In Asia, the idea of face is not unlike the concept in the West of dignity or respect or honor. Add guns to the torque of argument, honor and liquor and the probability of shots fired rise dramatically. Pinker concludes in The Better Angels of our Nature, page 99, that: “The essence of a culture of honor is that it does not sanction predatory or instrumental violence, but only retaliation after an insult or other mistreatment.” The issue of fitting the culture of guns with the culture of honor raises a number of issues, such as how available guns should be, the kind of weapons that should be allowed in civilian hands, and the role of the government in regulating guns in places where an insult to honor is avenged with violence.

In Thailand, on 27^th December, a policeman in the southern province of Phatthalung pulled his gun and killed six other police officers. The gunman and his fellow officers had been engaged in a drinking session in the border patrol police camp canteen. Someone must have said something that didn’t go down well. The gunman then walked 200 meters outside the canteen and turned his assault rifle on himself. The investigators’ theory is that a ‘personal conflict’ led to the shootings. That is a Thai code phrase for an insult to honor.

Police are trained (in theory) in the psychology of diffusing personal conflicts, and convincing someone with a gun to drop it.  Using lethal force is restricted in Thailand, as in most places.

The point is that Thai cops are products of their culture, and a face culture is an honor culture. Is this true for other cops around the world? Their attitude toward guns, threats, violence, insults and honor differ according to tradition, history and attitude. When the cork flies out of the bottle in an honor culture, it is best the man this happens to does not have a weapon. When cops are involved in an insult to honor, supposedly their training kicks in and they exercise more self-control. That training has its limits.  Cops inside an honor culture have same human emotions that flare up during drinking sessions. An insult, a slight, a roll of the eyes may be all that is needed to trigger the lethal response. Without guns having been present, it is highly doubtful anyone in that canteen would have died.

No one suggests after such a massacre that the police should be disarmed. Notably, in England most of the police are not armed, and the murder rate is significantly lower than places like Thailand where the police are armed. Yet, a fairly significant number of the population there also carry guns.

More difficult is the private citizen in an honor culture who is allowed by law to carry a handgun. The Americans are undergoing a debate about expanding the right to carry concealed weapons, and to allow someone with a gun permit to carry that weapon anywhere in the United States. More than 3.5 million Americans in 40 States have permits to carry concealed firearms. Keep in mind there are approximately 100 million guns owned by Americans. Remember that on your next visit to the States only a small percentage of them have anywhere near the experience of my fellow blogger Jim Thompson with a handling guns. The overwhelming number of gun owners are like pilots who’ve logged a couple of hours in a small plane seated next to an experienced instructor and think that experience makes them Ace fighter pilots.

Some states have more lax gun permit regulations and even more lax rules to revoke a permit if the gun owner has committed a crime. The New York Times reports about a cyclist in Asheville, North Carolina, who had an argument with a motorist. Words were exchanged and Diez, the gun holder, pulled his licensed handgun and shot at the cyclist. The bullet slammed through the cyclist’s helmet. Diez later pleaded guilty to a felony count of assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill. Pinker also notes the Southern United States has had a long tradition of an honor culture and self-help justice.

The proponents who argue for expanding the right for civilians to arm themselves with concealed weapons say it will allow the ordinary law-abiding citizen to protect herself or himself. The idea is that the bad guys are armed and the innocent are not; that, if the bad guys had knowledge that the innocent person might have a concealed weapon, they’d think twice about committing a crime against them. Also, they point out, an armed citizenry is the first line of defense against tyranny in government.

That is the deterrence argument that propels many to support legislation authorizing widespread gun ownership. There are a couple of problems with defending this position.

First, America is one of the few places where there is no historical consensus that the monopoly of violent force should be exclusively reserved to officers of the state. Unlike Europeans, the United States never succeeded in disarming its citizens before the citizens took over the government. Most of other countries in the West (they are democracies, too) do not sanction widespread gun ownership among the civilian population. They have a different history and tradition of gun ownership. And, in European countries, fewer people die of gunshot wounds than in America.

Second, it conflates democracy with gun ownership; that armed citizens are the best defense against a State turning rogue against its citizens. Americans have a culture of distrust of government that is closer to the attitudes found in Third World countries run by dictators. The reality is that guns are artifacts from the analog past. Modern governments have multiple digital tools to oppress and repress their citizens and these weapons of intimidation are more widespread and potent than guns. CCTV cameras, predators (soon to appear in your neighborhood), data mining your email, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other social media, acquiring your health, financial and education records. A population armed with handguns is no match for the arsenal that the world of 1984 brings.

Third, the idea of “protection” against the bad guys is always one that has everyone nodding their heads in agreement. However, the statistics show that the self-defense theory is not a solid argument, especially in an honor culture. The reality is that human beings are emotional creatures who are quick to anger. Alcohol and drugs makes them unstable. Diez, the fireman from North Carolina who almost killed the cyclist, is not uncommon. The cyclist wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t threaten Diez. He had an argument. Diez felt insulted, his ego was bruised and he tried to kill a man over “honor.”

I’d be willing to bet that if you graphed the percentage of people who have used a handgun to protect themselves against a criminal (the self-defense claim), it would be a much smaller percentage than the percentage of people who used a gun because they felt a slight to their honor. By increasing gun ownership, I would anticipate a rise in the number of homicides where the underlying motive was to avenge the loss of face, the slur, personal argument, or the insult. People kill each other over honor. Give them licenses to carry handguns and Diez-type cases will increase. Diez lacked self-control in this situation. This is not abnormal. Expand gun ownership and that will be a good test of exactly how normal the Diez case will prove to be.

Thailand has more than double the United States’ annual death by firearms rate.

