In the Vincent Calvino series, the novels are divided between crimes that are domestic in nature—though an expat might be involved—and those with and cross-border connection. The distinction between international crime and domestic crime often blurs once cash enters the picture. Mountains of cash from illegal activity make for strange bedfellows inside the world of crime.

In a globalized economy, crime has been at the vanguard of moving money, people, and products around the world. Criminals have an incentive. They don’t want to get caught and sent to prison. So they put money,  thought and time into avoiding risks. In the shadowy world of illegality world, the basic business skills are largely the same. But there is an important difference.

First, the criminal is relying on gaps, flaws or holes in the system, and similar gaps and flaws in the moral and ethical values of those who run the system. They exploit both. Second, criminals use threats, guns and violence if things go pear shape. Rather than recourse to the police or courts to redress breaches, criminals have their own methods of settling disputes. It’s called intimidation and violence. Legal businessmen delegate the intimidation and violence to entities of the State. They have less need to get blood on their hands.

Law enforcement has traditionally been a local affair in most countries because most crimes have been local in nature. The criminal and victim were from the same city, province, county and/or country. A case can be made that organized crime kicked started globalization. The British Opium Wars in the early 19^th century is a good example of a legitimate business becoming a crime syndicate (looting and pillaging by merchants/warriors/politicians has a longer history).

As part of its empire and trade-expansion imperial policies, Britain lent military assistance to The East India Trading Company (which became drug dealers but they weren’t called that) who used guns and canon to force open the domestic market in China to sell massive quantities of opium to the Chinese. The British were able (because of the opium business) to cut their trade deficit. Fiscal and monetary policy had different moral dimensions in the 19^th century.

Organized drug gangs continue to operate but they no longer have the overt support of a government, which supplies them military muscle, tax benefits and place their officers on the annual Honors List.  There will be readers who will cite examples of contemporary thugs who have received a gong before eventually finding their way to a prison. All of that is true but beside the point. I am speaking about a change in the general arc of history. There has been a shift—led by technological innovations—that continues to weaken the link between organized illegal activities and government officers.

Not all the forces inside governments are working to change the analog cash system. You would expect eliminating corruptions to be a priority but that lofty goal also means the breaking of many rice bowls that have been inside the system for generations. Giving up easy money is harder than kicking a drug habit. Reformers are put on committees to write reports and show the way. But nothing much happens at the grassroots level, at the end of the money pipeline where the rural school teacher, hospital worker, prison guard, cop and migrant worker are waiting for pay day.  That is money raked off inside the government system by officials skimming money from the low-level beneficiaries.

The other unofficial source of revenue for government officials is generated from illegal activities such as drug trafficking, logging, prostitution, gambling, and smuggling. Let’s have a look at opium. A big, profitable market that despite law enforcement efforts shows no sign of slowing down in Southeast Asia.

The current opium production in Southeast Asia is on schedule to record a bumper crop year. That means a couple of things: (1) moving the product across borders; and (2) laundering mountains of cash.

When the opium finds its way into the international market, how do governments in the region enforce the law? The poppies are grown in one place. The processing of the poppies into opium paste takes place in another place. The storage and transportation are likely in other locations. And the flow of money crosses multiple borders, going through numerous bank accounts. Some of that money is paid as bribes to politicians, cops, military personnel, customs inspectors, and others in the chain of security, protection and enforcement. Organized crime is highly profitable because it has the ability to patch together a makeshift set of mutually beneficial relationships that thrives on secrecy, non-traceability, and the sanctity of borders.

Co-operation between various levels of law enforcement and security officials complicates the risk factor for organized crime. By allowing co-operation across the borders, the sharing of technology and information, the cost to organized crime bosses increases dramatically. It is like insurance premiums. If that huge, devastating flood only occurs once every hundred years, the cost of insurance is relatively low. But if the hundred-year flood level happens every six months, the cost of insurance skyrockets to the point no one can afford to buy insurance.  Successful co-operation is a real threat to transnational crime.

Everyone sees the part of the elephant standing in their district but don’t see the overall dimensions of the beast.  According to the Bangkok Post, 43 Thai cops traveled to Hong Kong to meet their police counterparts. The idea was to establish co-operation between the two police forces. They can exchange information about finances and training, for example. Hong Kong and Thai authorities have promised to enter a memorandum of understanding on the nature and scope of their co-operation. What crimes and in what circumstances co-operation will occur remains to be hammered out. Whether anything tangible will arise from this arrangement is impossible to know at this stage. It is hard enough to get people within in the same department to co-operate. Extending co-operation across borders with different traditions, languages, and customs is what is called a ‘challenge’.

