This is going to be my last column for a while. My next book has a deadline gun at my head. So, like most people facing an immovable force, I am giving in. I am also conducting an experiment on myself; for the first time in my life I am going to focus on one thing, and one thing only. So, I have parcelled out all the other work I do and handed it over.

The forced passing of the “secrecy” Bill – it would be ridiculous if it was not so frightening – briefly derailed my ambition to be a wallflower. However, South Africa’s grasping rulers have underestimated how pissed off the electorate is with them. Those in power, sheltered from reality as they are, seem to have swallowed their own Orwellian doublespeak and that South Africans have experience at fighting injustice, mendacity and state crime. They will get their come-uppance as people who do wrong sometimes do.

This is one of the things I have learnt during the time that crime has absorbed my writing attention and these column inches for some time. And this column has taken me places. A year ago I was sailing with my family off the Tanzanian coast. We had planned a route further out into the beckoning, blue Indian Ocean, but because of raiding Somali pirates we kept inside the reef that protects Zanzibar. It was fabulous, but the limitations caused by the collapse of the Somali state irked me, although I see that Wilbur Smith – never a man to miss a moment – already dashed a book out about piracy, a distressed, blonde damsel rescued by manly men in khaki.

Piracy has a certain epic drama, so does the nepotism and corruption of the South African government. The borderline criminality of the supine US and British administrations that colluded with reckless banks and helped floor the world economy does too, but I do not find it easy to write about these broad sweeps of public crime. The scale is too large for me, the human fallout too removed from the crimes themselves.

It is the more intimate crimes that transfix the popular imagination that absorb my attention too. Crimes not motivated so directly by greed or politics. These are the crimes that are, in my view, diagnostic of the submerged rocks around which life eddies. They are the rocks that wreck the fragile vessel of our shared, everyday lives. The staged hijacking and murder of Anni Dewani, that lovely bride visiting Cape Town for her honeymoon, allegedly by her wealthy new husband. The murder of a middle-aged, middle class Durban couple by their own children. The brutal slaughter of township lesbians who dare to live their lives out and proud. The men who stalk women and kill them, who knows why. Is it for fun, or to assuage some deep-seated and permanent misogynistic rage or simply because they think they can get away with it? Difficult questions to answer, difficult subjects on which to reflect, anguished ghosts with whom to spend so much imaginative time.

Crime novels are almost always novels about death, written in the firm belief that every body tells a story. The investigator – the imaginary one, the novelist him or herself – recreates the circumstances of a particular death. It is through this lens of death that one can discern what kind of life a murder victim lived. How we die, why we die, where we die tells us so much about how, where and why we lived.

In a country as reckless, as socially and morally fractured as South Africa I have come to think that to know life one must first know death intimately. Four books do teach one a thing or two about writing and about life. And so here I am, embarking on the journey of the fifth novel. One thread of the plot is an investigation into paediatric deaths and – darker, deeper – paediatric homicide.

I sift through the cases – there are so many – making notes here and there of details that catch at my heart. A thick fringe of eyelashes resting on a chubby, bruised cheek, a tiny pair of bloodied sandals, a cable-tie, a box of matches. I want to understand what kills our children, who kills them, why. That is the ambiguous raft to which writers cling in the belief that by shining a light into the human heart, one can make sense of darkness.

By far and away the biggest chain of bookshops in the UK is Waterstones. Over the years this giant has gobbled up many smaller and less profitable companies and has built its reputation on offers like its famous, three books for the price of two. Until very recently – until what I like to call the ‘recession’ but what my government choose to regard as a bit of bother that nevertheless necessitates closing libraries – Waterstones was doing well. But when the ‘downturn’ hit, it hit hard and the company was recently sold to Daunts – a quality travel bookshop – for a very ‘reasonable’ price.

Of course this sent shockwaves belting through the publishing industry over here and everyone was very curious to see what Mr Daunt (the owner of the eponymous bookshop) would do with Waterstones. Now we know.

Mr Daunt, it seems, is not very interested in competing with our supermarkets. His vision for the ‘new’ Waterstones is of a chain of shops that will become local community hubs, that will be places to meet and discuss as well as places where books are sold. This is much more in line with how independent bookshops operate and could be deemed an ‘old fashioned’ approach to the industry. I know that a lot of publishers are nervous about the death of the three for two offers as well as the lack of bestseller offers at the cash desks. But I think that for mid-list authors and also for some publishers too, it may be a good thing.

If people are not tempted by offers then maybe they will pick up books that are new and maybe even more interesting to them. Maybe not, we don’t know. What we do know is that the supermarkets will continue to sell popular books at discounted prices whatever.