Anyone who has looked at the debate on gun ownership understands that statistics are often unreliable, and are often used inappropriately, such as failing to compare like with like conditions, traditions, histories and omitting crucial variables that make for complexity. Scholars have cautioned against concluding that widespread gun ownership causes higher murder rates. Russia, for example, has stringent gun control laws yet, between 1998 and 2004, its gun-related murder rate was four times that of the United States. Could an entrenched honor culture in Russia offer insight into the higher murder rate by firearms? The same scholars insist there is no correlation between the strength of gun laws, availability of guns and the homicide rate. Let’s admit that evidence of such correlation isn’t available. What is left unaddressed is the role of the honor culture.

Another killing in Thailand this week bears an emotionally twisted thread that links it to the Diez type of case. An arrest warrant was issued for a member of parliament, Khanchit Thapsuwan, who allegedly followed a rival politician into the toilet of a petrol station and shot him in the head eight times. He left ten .40 caliber casings scattered on the floor of the restroom where the shooting took place. There also were witnesses. Given this is Thailand, the police issued a statement, “If we knew his hideout, we would arrest him without heeding his social status.”

In Thailand the gunman’s social status is a significant factor that in some cases trumps the evidence of murder. But, in Khanchit’s case, with the social status of shooter and victim being approximately equal, the gunman is in deep trouble. What is the theory of why Khanchit shot the victim? They were political rivals and according to the Bangkok Post, “Whenever the two met, they were often heard making sarcastic remarks against each other.”

Two days after the killing, MP Khanchit showed up for a session in the Thai Parliament. A decision has yet to be made on the question of whether parliamentary immunity will be waived.

The final consideration in the argument to expand gun ownership is the costs. Gunshot victims place a significant burden on the health care resources of a country. One scholar, Phillip J. Cook, estimated that gun violence costs Americans alone $100 billion annually.” That would fund a lot of schools, clinics, bridges, roads and student loan programs. With that kind of money, a decent health care system could be universally available to all citizens.

Honor. Face. Dignity. Governments would do well to closely study the correlation of these cultural factors and how they factor into gun-related homicides before they go about authorizing the carrying of guns in the larger civilian population. Dismantling the culture of honor might, in the long run, be the best way to reduce gun-related murder rates. But that approach wouldn’t sell to voters. Arming voters does sell for those standing for election. Politics is a clash over “honor” and sometimes, as with the aforementioned recent murder in Thailand allegedly by an MP, the end result is the delivery of eight rounds to the head.

Georges Simenon wrote “L’Affaire Saint Fiacre” (“Maigret Goes Home”) in 1932. It’s one of the first of the 103 novels involved Inspector Jules Maigret. You can tell from books like this that the writer was a bit of a bastard. And we ought to be grateful for that.

The opening of “Saint Fiacre” (I’m going to look at the opening, rather than the opening paragraph, because the paragraphs are short, staccato) is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice:

“It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…”

Maigret raised himself on his elbows, making the mattress creak, and while he was looking in astonishment at the skylight cut in the sloping roof, the voice went on:

“Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind him when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the backwater where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” going back to his childhood village.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations–for Saint-Fiacre alone there are a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions–that it’s easy to think of him with the familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenager skipping down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

Simenon’s first editor wrote to him: “Your books aren’t real police novels. They aren’t scientific. They don’t play by the rules. There’s no love story in them. There’re no sympathetic characters. You won’t have a thousand readers.” Well, 550 million copies printed shows what that guy knew about potential sales. But he was right about the way the Belgian writer’s books worked. No real good guys and nothing–certainly not love–untainted by the grasping desire to escape a society of dying traditions and internal immigration.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair begins, then, with Maigret waking up in the inn of the village of Saint-Fiacre. At first he doesn’t recognize where he is. As it dawns upon him, he’s flooded with a heavy sense of darkness. He has returned to the village where he grew up to investigate a crime which is about to happen. (His office in the Paris police headquarters received a note saying that “A crime will be committed at the Saint-Fiacre Church during the first mass of the days of the dead.”)

As he strolls through the village, people glance at him curiously. They seem to recognize him, but can’t place the face of the son of the former steward at the local château, a face that left their community 35 years previously to pursue a career in the capital. All other traces of Maigret’s family are gone from the village and he wanders it sensing somehow that its very stones are unwelcoming.

When characters eventually recognize him or when he owns up to being from Saint-Fiacre, they seem to wonder what the hell could’ve brought him back. It’s clear they don’t trust him. There’s no hale slap on the back or curiosity about what he’s been doing all these years. Simenon captures the isolation and suspicion of the French peasant for the big city perfectly. What these people are signaling to Maigret–and what he instinctively realizes–is that he may have been born in Saint-Fiacre, but the moment he left he ceased to belong to it. They owe him nothing. He’s on his own.

If you’ve ever been back to a place where you weren’t happy as a kid, a place from which you wanted to escape, you’ll feel as though you’re reading your diary, not a detective novel.

At the first mass, the Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies of a heart attack. With his crime delivered as promised, Maigret uncovers a clue at the scene and tracks the killer. But it’s really his own despondent sense of alienation that’s at the heart of this novel, and it’s there right from the first paragraph.

–

I grew up in Appalachian Kentucky, the heart of the gun culture. I don’t remember the first time I shot a gun, but my age was a single digit. For my tenth birthday present, I got my first firearm, an Iver Johnson .20-gauge single-barreled shotgun. I worked for Uncle Sam for a while and get the disability checks to prove it. I’m an experienced hunter. I don’t know how many guns I’ve owned over time—it’s that many—and off the top of my head, just counting fully-automatic weapons (now scratching head), I can think of: MAC-10, M-16, M-60, H&K MP-5, AK-47. There are probably others. The point is that I know a bit about guns, enough to give some advice and recognize stupidities. For instance, don’t buy a Chinese AK-47. The selector switch doesn’t always work well, and you may want to fire a single round, but the damned thing may decide it wants to burn up half a clip before it decides to stop firing. Get a Russian AK. Bury it in mud. Drive nails with it. Whatever. It will keep working.