In this part of the world the problem is often not lack of co-operation but that there is too much co-operation between law enforcement, civil servants and politicians and the organized big league crime ventures. A glimpse of that organized crime world of powerful insiders using thuggish methods to drive out competition was revealed recently in China. In this ‘business’ model the local government ran the organized crime business through their friends and associates and those who tried to compete found themselves beaten and tortured and driven out of the country.

The Chinese government released information about Bo Xilai, the Chonguing party chief who recently lost his job in a power struggle. The New York Times reported:

Once hailed as a pioneering effort to wipe out corruption, critics now say it depicts a security apparatus run amok: framing victims, extracting confessions through torture, extorting business empires and visiting retribution on the political rivals of Mr. Bo and his friends while protecting those with better connections.

How best to approach the problem of corruption and organized crime in league with government officials? Follow the money. The pain criminals feel the most is when their traditional money routes are closed down. Big, organized crime is a headache because it is largely a ‘cash’ business. How does the criminal with bags of bank notes work the cash through the financial system? Brokers arise whenever there is a market. Cash is a market and brokers create an informal banking system to launder the illegal funds.

Money laundering legislation has slowed down but not stopped the Amazon River flow of cash. This is particularly true in less developed countries where there are few banks and almost no one has a bank account. Cash in hand systems are vulnerable to corruption. Every time money stops at someone’s desk on the journey from the person who sent it and the person who will eventually receive it, someone is taking a piece of the action. This rent seeking happens in the underground economy as well as in banks in legal economy and we call these fees. In the underground world, we call this corruption if the person exacting a fee is a government official.

In Afghanistan, payrolls for the ordinary cop and low-level officers were first distributed by higher-level officers, who took their cut before passing the cash down the line. A Vodafone program, first created for payments in microfinance operations in Kenya, was adapted to pay the Afghan police directly through their cell phones. That computer program caused mixed feelings. The high command hated the innovation. But low-level police thought they’d receive a raise. It was the first time they’d received a payroll without someone above skimming off the top. They loved the new system. In a country where very few people have bank accounts and there are a handful of ATM machines, banking through a cell phone is a mini-revolution. It is also an effective way to reduce corruption or, to use the lovely term, ‘money leakage’.

One frustrated commander demanded that his officers turn over their phones and PINs and attempted to collect their salaries from an M-Paisa agent.

India is examining the new technology to increase the reach of electronic transfers as a way to reduce government corruption. Argentina used electronic voucher cards as part of a successful campaign to beat corruption.

Money as a physical object is so much a part of our experience that it is difficult to believe there were long stretches of history when our ancestors didn’t use coins or paper money. We are going to a financial system that is digital. The knock-on effect means that electronic money transfers will continue to reduce the role of physical money passing through many sticky fingers.

Organized crime works at the municipal, county, provincial and national levels in many countries because corruption is difficult to root out. The technology is available to largely eliminate corruption. But those who benefit the most from the current cash and carry and skim system are not likely to step forward as willing first adopters. One would expect those with vested interest to subvert attempts to bypass the original channels in which cash flows.

Meanwhile co-operation between police forces across borders makes for a good study trip to another country, the hotel buffets, the sightseeing, and making of new friends. But let’s be honest. The problem isn’t lack of co-operation, as the officials often co-operate a bit too much. The problem is finding a direct way to make payments that avoids pushing bags of cash down the old traditional ramps in a world where the most powerful porters drive Benzes and live in mansions.

(This continues my series of autobiographical vignettes, intended to demonstrate the neuroses, ambition, talent, chance, mischance, place, alcohol and attitude that go toward the creation of a writer. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive. This one concerns identity.)

In a communal-style dining room in the Sicilian town of Siracuse, my wife noticed that I was being ogled by a bashful fellow in an apron. Before I could figure out why a twenty-year-old, chubby Italian would be smiling, wistful and excited, in my direction, the owner of the joint approached my end of the long bench where a hundred or more diners were enjoying lunch.

From behind his drooping brown mustache, he spoke to me in Spanish. I shook my head and told him, in Italian, that I didn’t understand. He switched to Italian. “You’re Gibernau.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said.