For years Waterstones attempted to compete with the supermarkets without success. Now that Mr Daunt is in charge that policy has apparently been overturned. After all competing with the supermarkets did not have the desired effect for Waterstones. The company clearly lost out, hence the knock down price when it was sold to Daunts. But can Waterstones or indeed any chain store survive without offers?

At the moment it is the quality independent bookshops that do not discount. What these places, which are often genre or subject specific, offer in return is personal service from expert members of staff. Will Waterstones start to employ ‘specialist booksellers’ in their stores too? That we don’t know. But what looks very possible at the moment is that Waterstones may very well be pitting themselves against a new set of competitors in the shape of the independents.

Mr Daunt, apparently, wants his shops to be the centre of communities all over the UK. But how will the little local bookshop that’s been at the centre of a town for decades respond to this? Again we don’t know. What I do suspect however is that the discounting war has finally been won by our massive supermarket chains (and of course Amazon) who will carry on selling books heavily, just as they’ve been doing for years.

But maybe the book-heart of the high street is up for grabs again. Only time will tell whether that is a good or a bad thing and who it is a good or bad thing for.

Interesting times.

It takes something like this to remind us that Iceland is right at the edge of the habitable part of our planet. A couple of weeks ago a Swedish tourist went for a drive in a the country, presumably got out to take some pictures and was unable to find his way back to the shelter of his hired car.

He was able to make a phone call to the emergency services, but by the time he was found, the unfortunate traveller was already dead of exposure. By that time, three hundred or so dedicated volunteers had spent the best part of a day and a night searching.

Iceland has some volunteer rescue teams who are well equipped, well trained and who jump into action as soon as they are needed, while whole communities also swing into gear to feed, clothe and house the rescue teams while the searches are in progress. They have been responsible for some remarkable rescues over the years, as often as not involving bewildered travellers who have been taken unawares by a car that won’t start or changes in the weather that can take you by surprise in a matter of minutes.

The unlucky Swede, like so many others, presumably assumed that as the mountainous region around Eyjafjallajökull and Fimmvörduháls (yes, the bubbling volcanic area that grounded flights across the northern hemisphere a year or two ago) is a fairly easy hour’s drive from the comforts of Reykjavík as well as in mobile phone range, the region is safe and populated. Not so.

Every year there are a few people who get into trouble in the highlands, the majority of them foreign tourists, but as often as not, it’s a local who comes unstuck. Cars run out of fuel on lonely roads where filling stations can be a very long way apart, people go to seek help and don’t find it while there’s no mobile signal or the battery in their phone goes flat. There are instances of people not knowing where they are and calling for help that leads to a search concentrating on an area miles from where they’re gradually shivering into unconsciousness.

Unprepared urbanites who generally prefer not to venture beyond the civilisation of Reykjavík’s city limits are as vulnerable as anyone else on a cold, dark night and hypothermia can set in very quickly, initially robbing the sufferer of the ability to think straight, and by that time it’s often too late.

Then there are the people who simply disappear with few traces to point to what has actually happened to them. There are more than likely a good few sets of forsaken bones lying in obscure valleys or next to roads that hardly see more than a dozen cars from one year to the next.

Now the Icelandic government has pledged to put something like €130,000 into developing an emergency locating system for foreign mobile phones that are logged into the local mobile networks and to set up a working group to look at safety issues facing tourists who often aren’t aware of the hazards they can face a few hundred metres away from a main road.

Disappearances in the past were generally attributed to the activities of the myriad trolls, ghosts and the hidden people who reputedly stole people away for their own ends.

In reality, who knows? It seems more than likely the shepherd who didn’t come home was caught out by a sudden squall of snow or suffered a simple accident that wouldn’t be life-threatening if it had happened close to home, rather than being fortunate enough to be spirited away, made to live under a mountain and marry an elf king’s daughter.

On the other hand, there are things that happen not all that far from the tarmac and the national power supply that defy explanation.

More recently there are people who have gone off the radar for no discernible reason. The efforts of the rescue teams are normally enough to find people who have managed to get lost if there’s an indication of roughly where they are. But in cases where the person’s disappearance is not noticed quickly, or if nobody knows in which direction they went, the chances of rescue are slim to zero. It’s not a big country but the population is small and thinly distributed outside towns. There are plenty of wide open spaces and pitfalls for the unwary – or for those who have no intention of being found.

The one that crops up repeatedly is the Gudmundur and Geirfinnur case that I’ve written about here before. With no bodies, no evidence and precious little motive, the disappearances of these two men in separate incidents could easily be accidental rather than murder.