I’m not advocating gun ownership. In fact, I think the vast majority of people would be better off without them, because they don’t know what they’re doing and stand a far greater chance of hurting themselves or someone unintended than defending themselves or loved ones. I doubt the average gun owner could even manage to shoot a rabbit for dinner. As far as the U.S. goes, however, I find the idea of limiting U.S. gun ownership ludicrous. The reason: Americans own 88.8 guns per 100 citizens. Do you think all those people will relinquish those guns? Many or most even refuse to register them if they can, considering it an infringement of their privacy. It’s a classic case of closing the barn door after the cows got out.

From what source are all these gun owners being informed about gun safety and their usage, especially in emergency situations, such as a home intrusion? I don’t have stats to back me up, but I would give long odds on a large bet that it isn’t through firearms safety courses, but through fiction: books and movies. They make it all look so easy. Even the shooting novice manages to save the day (cop hands gun to protagonist, “You know how to use this, right?”) I got news. It ain’t easy.

My biggest pet peeve is when a gangster turns his gun hand over, palm facing down, and engages in a battle with his pistol (usually referred to as a “gat” in these instances), and actually hits what he’s aiming at. They’re just not meant to be used that way and it’s not impossible, but making something already difficult that much harder. Very few people involved in violent confrontation don’t surge with adrenaline, which makes them shake and unable to concentrate on the simplest tasks. That’s why so many armed confrontations end up with dead bystanders. The only way to defeat this physical impediment and brainlock is through muscle memory. Shooters that burn up thousands of rounds on the practice range overcome this. Their minds and bodies tell them what to do as if they had wills of their own. If you want to own a firearm but don’t feel the need to become proficient with it, run a combat obstacle course. Every time a target pops up and you accidentally shoot a good guy, imagine your child’s face on the target.

Shiny pistols, chrome or nickel-plated, irk me. Whatever the NRA may tell you, pistols are seldom hunting weapons. They’re made for killing people. Even in the dark, there is almost always some ambient light, and it will reflect off those bright metallic surfaces. Here comes that home invader you’ve been waiting for. Why don’t you wrap yourself in tin foil and wear a silver hat to announce yourself and give him a better target? Buy a blued or matt black gun. Most handgun altercations take place within seven feet of the two combatants, by the way, and because of nerves, even at that short distance, neither can often manage to put a bullet in the other. And God forbid you let Bad Guy within arm’s reach of you. You’re probably getting your cherry busted in the violence game, he’s probably not, and he’s going to stick your gun up your ass.

High-powered, snub nose revolvers: Firearm safety teaches us that we should always use ear protection when practicing. On film, guns seem so quiet, just pop like firecrackers. Those short barrels won’t absorb sound or recoil. Take your chrome-plated, .357 magnum snub-nosed revolver to the practice range. Remove your ear protection and burn up half a box of ammo. Three days later, when you regain the feeling in your shooting arm and start to be able to hear again, you’ll head straight to the gun store and beg the owner to take it back. And that’s from using it outside. Picture that roar multiplied if you were to fire it in the confines of your home. Kiss those eardrums goodbye.

Many people buy nice, new pistols for home protection but never bother to shoot more than a couple of clips through them, just to play with their new toy. I got some news for you sunshine. That brand spanking-new, slick Smith & Wesson 9mm that you blew a few rounds through last year may well get sticky through disuse and hang up on you, a round jammed in the ejection chamber. So there you stand. Good citizen that you are, you have your pistol and ammo locked in separate places—to keep them out of the hands of your kids—it takes a little time to get them out, then you fumble with the clip for a minute because of nerves, you finally get it into your gun, you rack the slide, and your pistol went haywire in the dark. Bad Guy doesn’t know that. He only knows he heard a sound he’s all too familiar with: a bullet being jacked into a chamber, and he thinks you intend to kill him. How do you picture this scenario working out?

Which reminds me of the scenario in which Good Guy doesn’t shoot Bad Guy. Instead, he says something like, “I got ya covered. Drop your weapon.” Which Bad Guy almost invariably does, as if Good Guy’s weapon were a magic wand. Afterward, sometimes they even sit comfortably like old friends, have a drink and a chat while Bad Guy confesses. If I were Bad Guy, I’d probably be more scared of prison than dufus Good Guy, open fire and make a dive for the nearest exit.

Ammo: The movies like full metal jacket ammo. Why? It’s shinier, picturesque, photogenic. The Geneva Convention allows only the use of FMJ ammo in small arms. Why? It punches holes in people but kills far fewer of them than hollow point ammo, which expands on impact. It’s also more functional. A wounded man takes three men off the battlefield. The guy that got shot and two to carry him away. I haven’t signed the Geneva Convention, have you? Shoot hollow points. The damage you cause will multiply. Shoot a man my size, 6’0, 185lbs, half a dozen times with a jacketed 9mm. If you don’t hit a vital organ, he may keep coming after you, propped up by endorphins.

As an aside, the damage caused by a bullet wounds isn’t simply the intrusion of a single foreign object into the human body. The bullet drags clothing and all sorts of grime in behind it, causing infection. Also, the body is mostly composed of water. Do you know the theory of water displacement? It explains why a water balloon makes a big splat. It also explains why a high caliber hollow point makes a much larger exit than entry wound. Your water has been displaced.

How to surmount all these problems? The best pistol I’ve ever shot was an old 1911 .45 Colt semi-automatic. You know, the kind the U.S. Army started using in WWI. It had been shot so much that the action rattled when I shook it. But a gunsmith had worked it over and I could shoot decent patterns at 25 meters using only the front sight to aim with. In other words, like pointing my finger and having bullets come out of it. Get something like that, shoot the hell out of it. Burn out the barrel if you want. Replacement barrels are less than a hundred bucks. Practice reloading and field stripping it with your eyes closed, in case it jams in the dark. Keep it loaded, cocked and locked at all times. Meaning there is a round in the chamber and it’s ready to fire. The last sound Bad Guy will hear is the snap of the safety disengaging. If you don’t have “the drop” on Bad Guy: Keep moving, keep shooting. Engulf him in a hail of bullets. When do you stop shooting? To reload.