He put aside his cigarette (for the artwork in his establishment suggested Communist-Anarchist tendencies and the EU ban on tobacco in restaurants was being ignored) and reached out a finger. Poking me in the chest, he said: “You’re Gibernau.”

I shrugged, helplessly. “What does that mean?”

He mimed the act of revving up a motorcycle. “The rider, Gibernau.”

“Ah,” I said, miming the act of revving up a motorcycle and trying not to look fearful (which is how I feel when I even think of riding a motorcycle.)

“Yes.” He nodded, very happily.

“No.” I said, sadly, shaking my head. “Motorcyles are very dangerous. I don’t ride them.”

The patron glanced over his shoulder. The cook was bouncing from foot to foot in excitement. The patron leaned in close enough that I could smell the smoke on his breath and see the broken veins around his baggy eyes. “Right now, you’re Gibernau.”

“Okay. It will be my pleasure.” (I’m even more polite in foreign languages than I am in English.)

He left the table and went behind the bar. I shrugged at my wife. “Is this a joke of some sort?” I asked her. “Does ‘Gibernau’ mean foreign asshole in Sicilian slang?”

I asked one of the youngsters across the table from us. “Yes,” one of them agreed. “It’s a joke.”

Before she could explain why it was funny, the clamor of loud Italian voices was silenced by the ringing sound of a spoon banging against a wine glass. The owner stood at the bar with the cook. A moment of silence, and he spoke:

“Today is a great day. Here, in our bar, we have il grande pilotti –– Gibernau.”

He lifted his hands in applause. The room joined him. The cook beamed.

I rose from the bench, raised my hand in modest acknowledgement, and resumed my seat.

The owner came over again. He brought an autograph book. “You’re Gibernau.” He was telling me this time, not asking me. I signed something that looked like a signature for someone whose name might’ve sounded like Gibernau.

“And Senora Gibernau, too,” he said.

My wife wrote: “Nothing’s finer than eating in your diner. Senora Gibernau.”

“A line from Seinfeld?” I said. “That’s how you’re signing for them.”

She laughed, as I imagine Senora Gibernau (who was a supermodel of some sort, it turns out) would have done.

On our return to our hotel, we searched the internet for “Gibernau” and came up with an extraordinarily famous Spanish rider who, at the time, was the only one who could challenge the great Italian Valentino Rossi. Extraordinarily famous among those who aren’t scared witless by bikes. He bore something of a resemblance to me, though I should add that I’m four inches taller and I don’t have titanium plates in my collar bones from falling off a Ducati at 200 miles per hour.

My wife and I became committed fans of Sete (Gibernau’s first name). We watched all his races from then on. Sadly he didn’t win any of them and retired a couple of years ago. So he reaped no benefit from my being mistaken for him.

Neither did I. When I eventually departed the restaurant to another round of applause, the owner insisted that I pay him the five Euros I owed for our spaghetti.
–
The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com

It took me over four decades of life to find a job that I both enjoy and suits me: that of being an author. When I was a young man, I didn’t have money for higher education. I had too much pride to be one of the teeming under-employed masses. You know the cliché: flips burgers or some equivalent, lives in his/her parent’s basement, smokes dope and plays video games.

I was unsuitable, by nature of personality, for what one might term civilized employment. The nine to five grind in some lower managerial field. Typically, a constant smile and inane repetition of the word “yes,” the kissing of ass of superiors with the IQs of newts is required. I have a problem with two words: “Fuck you.” I took one of those jobs when I was in my twenties, but try as I might, I just couldn’t kiss ass. I did my best to get fired, but apparently I was good at it anyway, and kept getting raises and promotions, so I stuck with it for a year. Then finally, out it came after my half-wit boss raised her voice to me. I called her into her own office and said, “Don’t ever speak to me like that again. Fuck you.” And that was that. God, was I relieved.

So, I spent the following next couple decades in jobs that required a combination of brains and brawn, usually with a high danger element. I made a decent living, didn’t have to kiss the asses of dipshits, and seldom had to put up with any kind of insulting stupidity. But by the tender age of thirty-seven, I had too many broken bones and wrecked joints, made a sea-change in life and studied at the university. I completed a seven year program in five and earned a Master’s.