Roughly one person a year has disappeared in Iceland over the past four decades, all men to date and each one remains an open case for the Icelandic police until evidence of what befell them comes to light. This includes a hapless Italian tourist who was reported to have simply gone for a walk one day thirty years ago and never came back.

But sitting in a warm house with the lights on, it’s too much of a stretch of the imagination to believe that any of them were taken by the trolls or the hidden people. Outside on a dark night with the wind howling, it’s not difficult to think otherwise.

When Willie Sutton, the American bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks, he replied, “That’s where the money is.” Brooklyn born Slick Willie was on to something. The economic aspect of crime is vastly underrated. Extending Carl von Clausewitz’s war is politics by other means we glimpse the reality that crime is business by other means. We begin to understand the similar impulse between those who rob banks and investment bankers selling hedge funds stuffed with worthless mortgages.

If Willie Sutton were alive today, he might rethink his assumption that banks are where the money is. At least in places like Thailand. Not that there aren’t many banks stuffed with cash. There are. The money is in vaults and hard to get into. And with Bangkok traffic, once the heist is done, getting away is also a challenge. Besides, the big money isn’t in banks. It’s kept inside houses of the class of people who must report their holdings, cash, money, jewels and so on. These people are politicians, senior civil servants, military and police big shots. The idea is to prevent the people at the center of power from profiting from their official position.

Transparency International ranks Thailand #78 on the Corruption Perception Index for 2010– squeezed between Serbia and Malawi.

What do corrupt officials do with their cash? If there is a huge amount, it is difficult to spend without attracting attention. Not to mention that a new villa or an airplane has to be reported on the list of assets and the money for it must be accounted for.

They could bank it. But then there is a paper trail and they have to report it in Thailand, and someone might raise an eyebrow over the odd ten million dollar deposit by an official who on paper makes about $2,000 a month. Or the official might put the money in the name of his maid or driver, a best friend or distant kin. All of those alternatives have their own set of risk. Mainly a maid with ten million in an offshore account might ask for a raise or two.

The other alternative is to bag the cash, and keep it at home. That’s a safe place, right? The problem is a lot of cash takes a lot of room. It can fill an entire room.

Servants working in such a house notice these things. Open a door to a room and find wall to wall stacks of bank notes makes dusting a delight. You wouldn’t want another job. In fact you might brag to your friends. And may be some of your friends know people who are criminals and before you know someone is planning a heist.

A man’s home is his castle by English tradition. As far as I’ve been able to determine English tradition is little followed in this part of the world. But a recent case involving a senior civil servant, suggests that for some Thais home banking has an entirely new meaning.

The permanent secretary at the Transport Ministry Mr. Supoj Saplom, who also serves on the board of directors of Thai Airways International and Mass Rapid Transit Authority, has found himself in the public limelight. On the evening of 12th November, robbers rolled up to his house while he and his wife were away.

The crew of robbers apparently forced their way inside and made off with cash. Here’s where things get interesting. Mr. Supoj apparently talked with the police and reported the robbery once he arrived back home to find his maid tied up. He had little choice as his maid spilled the bean to the cops as the house was broken in. It’s likely that Supoj must have called the police to downplay the cash amount. His wife also asked to the media not to make a big fuss about the heist.

The senior civil servant initially told the police the robbers had made off with one million baht. There are unconfirmed reports (that hasn’t stop the local press from reporting them or me from blogging about them), that he phoned back and said, it was three million baht and finally called again saying it was five million baht that had been lost. You have this vision of a man trying to estimate what was taken and finding it hard to come up with a firm number.

Since this is an important VIP the police immediately set out after the thieves. The CCTV camera had caught their images (though they were disguised) and their vehicle. Soon enough the first couple of robbers were arrested. People who steal from VIPs almost always get caught, and it makes you wonder why they continue to defy such odds. Clearly these guys were in a different class from Willie Sutton who would have evaded police for at least another 48 hours.

The Thai robbers had there own version of how much cash they stole ranging from 9 million to 200 million baht. To make it really interesting one of the robbers said they hadn’t made much of a dent in the bags of cash they found. The robbers estimated there was between 700 million to one billion baht in cash inside the house. What it comes down to is no one is sure how much the robbers stole,whether the amount recover by the cops is all or just part of what they stole, or how much cash was in the house.

A couple of days ago a Thai language newspaper reported that16 million was recovered and the police confirmed at least 100 million was stolen. On Thursday 24th November, the Bangkok Post said the robbers ran off with at least 50 million baht. One heads swims with large numbers. It may be that the robbers, cops and Supoj haven’t yet found out the exact scope of the robbery, who was behind the heist and how much loot was left behind.