Perhaps my favorite fiction kill is with the sniper rifle that comes in a briefcase. The professional assassin—usually wearing a suit, sunglasses and driving gloves—opens the case to reveal a rifle in parts, including a scope. He snaps the parts together and then quickly and efficiently scores a one-shot kill at seven hundred meters. This is a joke.

A sniper rifle requires extreme care and maintenance and when used, must be handled with the equivalent of a lover’s caress. It must be sighted in for the individual shooter. It’s so sensitive that it must be re-sighted in if the temperature varies much. The barrel of a sniper rifle typically floats in its stock and can be likened to a tuning fork. It vibrates upon firing and is so delicate an instrument that often it requires extensive experimentation to find the proper powder charge and bullet weight combination for correct vibration and maximum performance. Long-distance shooting is a hobby (or profession) that requires a great deal of training, time, expense, and at least a fair degree of intelligence. For instance, ballistics charts must be memorized. For my money, I’ll take a .300 Winchester Magnum with a bull barrel (extra long and heavy) any day. It’s bolt action, simple in design and dependable. A word of warning, it’s more like a cannon than a normal rifle. The recoil is straight back, not up, and may take you off your feet. Get a military-trained sniper to teach you how to handle it properly. The recoil can also knock your retinas out of place. Not a rifle for the uninitiated.

I was going to include self-murder, generally known as suicide, in this. But I’ve meandered too long and must save it for another day. By the way, I haven’t owned a firearm since I moved to Finland. It’s a tool I have no need for living in Helsinki.

Happy New Year!

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

December 27, 2011

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

Facebook: James Thompson author

Twitter: tassu1

James Thompson is an established author in Finland. His novel, Snow Angels, the first in the Inspector Vaara series, was released in the U.S. by Putnam and marked his entrance into the international crime fiction scene. Booklist named it one of the ten best debut crime novels of 2010, and it was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Strand Critics awards. His second Vaara novel, Lucifer’s Tears, earned starred reviews from all quarters and was chosen by Kirkus Reviews as one of the twenty-five best novels of 2011. The third in the series, Helsinki White, will be released in March, 2012.

Just back from the golden city on the Bosphorus. As always I come home with a bewildering array of impressions. On the one hand I had a fantastic time seeing old friends, wandering the lesser known boroughs and having one fabulous (and free) night at the iconic Pera Palas Hotel. On the other hand however, a lot of death has happened since I was last in the city. A friend’s young brother, a soldier, has been killed by PKK terrorists in the East; a woman I knew in central Anatolia has died of cancer while a strange American woman on the periphery of my circle allowed herself to be led into an early and painful death by a corrupt alternative healer based in Hawaii. My Turkish ‘family’ has its ups and downs and its oddities just like its British equivalent. Of course it does. It’s just that when one isn’t around all the time, such experiences become all the more intense. There was a lot of talk but also, on my part, a lot of thinking too. I didn’t just get a free room at the Pera Palas for no reason.

Officially, the Pera Palas, the hotel where passengers from the Orient Express ( Paris – İstanbul) used to stay, was giving me the Agatha Christie room in return for a book talk I agreed to perform in the bar. This duly happened, was very well attended and the hotel management were very pleased. But I was doing more than just singing for my supper. This was a research visit, embarked upon with a view to writing a murder mystery set in the Pera Palas featuring Çetin İkmen, Mehmet Suleyman and possibly Arto Sarkissian too. But I didn’t really know quite how this was going to manifest when I went there. Now I do.

People sometimes ask me why I always feel it is necessary to visit all the places I write about in my books. I think that some people think that maybe I’m just having some sort of wild jolly-up – albeit, most of the time, at my own expense. I can see how that impression can be given. But I also know that my research trips, be they to Turkey, the USA or wherever, are always purposeful and never in vain. Until I got to the Pera Palas I didn’t know what kind of mystery I was going to write. It would take place in the hotel, yes, but who would be killed, why and in what sort of time frame?

I spent a lot of time wandering the hotel corridors and thinking weird thoughts in Agatha’s old room. I slept little and found myself constantly bothered by ideas that were sparked off either by the view from my balcony, the comings and goings in the restaurants and bars down below or just my own head grabbing hold of every second of time I had there to work things through. Now I’ve been and come back, I know what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. But that is only because that place and the atmosphere it had just pre-Christmas, told me what to do.

In my head, in part, I am still in İstanbul and will be for quite some time to come. That’s how it goes with me. I go there and get all the latest ‘gossip’ both national and personal and somehow things come, sometimes from the most surprising sources. You want to know what I’m going to be doing to İkmen this time! I can tell you, it shocked even me.

So author trips or ‘jolly-ups’ or whatever you like to call them, do actually have a function and I for one am not about to stop doing them. Who knows where I’ll end up in 2012?

And talking of which, Happy Christmas to all those who celebrate, and Happy 2012 to everyone. Inşallah it will be a lot better than 2011.

Food is a hugely valuable device for a writer. There are few better ways than evoking those aromas and to nail down a sense of location. Writing about France, Spain or Italy? Then it’s those sun-kissed tomatoes, fragrant herbs, olive oil, tarte au pommes, garlic and fresh, young red wine. Yup, I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.

Anywhere on the southern side of the Mediterranean and it’s those subtle blends of elusive spices, savoury and sweet, meat cooked tender in a tagine with fruit, honey and mint tea. Try central Europe and those aromatic goulashes, monster schnitzels, sauerkraut and beer made by people who have been growing hops and practising their art to perfection for centuries.