I truly enjoyed the university. I think older students, having done other, more mundane things, can appreciate more than most youths. The atmosphere. Engaging in often philosophical conversation. Absorbing hundreds of texts by authors who were mostly, in one way or another, grappling with the nature of existence. I had been an amateur writer for nearly a decade by then and had developed some skills. I made contacts, and before long, started taking in work as an editor. Usually academic work by Finns writing in English. I opened my own business and made a paltry living. And somewhere in that time, I came to realize that I had spent my life trying to live it on my own terms and at the same time discover what it meant.

Writing is an articulation of our thoughts. I’ve noticed that most people seldom or never articulate their thoughts on the world, their place in it, what life means, what gives it value. Most people just stumble aimlessly through life and take what it throws at them. I began studying at the university ten years ago. I’ve been writing nearly every day for eighteen years. I estimate that in my life I’ve read five thousand books, give or take.

I’ve written six novels, published five of them (refused to publish the other). I’ve co-written an educational book, contributed to other books, edited a couple dozen of them. In the past year, I estimate that I’ve written better than half a million words. And those are just what got published in various places, not the dreck and dross that I trashed. All this dedicated to the single task of trying, by way of articulation, to define the world, its meaning, and my place in it. AND I STILL DON’T KNOW ANYTHING. In fact, I’ve lost ground. I used to at least have a set of beliefs that shifted in small but regular increments as I gained experience. They’ve by and large eroded as I’ve gotten older. I don’t think I’ve even gained any ground in knowledge or even self-knowledge.

For a time, I held what was my most comforting belief. That we live in a universe with no meaning, spin endlessly around a doomed sun, that we exist without purpose, for no reason at all. That belief makes passing from this earth without leaving a trace palatable, as one day the sun will supernova, all man’s greatest achievements will be reduced to the atoms from which they were constructed, and thus, nothing we do means a damn thing.

But that was tempered for me by the realization that we can’t pass through this world without causing pain in others. Pain has meaning—just ask anyone suffering it, basically all of us—and the attempt to simply avoid causing it must have some value. Belief in God brings no solace, as nearly everyone is working their asses off in an attempt to anthropomorphize God, to make the being’s sentience and belief structures equal to our own. I have a great deal of difficulty in believing that we could have any knowledge of the psychological profile (if such a being has a psyche as we envision it), or any knowledge at all of a supreme being. Lurian Kabbalah has it’s attraction in this regard, but still comes up short for me.

Maybe the world is changing at such a rapid pace that I just can’t get a grip on it. Maybe every time I almost know something, that something changes and slips through my fingers like water. Or maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question—What do I know? Only to have transformed myself into a font of useless information—when I should have been asking: Why am I incapable of knowledge?

I’m forty-seven. If I’m still around in another forty-seven years (I really hope not, I don’t think I can’t stand to live that long all over again), I’ll let you know if I’ve made any progress in these matters.

James Thompson

Helsinki, Finland

March 27, 2012

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, released in March, 2011, earned starred reviews from all quarters, and was named one the best novels of the year by Kirkus. The third in the series, Helsinki White, was released on March 15.

www.jamesthompsonauthor.com

FB: james thompson author

Twitter: tassu15

Like children, some words can be very, very naughty. I don’t mean that they’re rude in themselves, no. Naughty words are those that are tricky and slippery and given to occasional changes of meaning.

Take the word ‘trolling’ for instance. Last night I watched a deeply disturbing documentary about people who (for reasons best known to themselves) post vile messages and disgusting pictures on tribute websites and Facebook pages dedicated to dead children. This, apparently, is known as ‘trolling’. According to the one ‘troll’ who was actually lured out to be interviewed for the documentary they do this because they object to the fact that people who never knew the deceased post messages of support on these sites. Trolls find this offensive it seems. They also like to provoke controversy and reaction. Great.

Firstly, as someone who has experienced bereavement I can state categorically that a kind word from a complete stranger who didn’t know my loved one was always very welcome. Secondly, there are other ways of provoking reactions. Just off the top of my head, dropping your trousers in front of the Prime Minister would provoke, I imagine, a most satisfyingly extreme and possibly violent reaction.

But I’m not here to talk about Internet trolls per se. No, it’s the word ‘troll’ that interests me because it is one of those slippery little devils that occasionally changes its meaning.

Troll used to mean and means different things in different places. In Scandinavia it was a mythical being generally perceived as something rather dirty and malign. Trolls were dangerous to human beings who tried not to fall foul of them by avoiding lakes, mountains and forests known to be ‘owned’ by trolls. In old French the word ‘troller’ was a hunting term used by those stalking deer and wild pigs.