Cases like this one raise enough questions to keep film makers, pundits, novelists, scholars, bankers, political scientists, security operations personnel, prosecutors, investigators, independent agencies and politicians in business for years. Mr. Supoj has been transferred to an inactive position in the Prime Minister’s Office (it’s confusing, I know, but trust me this is where most of these cases end).

The lesson from the Supoj caper won’t be lost on a globalized world of criminals. Forget about what Willie Sutton taught all those years before. Get a copy of the latest Transparency International Index Report, find a country with nice beaches, good climate that is reasonably corrupt. Get a list of the senior politicians and civil servants. Figure out the lay out of their luxury villas. Search on Google maps for the ones with little or no security. That means a stakeout. Locate the surveillance cameras, know how to disable them without letting those who watch them know they’ve been tampered with. Wait until the boss and his family are away for a wedding, funeral or holiday, disable the cameras and other security devices, tie up the maid and steal the cash. Chances are the victim won’t make Mr. Supoj’s mistake and call the police. They can see that approach is bound to backfire. But it would be a good idea to get out of the country as soon as possible.

Perhaps the only way to combat corruption is to give the modern day Willie Suttons a green light to strip away the ill-gotten gains of the corrupt. Let the bank robbers clean up government by cleaning out the corrupt. At least with crooks like Willie Sutton you have an admirable degree of honesty as to what they do and why they do it.

Police interrogation of the initial set of robbers indicated they had been carefully planning the heist. They had rented a nearby apartment and went on stakeout.  They said, Mr. Supoj was “unusually rich,” so he must have taken it “from the people.” But they were more Willie Suttons than Robin Hoods, as their is no evidence they were handing out cash to the poor.

There are thieves and then there are thieves and sometimes it is difficult to tell the good guys from the bad one. In this neck of the global woods, honestly rarely extends to the class of politicians and civil servants gorging at the expense of the public.

We can kill two birds with one stone. We make it much more dangerous to be corrupt and we allow professional thieves to retire and leave the rest of us alone. Of course, the corrupt won’t take this lightly. I’d recommend buying shares in international security agencies that advise the ultra rich how to protect themselves, property and cash from the likes of the Willie Suttons of the world. In that case, you as a shareholder make off with the cash that a wannabe Willies would otherwise take.

So, I fly up to Jo’burg to take part in celebrations for Nobel-laureate Nadine Gordimer’s 88^th birthday. The taxi-driver, who took me and the group of writers I was with, was pulled over and extorted in central Jo’burg. Having an enormous man with muscles rippling up the back of his shaved head climb into the front of your mini-bus and tells your driver to get out and hand over cash does that to one. The driver, a sensible and experienced man, did so at once. He peeled off notes three times before Muscle Head let us go. It made me feel dirty, knowing that it is so easy to be rolled over and ripped off.

But be that as it may, last Friday was the day the Mail & Guardian did the time warp. They blacked out of a story about arms, secrets and lies that they had been prevented from publishing. The reason? The journalists were threatened with arrest for publishing a story that was clearly, fairly and squarely in the public interest. The censored pages were an instant flashback to the 1980s when censorship by a vicious and paranoid state, aware that power was slipping from its bloodied hands, reached a feverish pitch.

The laws governing freedom of expression and the press were draconian then. They were designed to silence the public and to keep secret what officials were doing. That was all swept aside in the euphoria of the early nineties, and freedom of expression – the right to the truth, I suppose – was enshrined in the constitution. We all should have lived happily ever after but there was to be a twist in the ending of this tale.

It was called The Arms Deal. Despite a lot of complicated detail, the story is mind-numbingly simple in essence. Senior party and government fleeced a trusting and hopeful nation by ordering obsolete, unnecessary weapons at inflated prices. Kickbacks from arms manufacturers were brokered and money flowed into Swiss bank accounts. It has felt a bit crazy for a while. They know they did it.  We know they did it. They know we know they did it. We know they know we know they did it…

It’s enough already because the arms deal, a dark, vampiric twin has shadowed South Africa’s democracy since it was brokered. The arms deal, I’ve heard it rumoured, as far back as 1992. This venal deal was struck between nasty businessmen representing European governments and arms manufacturers, and the revolutionary wideboys whom they’d assiduously courted with the single malt and Cuban cigars.