Britain, well… there are chips, sausages and pies, spotted dick, custard, warm beer. That’s not quite true. We Brits do see decent food, contrary to what the rest of the world believes and laughs about, but you have to search it out.

You can understand why crime writers set their work in exotic locations; India, France, Italy, South Africa, Turkey, South-East Asia. It’s warm pretty much all year round and the food is great.

There are a very few of us who have been misguided enough to venture north. There are a couple of us Nordic Pretenders who have set our work in places north of Shetland for one reason or another, but it’s not because of the low prices, easy access in winter and the fantastic cuisine.

I went to Iceland first at the end of the seventies and it was the food rather than the weather that was hard to get used to, not to mention the bizarre drinking culture. Icelanders were pretty much cut off from the rest of the world for centuries while the Norwegian and Danish kings ruled the roost. A few ships sailed to Iceland with precious goods, taking away with them saltfish, ponies and the few other things that Icelanders were able to produce. But for centuries items such as flour and sugar were luxuries.

The two grocery shops in the town where I lived had identical ranges of onions, potatoes, green and red apples that tasted of paper, occasional bananas or oranges, and vegetables in tins – tinned peas, tinned carrots, tinned carrots and peas, or red cabbage. Fresh veg was swede. Oh, there was also tinned fruit, but ruinously expensive and only for special occasions.

The diet was meat and potatoes, or fish and potatoes; these being the mandatory potatoes that accompanied every meal. The meat was mutton, and normally laden with the fat that people working long hours in the cold need to keep themselves insulated, and fish was haddock, cut into steaks with skin, bones and the rest of it and boiled. Occasionally there’d be fried halibut or catfish, or boiled saltfish. The Nordic countries produce saltfish as part of a long tradition that goes back to the trade to supply Catholic Europe with something to eat on meatless Fridays. But saltfish in Iceland is nothing like the way it’s cooked in southern Europe with tomatoes, onions, garlic and all that good stuff. Icelanders have their saltfish de-salted and boiled, served with rendered lamb fat. I’m not kidding. I mentioned this in Frozen Out and it’s one of the things I received many questions about, but I assure you it’s entirely real.

In fact, there used to be so much meat and fish in the diet that newcomers would occasionally come out in a rash and run to the doctor thinking they’d caught an obscure arctic disease, only to be told that they were suffering a reaction to the sheer volume of protein in their new diets.

Strong flavours weren’t appreciated. Food was pretty bland and the misguided efforts of the ship’s cook (me) who overdid the curry one day with what I thought was a perfectly reasonable dose of chilli powder is still talked about to this day in hushed tones.

‘My God, it was enough to make a blind man see,’ the mate groaned. But he still finished his plateful and asked for more, albeit with a litre of milk to wash it down.

These days, in spite of the ongoing financial crisis, shops carry everything you’d expect to see anywhere in Europe – from extra virgin olive oil to every exotic fruit. There are TV chefs extolling the virtues of every mysterious ingredient and there are restaurants and takeaways of every flavour and description.

But now we get to the seasonal part that gives this blog post its tenuous topicality. The traditional food Icelanders ate before freezers and supermarkets is still there. Christmas is traditionally the time for smoked lamb, eaten on Christmas Eve, accompanied by boiled potatoes and white sauce. This delicacy now appears to be somewhat on the decline, as Icelanders are choosing smoked pork, ptarmigan or reindeer. The same can’t be said of the traditional skate dinner eaten on the 23^rd of December, the feast of Saint Thorlákur. This is skate that has been allowed to putrefy as a means of getting the ammonia out of the meat that would otherwise be poisonous. The smell alone is an experience, and it carries.

Late winter is known as Thorri, when a festival of traditional foods is held in practically every village and town to feast on sour whalemeat, scourged sheep heads and a few other goodies – and shark. The ammonia-rich Greenland sharkmeat is allowed to putrefy in much the same way as skate, buried below the tideline. Whoever tried this stuff first must have been seriously ravenous, as it takes a strong man to get past the smell alone that rivals surströmming – Swedish fermented herring –in being so pungent and unappetising that just cracking open a jar of this stuff can clear a room in seconds.

After just thinking about that, my appetite has unaccountably vanished, and I haven’t even mentioned the pickled testicles yet. If you want to get under the skin of a place, and especially if you want to write about it, avoid the ubiquitous international cuisine of steaks, burgers and the rest of it, and eat where the locals eat, in snackbars and truckstops. Talk to the cook, the guy behind the counter and the girl clearing the tables, if they have time. Get yourself up close and intimate with the local food culture. It may be a challenge, but it’ll always be interesting.

THERE may have never been one list. We don’t have to enter that debate. We can start by acknowledging that we live in an age of list of junkies. We are all guilty; we are all addicted. Top ten lists are catchy, fun and most of all require a short attention span. They are like intellectual popcorn. David Letterman made his reputation by reading clever Top Ten Lists written by his staff writers.  And I also love reading and writing a good mystery. What better mystery than tracking the whereabouts of fugitives on the run from the law? In reality most of those on the most wanted list are more elusive than the Higgs Boson.

Think of the Modern Top Ten Criminal lists as the way law enforcement officials try to build the equivalent of the particle collider. Most of the data is inclusive. The main difference is the criminals exist in reality and are simply very hard to find, and the jury is out whether Higgs Boson is non-existent or just hard to find.

The idea of Top Ten Criminals has been around longer than crime fiction. In the case of criminal justice systems, the entertainment value of announcing Top Ten Most Wanted Lists has caught the attention of law enforcement agencies in most countries. The media love lists. Newspapers, blogs, TV news all love list with pictures. These list which used to be taped to post office walls has gone digital. We now spend most of our lives in front of one sort of screen or another looking at photographs. The digital world is tailor-made from the list of bad guys. We can visualize the criminal but nothing satisfied as much as seeing an actual picture. Law enforcement officials no longer need to describe what the criminal fugitives on the run look like. Show their pictures on the Internet. Let the public study their features and image the evil lurking inside that caused them to turn to a life of crime. Let the public become the private eye who can nail a bad guy and collect a million dollar bounty.

