally rendered obsolete by a magnificent tunnel hacked through the mountain.

It’s a cold and remote place in winter. When it’s dark and the wind howls, your subconscious can run riot and even the most hardened and cynical urbanite will wonder if there really are monsters out there beyond the street lights.

Icelandic ghosts have never been the pleasant variety that drift through walls with the discreet rattle of a chain. In the Saga Age, the dead would rise vengefully from unquiet graves and give the living a thorough beating, or worse. Happily, that’s something that has been left behind in the Saga Age, but then there are the Hidden People. Take note, these are not the Little People, sweet leprechauns or pixies who live in fairy rings at the bottom of the garden, but folk who live in the rocks.

Personally, I have no idea if they are there or not. I’m a cynical (sub)urbanite who doesn’t believe in anything I can’t see for myself. But the number of people who have an abiding belief in the parallel population of the Hidden People is startling. Gruff, down-to-earth, taciturn people who have spent their lives outdoors and to whom the whole concept of making up fairy stories is entirely alien have told me in all seriousness that you mess with the Hidden People at your peril. These are the opinions that are difficult to shrug off as fantasy, so I sit firmly on the fence on this one. Although I’ve never seen the Hidden People, there have been occasions when something not easily explained has happened and those hairs on the back of the neck really do start to prickle.

Now Bolungarvík has run into conflict with the Hidden People. The construction of a series of avalanche barriers on the slopes of a mountain overhanging the village and inhabited – supposedly – by the Hidden People who have had enough of tunnelling and blasting, has hit immense difficulties. Heavy equipment brought in to do the work broke down, and once fixed, immediately broke down again. Then while blasting was in progress, something went catastrophically wrong, hurling sizable rocks into the village streets.

It’s reminiscent of a suburban street outside Reykjavík a few years ago that planners had envisaged as a straight thoroughfare, taking out a rocky outcrop in what was then scrub land. Truck and digger engines seized, drill bits bent like putty, blasting caps refused to fire and there were endless accidents until the planners relented. That particular sleepy street, Álfhólsvegur (Elf-Hill-Street), now skirts in an arc around the rocks that children play on in summer.

The good people of Bolungarvík are disturbed by the events, after all, they have to live there. A medium identified a clan of the Hidden People in the mountain and prevailed on the parish priest to bless the area. The village’s people asked the Town Council to apologise to the mountain’s inhabitants – and this is where the fun starts.

The Bolungarvík town council dismissed the villagers’ concerns, stated that all of the problems could be traced to rational causes and proper health and safety procedures ought to be followed, while the mayor made it plain that there was no way he was going to stand in front of a mountain and apologise to a bunch of invisible elves.

Deserted by their elected representatives, the villagers of Bolungarvík have taken matters into their own hands and organised a musical event, singing to the Hidden People by way of an apology and saying prayers while there was a hiatus in the construction work.

The mayor reportedly stayed away, maybe preferring to keep his dignity intact. It remains to be seen whether or not the villagers’ efforts will enable the construction to continue, giving the Hidden People an opportunity to move house – presumably to another mountain.

It’s also worth wondering how this would have been handled a few months ago. Maybe with municipal elections approaching rather than a recent event, the mayor would have been happier to sacrifice a little dignity to placate his electorate – and the Hidden People in the mountain.

We had a power shortage at Eel Swamp. When that happens everything seems to shut down from computers to water pumps. People tumble out of their houses with a vaguely confused look, standing in the street, looking around as if the Power Gods might roll up in a van and reconnect them to their lives.

While the power was out, crime continued. A local man was shot in the field, on his motorbike, as he was on his way to tend to his horses. His sister reported hearing seven shots. In another news, a Pattaya police sting operation went sideways and two people were killed in the ensuing gunfight.

Daily life has this riptide of uncertainty and evil that pulls you out of your depth, disturbing you life and threatening to harm you. Sometimes these forces blow out your lights. Other times they extinguish, like blowing out a candle, a couple of human lives. Crime is one of those things that even a power shortage can’t stop. But the crimes that happened this Friday will never be reported outside of Thailand, and likely won’t receive much coverage here. The rough and tumble of life isn’t all that newsworthy.

What captures the attention of the press are crimes and big time crime bosses. Marlon Brando in the Godfather comes to mind. Al Capone with his trademark cigar. Big John Gotti in his expensively tailored suits.  Every culture has an equivalent set of figures who cross the stage of life and then fade into the past as memories of them, no longer fed by the press, dim and their replacements take center stage.

This has been the natural cycle of crime and the bosses who head the organized criminal activities. It has also cycled through countless books, movies and TV series. My feeling is that times have changed and along with that change has come a revision of who are the crime bosses. We have moved beyond the iconic Godfather. The public reconfiguration of the identity of crime bosses is one plausible explanation for the popularity of crime fiction around the world. Who are they? What role do the new digital media play in exposing them and their activities?

The new crime bosses are investment bankers, hedge fund managers, corporate CEOs, and politicians of one type or another. They have advanced university degrees. These men and women know how to rob a bank without a gun. They appear in posh magazines, at film openings, and support the arts. But unlike the old days, not everyone is fooled. The International Criminal Court has been busy trying some of these big time criminals. And in the future they will likely get a shot at a new crop of political leaders.

The public, if not the courts and prosecutors, have been criminalizing economic and social conduct for as long as we’ve lived in villages and cities. The major change is that with the Internet we have internationalized criminal bosses. They are no longer just locally recognized faces; the modern new crop of criminal bosses are on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. They are known to billions.

They represent a different breed of crime boss, and belong to a different category of criminal conduct. In the past we have been content to allow the authorities the power to define crime and the criminals who commit them. Now people are waking up and talking about how this game ‘we define the crime’ has been largely rigged from the start in favor of the elites.

The idea is spreading that around the world we’ve all been sleep walking. That self-delusion about modern economic and political criminal networks has allowed masses of people to become victims without a remedy. The people who died in my neighborhood today will sadly leave behind grieving relatives and friends. But beyond that circle of sadness and despair, the ripples won’t wash to your shore. Government officials who use torture, disappearance, extra-judicial killings create the kind of ripples that wash over your head. Sooner or later, as the sanction of the State launders the crime, exonerates the actors, and is sold as protecting the public.

Crime fiction authors have moved into this field of gray. A place haunted by forces larger than any old-fashioned crime boss. The best crime novels reveal a noir-like world where even the most law-abiding citizen may find himself mugged not by a drug addict but by a hedge fund manager that invested his life savings in mortgages. Everywhere I go on the Internet, I find a growing anger and resentment, as people are no longer willing to adjust to spending their lives inside extended crime families that would have made Capone and Gotti green with envy. The Arab Spring as an example of people seeking to replace the old crime syndicates that pretended to be governments.

The future holds a rich store of experience for the crime author. And the best ones are coming around to the view that readers are interested in novels where the conflict in crime reflects this new breed of criminals who don’t look like criminals and are treated like celebrities. It doesn’t take much digging to find examples of public indignation when one of the new bosses is trapped, cornered and exposed.

It’s a time for self-examination and reflection. As the passions run high, we’d do well to consider this quote from Noam Chomsky:

“I’ve reviewed a lot of the literature on this, and it’s close to universal. We just cannot adopt toward ourselves the same attitudes that we adopt easily and in fact, reflexively, when others commit crimes. No matter how strong the evidence.”