It’s almost twenty years that this malignant party-spoiler has lurked. Most of us – the fleeced – wished that they – the blustering fleecers – would go away. That they would go to jail without passing Go, without collecting more money. That was too much to ask, as became clear after Shabir Shaik went to jail briefly on behalf of everyone. Those within government and the prosecuting authorities who worked to prosecute those involved were sidelined or silenced.

The garments of ethics and trust are fragile. The high temperature wash required for money laundering shrunk the rainbow-nation garments we all invested in. They no longer stretched over the plump, governmental bellies. Hubris, however, has seen the politicians clinging to power, clogging the arteries of public life.

There have been frantic fig leaves of spin, but all of us looking at this tawdry spectacle; we can see that the emperor is naked. So are many of the courtiers, the jesters, the pageboys, the lords and ladies in waiting. And after such a long, sustained journey on the gravy train, they are not looking good.

Beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and from where I am looking it is not pretty. It is also too late for a cover-up. No amount of nipping and tucking of the truth can hide the extant of the rot. It is this knowledge that is behind the ANC’s sustained attempts to push through the Protection of Information Bill, the ‘Secrecy Bill’, through parliament. This legislation, a toxic mixture of the dystopian visions of Kafka and Orwell, will hide naked greed and corruption under a cloak of secrecy and ‘classified’ information. It will criminalise those bring governmental wrongdoing, corruption or plain ineptitude to the public’s attention.

There will be no recourse. This legislation does not even have the flimsy protection of a ‘public interest’ clause to protect the body politic. The Secrecy Bill is the legislative equivalent of a date rape – an intimate assault on a trusting public by a democratically elected government.

I’m getting ready to dive over to Turkey at the beginning of December and have just returned from a shopping trip to Manchester to pick up supplies. Apart from anything else Marmite has to be purchased for deprived expats. Something else I bought, for me, was a copy of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. It’s been years and years since I last read it and now I both want and need to do so again.

In return for giving a talk about my own books, the Pera Palas Hotel in İstanbul is letting me stay one night in Agatha Christie’s old room. This is the room where she wrote, at least in part, Murder on the Orient Express and also where she liked to stay while in transit between England and the Middle East in the 1920s and 1930s. So I’m very honoured and very fortunate. The Pera Palas, which was built to accommodate passengers from the Orient Express, is a legendary hotel which, in the past, has played host to luminaries like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Queen Elizabeth II, King Edward VIII, Ernest Hemingway, Mata Hari, Jackie Onassis, Greta Garbo and King Zog of Albania.

Now a scruff from the East End of London will join their number. Who knew? However, arranging such a thing has not been particularly straightforward and I have a lot of friends and aquaintances to thank for helping me to get this organised. Because of course I do have an ulterior motive too. I’m a crime writer, what do you expect?

I’ve always wanted to write a ‘traditional’ locked room mystery featuring Çetin İkmen, set somewhere very prominent and atmospheric. So now I have an opportunity to give that a go, I’m going to launch myself into it for all I am worth.

I have a basic plot and a cast of characters and it is my intention to start this book in the hotel, in Agatha Christie’s bedroom. God forbid that I should ever compare myself in any way to Miss Christie but I think that she’d find this notion not unpleasing. After all it’s not as if I’m in competition with her work. I’m not. Çetin İkmen and Hercule Poirot could hardly be less alike now could they? Poirot is a most particular fellow with some real obsessive compulsive traits going on. İkmen, like me, would hardly notice if his office was covered in volcanic ash.

But whatever happens, this İstanbul trip will be like no other I have ever made before and I look forward to seeing just what it will bring. Now let me get back to my book…

There are supposed to be more people  speakers of Klingon than Icelandic, but somehow I doubt that there are a great many native Klingon speakers around, while there are around a third of a million Icelanders who do speak this strange throwback to the saga age as their mother tongue.

It’s very much a minority language – and with the arrival of cable TV and the internet, Icelandic has probably changed more in the last two decades than it changed in the previous two centuries.

Norse settlers brought their language with them when they arrived in the ninth century, supposedly as refugees from the political upheaval in Norway where the king was making life tough for them. They also brought with them slaves and concubines from as far afield as the Baltic, Ireland and southern Europe, while more than likely also making slaves of the (possibly Hebridean or Irish) settlers who were there before them and of whom only the most fleeting glimpses remain.

Iceland’s new masters were in touch with the outside world, sailing to Norway and elsewhere to trade and raid as the mood took them, and even making pilgrimages to Rome once new arrivals with crosses managed to clear out the old gods the settlers had brought with them.