But there is a slight problem with digital volunteer bounty hunters. Our resources as individuals are completely overwhelmed by the sheer volume of top ten criminal lists. Every city, county, province, and country has a top ten list of most wanted criminals. If that isn’t enough, within each of these political divisions are cops who are further divided into a multitude of separate but overlapping turfs. There is a 10 Most Wanted in the World List.

If you are a crime writer wondering who would make a good villain for your next novel, you might want to scroll through the latest list of international gangsters, gunrunners, revolutionaries and cartel kingpins of the lam from justice; go straight to the Top Ten Criminals on the Planet List.

How about the Top Ten Most Wanted Fugitives List? City of Vancouver has a list. The FBI has perhaps the most famous of Top Ten lists going back to 1950. The FBI has refined its lists by categories. So if you want to know the Top Ten Most Wanted White Collar Criminals, they have a list. Interpol has a list. Is there any political subdivision on the planet without a list? If you could speed read 24 hours a day it would take 572 years to go through the images returned by Google for each of these lists.

Here’s a little game to play on Christmas Day after eating all of that turkey. Gather the family around with their electronic devices. Ask them to Google “Thailand’s ten most wanted criminals.” Then ask them to click on ‘images’ and the number that comes up is 53,900,000. Given them ten minutes to assemble their top ten images. Compare selections. An extra helping of pumpkin pie to the winner.

The Thai population is 65 million puts in perspective the 53 million faces that the Thai Top Ten criminal list returns in Google images. Such a high return of famous criminals to ratio of population might qualify as the most egalitarian feature of Thai society. Of course, the Google image search return has thoughtfully included: a human-like gnarl in a tree, Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Dick Cheney, Sandra Bullock and Steve Jobs—a fairly wide number of individuals, some of whom are dead, have been selected as candidates for the top ten of criminals on the run in the Land of Smiles. There are several problems. First, there are too many foreigners. Second, the law enforcement agencies will use this issue to vastly increase their budget request for 2012/2013. Third, co-operation between international law enforcement agencies will likely collapse as too many influential politicians are on the Thai image list. And there are doubts whether those names—such as mentioned above—are all criminals.

Perhaps this explains the difficulty of making a Top Ten List of Criminals in the digital age. AI development being in the relative infancy means that algorithms pick up a huge number of false positives when assembling images.  We can have more sympathy for law enforcement officials on the ground. Finding a needle in a haystack is easier than shifting through millions of these images. Institutional caution and careerism means that no one whose image comes up from such a search can be excluded as a possibility. There must be someone who will take responsibility for deleting one of the images. And if he or she is wrong—say, indeed Dick Cheney proved to be on the Top Ten List of Criminals in Thailand, they could be shuttled off to a desk in North Dakota to catch rabbit poachers.

As you contemplate 2012, remember the Maya Legend about how the earth would end in 2012 might actually have been a warning that by 2012 our ability to discern reality from fiction may have collapsed under the weight of just far too many distractions, images, and associations. The evidence of brain shutdown explains a lot of what we are reading in news reports. Soon everyone’s picture will appear on a top-ten wanted list somewhere.  I expect that in the far future, there will be final news report will profile this vast gulag, and featuring the last free person on the planet. Heads will roll as someone, somewhere will have to take responsibility for this oversight, to explain how this person fell between the cracks, was excluded and left out of some list. There will be hell to pay.

I’m writing this in a plain office in the corner of a building that was
described by the realtor as “exclusive,” though it doesn’t exclude
despondent ultra-Orthodox Jews panhandling for cash, plumbers who break all
the pipes you hadn’t called them to fix, or the cheerful lady who lets her
dog pee in the elevator. There’s the hum of heavy traffic from the road
below and a view across the valley of brake lights on a highway where no
one ever seems to move. The air is clear enough up here that I usually only
smell me, sweating through the desert heat, except when the garbage truck
empties the trashcans and sends up a rotten fruit ripeness, or when the
khamsin blows and I can smell the dirt on the hot wind. There’s a mosquito
in here, but the bastard isn’t friendly enough to show himself. When he
does, I’ll do what people in the Middle East do best. There are already
spots of my blood across the whitewash where his brothers and sisters felt
the thick side of my fist.

If that sounds like a spoof, you surely know who I’m caricaturing. We
decided last week that you couldn’t do much better than the opening
paragraph of Hammett’s “Red Harvest” for an introduction to the narrative
voice, narrator, place and tone of the entire novel. But if anyone could
beat it, we’d have to look at Raymond Chandler.

The grumpy god of the gumshoe genre claimed not to have much time for the
idea of a classic in crime writing. In one of his essays, he wrote that
contemporary writers who aimed for historical fiction, social vignette, or
broad canvas would never surpass “Henry Esmond”, “Madame Bovary”, or “War
and Peace”. Crime writers, on the other hand, would easily be able to
devise a better mystery than the ones detailed in “The Hound of the
Baskervilles” or “The Purloined Letter”. “It would be rather more difficult
not to,” he wrote.

Still, the poet with the pipe (okay, no more quirky names for Ray) proved
himself wrong. Or rather he proved that he was right not to focus so much
on the mystery element and, instead, to build a mysterious atmosphere and a
sardonic sense of humor. From the opening paragraph.

This is how he starts a long 1950 short story called “Red Wind”:

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry
Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair
and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every
booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving
knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even
get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

Like the opening paragraph of “Red Harvest,” this gives us all the elements
we’d expect. It also tells you a lot about the narrator and his lifestyle.
The booze parties, and the sense of being gypped at the cocktail lounge.