So while Icelanders are something of a mixed bunch in terms of genes and DNA, the long isolation that began after the Sturlunga age ensured that the language remained unchanged for centuries during the dark years as the kings of first Norway and then Denmark owned this barren island that they didn’t lose much sleep over.

Danish was spoken as the official language and ‘better’ people would speak Danish and even ‘Danishised’ patronymics into surnames. When I first arrived in Iceland at the end of the 70s, older people didn’t generally speak English. These people were the generation that had grown up under independence, but still learned Danish as a second language and travelled to Denmark to study or serious medical treatment. As Danish was seen as the language of the former colonial power, albeit a relatively benign one, there was always an element of friction. Danish wasn’t popular. Textbooks, manuals and catalogues were in Danish, so people spoke Danish out of necessity but didn’t have to like it.

Occasionally I’d try out some new piece of vocabulary and find myself with a finger being wagged sorrowfully at me.

‘Usss. Don’t say that. That’s Danish slang,’ would be the reprimand.

Not a huge amount of Danish made it into Icelandic. Admittedly, some did – words such as bremsur and kúpling for brakes and clutch.

But then English happened and everything changed. While Icelandic didn’t absorb that much Danish, there was a sudden influx of loan words from English that is still gathering pace. The end of the 1980s coincided with a generation that had given up listening during Danish lessons at school, preferred to travel to the US to study and had English-language cable TV after years of the single channel of Icelandic state television.

I’ve heard it suggested that the teaching profession is largely responsible for the flood of English loan words, with teachers coming home after their years of study overseas and instead of relying on clunky neologisms, simply threw in English or American terms and found that this set them apart from the stay-at-homes who hadn’t been to foreign universities.

Whether or not that’s the case, I couldn’t say, but Iceland’s media needs to shoulder some responsibility for keeping the trend alive and well. Radio presenters in particular speak a language that would not have been understood a generation ago and which still leaves some of us shaking our heads in bewilderment as the percentage of English casually slung into conversation that sometimes leaves you wondering which language they are actually speaking.

On the other hand , there are serious efforts being made to preserve Icelandic, with all of the problems that face a mediaeval language hauled into the 20^th century. There are official committees that decide if names fit the rules and have the power to say yet or no if you want to give a child a new or unusual name, as well as others that decide with a mixed level of success on new words.

The short, sweet, easy words tend to make it through into mainstream use. A computer is tölva, a telephone is sími, but a banana is a…  banani, even though there is undoubtedly a carefully considered and probably fairly ponderous neologism that would be used in a government directive on fruit imports.

The net result is that everyday spoken Icelandic and the necessarily precise language of law and government are diverging at a surprisingly rapid rate.

Facebook and the internet in general have thrown up a wealth of incongruous terms and while a changing language is the sign of a living language, you have to wonder just how long it will be before Icelandic is consigned to the dustbin of dying languages kept alive in intensive care under the awful spectre of shiny modern business English and office jargon taking over the world.

Last week was the birthday of the poet Jónas Hallgrímsson, and the 16^th of November, marks the ‘Icelandic Language Day.’

How Jónas, who spent much of his life in Denmark and who campaigned for resistance to Danish rule until his accidental death in 1845 at a tragically young age, would react to the wholesale adulteration of the language he wrote in is difficult to say.

Mind you, Jónas was no mean coiner of neologisms himself, having translated scientific texts into Icelandic and having no choice but to invent new terms in the process. But I’ll bet he would have come up with a smarter word than bjúgaldin for banana.

This being my first contribution to the blog I figure the polite thing to do is introduce myself and tell you some about me. My name is John Lantigua and I am the author of seven suspense novels, the last four set in Miami and featuring the Cuban-American private eye Willie Cuesta.