But the opening paragraph which might be said to define an entire genre ––
and the sub-genres of attempts to copy the true representatives of the
genre, and also to parody it –– starts Chandler’s 1949 novel “The Little
Sister”:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “*Philip
Marlowe…Investigations*.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a
reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the
year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is
locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not
locked. Come on in –– there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle
fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

That’s now a staple of the genre and, just as much, of its parodic/iconic
avatar –– the detective innocently awaiting the moment when the lady
arrives (or in this case, telephones) his shabby office. But what makes it
so compelling is the voice of Marlowe, with its sense of regret at having
become involved in the story and its unspoken acknowledgement of the
inevitability of a repeat performance. After all, if Marlowe truly learned
the lessons he claims to have taken on board, he wouldn’t be who he is.
He’d be corrupted or cynical. Of course he’s neither.

It’s this subtext of honor (the knight in shining armor element of
Marlowe’s character, as Chandler called it) that allowed the Epistolarian
of Evil (sorry, I said I wouldn’t do that again, didn’t I) to elevate
himself above the many who have copied him.

Miami has been transformed –and spiced — over the years by waves of immigrants from Latin America and Caribbean. First you read about turmoil in one country or the other –economic, political, or both — and after a fairly short interval you begin to see an increase in that population in Miami.There is an easy way to measure where the newest wave is coming from and I’ll get to that below.

Of course, the biggest influx has been the Cubans. They have come, basically, in three waves: the hundreds of thousands who fled the island in the first decade after Fidel Castro and his cohort took charge in 1959; those who fled in 1980, during what came to be known as the Mariel boatlift –about 125,000 in a matter of a few months; and many more thousands who have come after winning visas in lotteries for Cuban citizens staged by the U.S. government. In the first 35-40 years or so after Castro took power, many people also took to rafts and tried to ride the Gulfstream current from the north Cuba coast to Florida. Back then, if the U.S. Coast Guard encountered rafters at sea, those refugees were taken aboard, brought to the U.S. and in short order were granted legal residence. It was part of the U.S.’s absolute position against the Castro government. But during the administration of President Bill Clinton —1993-2001—that policy changed. In order to keep Cubans from risking their lives at sea, the U.S. instituted a policy known as “wet foot, dry foot,” which is still enforced today. That means that if Cuban rafters – balseros— are encountered at sea, the Coast Guard returns them to Cuba. If they make it to shore and step on dry U.S. soil –or sand– they have the right to stay. This has been strictly enforced by U.S officials. Rafters wading ashore and just yards from the beach have been detained and sent back to Cuba. This drives some Cuban exiles crazy. The policy has also led the local head of our American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a leading human rights watchdog, to joke that Miami is the only place where the U.S. Constitution is interpreted differently depending on whether it’s low tide or high tide.

The various waves of Cubans arriving in Miami have been augmented by a smaller but steady stream of Haitians over the years because there has always been terrible poverty –the worst in Western Hemisphere—and also political violence in Haiti. In addition, Nicaraguans who considered themselves enemies of the left wing Sandinista Front arrived in Miami in considerable numbers after the Sandinistas took power in 1979. It’s interesting to note that El Salvador was in the midst of a left wing guerrilla insurgency in the 1980s, which was answered by violent and sometimes savage repression by the Salvadoran Army and its death squads. Miami does have a small Salvadoran population, but the great majority of refugees from El Salvador from that time did not come to Miami –which was considered a place full of conservative Latinos. Those Salvadoran refugees went primarily to California, which was seen as a haven for people of left of center sympathies. The Salvadorans were following in the footsteps of thousands of Chileans, who in 1973, when the military government of General Augusto Pinochet came to power, fled to California rather than to Miami. Why? Well, because many anti-Castro Cuban exiles openly spoke of their great admiration for Pinochet, despite his death squads and the killing of many unarmed civilians. He was a staunch anti-communist who had condemned Castro and that was all that mattered.

A good number of Guatemalans –mainly Mayan Indians– who were fleeing the violence caused by that country’s long civil war ended up on both coasts. The Guatemalan military, if it thought a village was sympathetic to the leftist guerrillas, was capable of killing off entire villages, especially in the Mayan highlands. A report completed after the end of the civil war by the Catholic Church in Guatemala concluded that some 200,000 people were killed during more than 30 years of conflict –more than 90 percent by the Guatemalan military and about 5 percent by the guerrillas. The Mayans who fled to Florida didn’t fit in Miami for political reasons. They ended up 70-100 miles north in the area of Palm Beach County, where there are fewer Cubans and Nicaraguans.

Over the past two decades, Miami has received waves of Argentines, who have fled economic turbulence in that country; waves of Colombians fleeing drug cartel violence and kidnappers; and Venezuelans who oppose the leftist government of President Hugo Chavez. Like the Nicaraguans and Cubans they have established their enclaves –their barrios. Those differing diasporas and their neighborhoods are the milieus I write about: my first two books set in “Player’s Vendetta” and “The Ultimate Havana,” were set among the Cubans; the next, “The Lady from Buenos Aires,” involves the Argentines; and the newest, “On Hallowed Ground,” the Colombians.

Back in the 1980s, I was living in San Francisco when Salvadoran refugees started to arrive. I remember a friend telling me how more and more of the security guards working in the city were Salvadorans. It was a low-wage, entry level position that often required little or no English. Over the years, here in Miami, I’ve tried to gauge the influx of different nationalities. I live in Miami Beach and given the large hotel, resort and nightclub industry in my neighborhood, I have found a good way to figure out who the new arrivals are: I question the parking valets. The Cuban and Nicaraguan parking valets of years past have given way over the years first to the Argentines, then the Colombians and the Venezuelans. We’ll see who’s next.

I’m late with my blog this week and this isn’t just because I’ve just got back from İstanbul. That was a fantastic trip which I will tell all about at a later date, but at the moment all you need to know is that it ended badly.