In creating Willie I have tapped a bit of my own background. My father was born in Cuba, my mother in Puerto Rico and they met in New York City, where I was born. When I was four we moved from a Spanish-speaking barrio in NYC  to a part of New Jersey where no one spoke Spanish. I was told to forget Spanish and learn English, which I did, and I was educated only in English. But I have spent almost my entire professional career, both as a journalist and a novelist, going back to streets where Spanish is spoken, both in the U.S. and elsewhere. I started my journalism career covering poor neighborhoods in New England, populated largely by African Americans and Puerto Ricans. I later moved to Mexico where I lived for almost five years –mostly in the southern state of Oaxaca, known for its indigenous culture. For two years, I ran a camping business taking tourists through the mountains, and then I moved to Oaxaca City. During that time I learned just how badly the poor could be treated in Mexico, so that years later when serious and widespread  drug, gang and kidnapping violence started there I was not much surprised. By 1982 I had returned to journalism, covering the civil wars in Central America. I lived in Honduras for most of one year and then about five years in Sandinista Nicaragua. Whenever President Daniel Ortega gave a press conference journalists would be summoned two hours early so that equipment –tape recorders, cameras, video cameras –could be checked for explosives. Since I worked with only a pen and notebook I was allowed right in. I was then left with a long wait and I started bringing books to read. That is when I started reading suspense novels. I became particularly fond of Ross MacDonald’s books, starring p.i. Lew Archer. (I’m still hooked on them.) One day I decided I knew enough about Central America and enough about suspense novels to attempt one, which may make me the only author whose literary career owes its beginnings to Daniel Ortega. I wrote my first two novels, “Heat Lightning” and Burn Season” while living in Nicaragua. The first dealt with hostilities in El Salvador –and was nominated for Edgar Award–and the latter with Nicaragua. My third book, “Twister,” set in Texas and partly in the world of Mexican-Americans, was completed during a six –month sojourn in Bangkok. But I was soon back in the Spanish-speaking world, as a reporter for The Miami Herald, based in Miami. At one point I covered the Cuban exile community in South Florida, which led to the first two Willie Cuesta books, “Player’s Vendetta” and “The Ultimate Havana.” For the past nine years I have worked as a Miami-based reporter for “The Palm Beach Post” newspaper. I have reported for The Post from Argentina—during which I researched the third novel in the series “The Lady from Buenos Aires”—and also from Colombia, which led to my last book, “On Hallowed Ground,” released earlier this year. I’ve also covered a good number of the world’s catastrophes over the past decade, from the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and  the 2010 Haiti earthquake. But for the purposes of fiction I have been drawn again and again to Latin America. It has been my passion. So many crimes committed in Latin America over the past decades –including large political crimes with many victims–have gone unpunished due to misuse of power, corruption and dysfunctional justice systems. Whenever I sit down  to write I’m trying to straighten out the record—identify who really did what to whom and make sure they get punished. As I’ve told my friends, I could write a novel about each one of the Latin American and Caribbean countries. They all have skeletons in their closets, skeletons still clamoring for justice. I set my books in Miami because so many people have come here from Latin American and the Caribbean  trying to escape the nightmares in their countries. Oh, yes, it’s true that many have come for purely economic reasons, but I’m much more interested in those who have arrived here running for their lives. And there are many. Those are ones with ghosts and they are the ones that grab me. So in my blog entries I’ll be writing about those people — and those ghosts.

This is a crime fiction blog. So we ought to shoot straight. Here it is:
there are lots of crappy detective novels out there. Which is why I say
thank God for Arkady Renko.

The hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s excellent series set in the Soviet Union
and, later, Russia (with stops in Cuba, Ukraine, Germany and Alaska) is the
closest today’s crime fiction gets to Chandler’s idea that “down these mean
streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” In many ways, Cruz Smith is
the closest among current crime writers to the keen yet elliptical style of
plot development perfected by Chandler. (In Chandler’s case, that was, as
he admitted, largely because he didn’t really keep track of the plot; I
suspect that’s not the issue with Cruz Smith.)

[Note: To qualify my lead paragraph, I ought to quote Chandler once again:
“There are as many bad literary novels as bad detective novels. The bad
literary novels just don’t get published.” That’s not true anymore, as
anyone who’s ever tossed a copy of Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America”
at the wall will vouch. Still detective fiction retains that reputation
among certain circles, and indeed a lot of crap still washes through the
sleuthing sluices.]

I’ve read all the Renko novels, as well as some of Cruz Smith’s standalone
books. From the perspective of a writer, I’ve observed with enormous
pleasure the elements that make Renko work so well, and of course the
manner in which Cruz Smith puts them to effect.

A key to this is Renko’s voice. His apparently deep disillusion is
something of a trick. Renko’s father was a Stalinist general and as an
investigator he’s constantly measuring himself against that old bastard –
and regretting the similarities he finds. This continuity between the old
USSR and the new FSU grounds Renko. It’s why he’s not a drunk like some of
his colleagues, and why he isn’t corrupt like the others: he’s a hard-edged
idealist, like his father, who happens to have inherited the humanity of
his mother.

Cruz Smith’s Russia is the perfect backdrop for Renko’s tawdry shining
armor. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cruz Smith has painted the
breakdown of society better than any nonfiction or journalism I’ve read.

It’s what I’ve tried to do with my Palestinian crime novels. A place
over-covered by journalists, like Gaza or Moscow, might seem to have little
new to yield for a fiction writer. But the element overlooked by journalism
and nonfiction – which sees everything in terms of politics – is that
politics in such places is merely the thin end of a gangster wedge which
must reach to every corner of society and go to sordid lengths to maintain
control. Thus any murder Renko uncovers (such as the whore/dancer of “Three
Stations,” his latest) reaches directly to the upper echelons of the
government, the security establishment or (in the case of “Three Stations”)
the new oligarchic economy.

That’s what makes Renko so dangerous that the bad guys want to stop him.

And that’s an element detective writers ought to note: when your sleuth is
after the truth, are the villains trying to stop him merely to avoid prison
for their personal misdeeds? Or are they protecting a corrupt, monolithic
system that our hero will uncover and, in his small way, smother around the
edges?

This kind of context is what makes Renko the most compelling detective in
contemporary crime fiction.

Courtroom dramas are in a little bit like science fiction or romance. There are cult followers who follow the increasingly (to me, a prosaic crime writer rooted in science, motive and evidence) weird narrative twists that take place.

John Grisham is the undisputed king of the fictional courtroom drama and his books capture the socially agreed voodoo that is necessary for a justice system to work: the rigmarole of the robes, the standing and rising for judges, the wood paneling, the gavel, the hand on the bible stuff, the swearing to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth – as if that were remotely possible. All this ritual makes us believe the justice system is rational and fair and real in fiction.

Reality is altogether another matter and, seeing as I am not writing a book at the moment, it has diverted me  from the plausible world of fictional justice. The cases currently before bemused-looking judges presiding over South African courts belong more to the world of Stephen King than jurisprudence. For example, there’s the case of the high court judge murdered in his luxury apartment Cape Town. His hell-hath-no-fury wife is on trial his brutal slaying alongside with a young man who seems to have confused the roles of toyboy/handyman with hitman. The presiding judge is looking nervy. My advice to him would be that he buys his own wife flowers on the way home.

There’s also been the unseemly spectacle of the ANC Old League ‘disciplining’ (the language of the dominatrix!) the head of the Youth League, that irredeemably tasteless dresser, Julius Malema. He is now out on a populist limb, but like that other badly dressed, pompous, language-mangler, Arnold Schwarzenegger, I have this feeling that ‘he’ll be back.’

But it is a Durban case that has had me riveted. The Lotter case involves matricide, patricide, cults and tokoloshes. It is unfolding with the kind of prosaic weirdness that must make the judge wonder if he has heard right. The Lotter siblings, Hardus and his angelic-looking sister, Nicolette, have admitted to gruesome killing of their parents. Their dispute is that it was murder. They claim the killings were done was under the hypnotic influence of one Matthew Naidoo, the self-proclaimed ‘third son of god.’ This is one the aspects of the case that has perplexed me. If Jesus was the first Son of God and Matthew from Pineview was the third, then who is the second Son of God? The Durban High Court has not addressing this particular theological detail, but you will excuse them. Such bizarre ramblings have been presented as evidence.

For example the judge had to sit through testimony, as reported by IOL, that ‘murder accused Nicolette Lotter had been spiritually raped by a tokoloshe as a result of witchcraft by her domestic worker… and she was tormented when she was around. Nicolette started having nightmares, found dead frogs, chicken feet and snake skins at her house.’

There is not even a semblance of the search for a rational explanation or seeking treatment for hallucinations. I can just imagine the lawyer-client consultation in which they decided that the witchcraft/tokoloshe defence was the way to go rather than the ordinary, everyday insanity defence.

Ms Lotter is a wide-eyed innocent who admits to knifing her pleading mother to death. She went on to say under oath that she ‘could not focus on her studies and decided to get help as she was desperate and scared of her domestic worker. She went to eight ministries but no one could help her… Eventually she met Mathew Naidoo and “this thing left me” when they were intimate. “I was so grateful that this thing had gone and was not raping me anymore. I was relieved, I thought that this guy was so godly, so good.”

So far I have heard of no psychiatric assessments, but a ‘pastor’ was called. This pastor, it was reported, ‘told of certain manifestations that happened when evil forces took hold of people and how these forces could be driven out when ordered to do so by an authority…The pastor said this was in the realm of the supernatural He said that when people were possessed, they believed that whatever they were doing was the right thing to do.’

Underlying this peculiar mish-mash of childish fears and a complete rejection of the rational are the prejudices of one version of white, suburban South Africa that has melded racism, terror of the tokoloshe, belief in witchcraft and satanic possession with the fundamentalist versions of Christianity that have found such fertile soil in South Africa.

It is a lot of violent hocus-pocus. Dish out some psychiatric care and give me science any day.