As usual when I go to Turkey I take a load of stuff out for people there and bring a load of stuff home for people here. By ‘stuff’ I mean I take out UK newspapers, Christmas and birthday presents and I come home laden down with Turkish tea, olive oil soap and Turkish textiles.

When I fly back to my local airport, Manchester, I have to get the airport train into the city, then the tram across town from Piccadilly Station to Victoria Station where I catch the train home to the middle of nowhere. It’s no big deal but I arrived home during the rush hour and so the trams were packed. As a consequence I had to keep on lumping my really heavy suitcase around so that people could get on and off. I did it so often I put my back out. Oh joy.

So now I’m in pain and am walking around the house bent over like a gibbon. It bloody hurts but I can’t take bucket loads of medication because I have to work. So I’m not happy. However worse than the pain is the reason behind why I have the injury in the first place.

As a woman of a ‘certain age’ I have absolutely no ‘victim value’ in British society. I am neither a young and pretty blonde (who may well ‘put out’ or at least smile sweetly for a knight in shining armour) or a frail old lady who everyone will ‘aahh’ over. I fall into that category known as ‘tough, middle aged old bag’ and it is a category that no-one wants to look at, least of all tough, middle aged old men. I put my back out because, in spite of the fact that it was obvious I was struggling, no bastard deigned to help me, mainly because of my age.

However before the people of Manchester rise up against me and cry that my accusations are unfair, I do have to say that this phenomenon has nothing to do with Manchester per se. It is a general phenomenon that infects the whole country. The invisible middle aged woman. And if you ask me it’s a damn crime!

Now I have to stop this typing as my back is bloody murder.

Iceland doesn’t really appear to have much crime. It’s not the largely crime-free society it was a generation ago, but all the same, it’s still a pretty peaceful and safe place. In reality that sweeping opening statement needs to be revised. Iceland does have a growing amount of crime, but it’s mostly low-end crime that generally doesn’t involve people getting hurt. There’s plenty of petty crime, quite apart from traffic offences and the unique Icelandic driving culture.

The way the banking system has turned out in the last few years demonstrates that white-collar crime abounds, or did until recently. While on the surface everything looks placid enough in this little island, a night out will tell you that there is more dope and illicit booze around than ever before. Business isn’t going to be harmed by the government’s joyful pre-Christmas announcement of hikes in the prices of booze, ‘baccy and petrol, probably giving purveyors of moonshine and weed a much-welcomed bonus in case the thirteen Yule Lads (Iceland’s own version of Father Christmas) don’t turn up bearing gifts.

Since the events of 2008, when the collapse of the three main banks became a pivotal event in Icelandic history, there is far less money about, and unemployment is higher than it has ever been. Prices have gone up and the cost of living in general has gone through the roof. Rates of mugging, housebreaking and acquisitive crime have escalated.

The latest stunt is to drive into a garage with ‘borrowed’ plates on a car, fill up, and then simply drive off without paying. The numbers are recorded on CCTV and the mystified owner of the car those plates belong to gets a call from the police, which is when it turns out that the car that goes with those numbers isn’t a boy racer’s jalopy with tinted windows and a boombox in the boot, but some old couple’s miniscule Fiat. By then it’s too late and the police have better things to be doing anyway.

The fuel scam is just the tip of an iceberg and it won’t last long. Soon enough filling stations will expect you to leave a credit card at the desk before you can use the pump, and before you know it we’ll all get used to one more petty inconvenience.

It’s only recently that Iceland has seen serious, major crime, committed by the coterie of whizzkids who, allegedly, managed to bankrupt the entire national economy. Until now, crime has tended to be a clumsy, amateurish affair, although the massive influx of foreign labour in the years before the crash also brought the country to the notice of organised crime from Eastern Europe.

What Iceland hasn’t seen is gun crime – yet – although there are guns everywhere. Pretty much everyone knows someone who shoots geese, ptarmigan or even reindeer for the pot. Even many city dwellers make a point of spending a few days shooting every year. It’s not so much the opportunity to fill the freezer with free food – as once you’ve paid for cartridges, diesel and everything else, it’s probably cheaper to buy a plucked and ready-for-the-oven bird – as the elemental back-to-nature thrill of the hunt in designer camouflage.

Icelanders are no strangers to guns, at least, not legal weapons that are used by people who have an idea what they’re doing. Occasionally there’s an incident, normally an alcohol-related argument that gets out of hand in which an old shotgun is produced, triggering a callout for the police armed response unit. But so far that’s as far as it’s gone. Until now. A shooting incident a few weeks ago in Reykjavík was something a little different. There have since been some arrests and the police have laid their hands on a small arsenal that included dozens of knives and a few firearms.

While the going was good, the series of privatisation-mad pre-Crash governments had little fondness for the public sector and preferred to keep the police and law enforcement on a tight rein. As a result the police and the prison system as a whole had already been strapped for cash even before the Crash hit like a sledgehammer, forcing massive cuts to law enforcement, health, education, you name it. It’s not as if the police are awash with resources or manpower, just when they have to deal with a whole raft of emerging problems.

It’s an open secret that there have been illegal handguns in Iceland for a good while. In fact, it’s extraordinarily difficult to own a handgun legally. It’s undoubtedly a ‘when’ rather than an ‘if’ question of whether or not someone will use one of these cached pistols in anger as a punishment or to settle a score.

The latest weapons bust coincides uncomfortably with biker gangs finally gaining footholds in Iceland after a long resistance that included a bunch of visiting foreign gang members being turned back at Keflavík airport. One of them now is reportedly set to sue the Minister of the Interior on the grounds of some kind of discrimination, but I doubt somehow that the Minister in question is losing much sleep over that. He probably has a few more headaches to deal with right now – like working out what to do with a prison population that has never been larger and is only set to grow.