Possibly from this word ‘troller’ there developed an English word ‘trolling’ which was adopted into the gay patois of post war London. This patois, called polari, was developed so that gay people could talk to each other without ‘outsiders’ knowing what they were saying. Homosexuality was illegal in England and Wales until 1967 and so this kind of discretion was essential.

Back before Noah was born, when I was a teenager, I moved in a London theatrical scene that was still dominated by middle aged gay men who had suffered under the harsh pre-1967 anti-homosexual laws. They automatically spoke the polari and taught it to younger men and to women and girls, like myself, who lived in that world. And one of my favourite words was ‘trolling’.

When you went out trolling you got your glad rags on, put the sexiest pout you could imagine on your face and you went out hunting for love. Places like the Kings Road in Chelsea, the Soho district and pubs like the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane were prime sites to troll and be trolled at. I regularly used to waft around such places covered in make-up, wearing feathers and smoking furiously. We trolled for all we were worth and sometimes we met men who appreciated us all the more for it. There was even, and still is, a drag act called The Trollettes – featuring the fabulous Jimmy and Maisie Trollette – who I saw many times back in those outré and yet strangely innocent days.

Troll, trolling, trollette – these are very naughty words indeed but because of my personal past I do still love them despite their sinister modern connotations. So maybe it’s time for troll to get on its bike and change its meaning again. I like the trolling that involves putting on too much jewellery, drinking gin and flirting with dark eyed men in shady pubs. With that in mind I’ve decided to start using the ‘t’ word in its old, gay patois sense and not dignify people who abuse RIP sites with such a deliciously wonderful term. Keep trolling fun is what I say – keep it outré, kind and fabulous.

Googling yourself calls for a strong stomach and a deep breath before jumping into the search engine quagmire. Of course writers claim to ignore the reviews, the stinkers at any rate, but it wasn’t the (thankfully very few) crap reviews that made me want to punch the wall.

It’s all about us these days. First the music business was hit by piracy, then cinema, finally with the advent of ebooks, it’s writers and publishers. Piracy is everywhere and I was staggered at just how many download sites were offering free electronic copies of my latest book (Cold Comfort, in case you wanted to know…). In fact, these were on offer before the kindle version was even available, before I’d even seen my own book myself.

Several of these sites have comment boards, with positive comments about the book. I’m ‘another good norse writer for my norse noir’ according to ‘Certinty’. Yeah, but not so great that Certinty is prepared to stump up €5 for a legal copy.

It’s bloody infuriating to first see your book offered free for download at a torrent site, and then to see the comments by those who downloaded it saying what a great read it was. Better than them slagging it off, I suppose. But still not hard to keep the teeth ungritted in chagrin.

To begin with the music business was made to suffer by internet pirates, and it doesn’t seem that the books business has learned all that much from music’s tough time. It’s the way the world functions. Someone puts up a fence, and a horde of others won’t rest until they find a way around it.

So let’s take a look at this. It’s not piracy in all its colourful trappings. It’s not sticking it to the man. It’s not a blow for freedom and it’s not ‘sharing’. Let’s call it what it is; it’s thieving, as surely if the guy who described me as ‘another good norse writer’ had put his hand in my pocket and extracted a fiver from my wallet. Personally, I’d like to poke him in the eye, or maybe borrow his car for an afternoon. Perhaps he wouldn’t mind if were to pitch up at his house one day, drink all the beer in his fridge, belch and tell him what a great guy he is before strolling off down the street.

He wouldn’t walk into Waterstones, grab a copy off the shelf and walk out with it, so why the online version of the same thing? It’s because he can and it’s out of sight and out of mind. It’s practically human nature. Leave something lying around in full view and not firmly nailed down, and sooner or later someone will sneak off with it.

Earlier this year award-winning Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria announced that she would be retiring from writing and would be looking for a job after discovering that more illegal copies of her novel El Contenido del Silencio (the Contents of Silence) had been downloaded than it had sold legally. This is despite the book not even being available as an ebook, but distributed as a scanned pdf.

Spain is, apparently, right at the top of the chart for illegal downloads. China and Russia see a higher volume, but it seems that on a per capita basis, Spain is where the work of artists, musicians and writers is seen as something that should be free.

Bizarrely, Lucía Etxebarria was lambasted for her decision. If she were a shopkeeper who decided to pack up her business because shoplifters were eating up her profits, would those same people have told her to keep going because they like having her shop there but don’t actually want to buy anything? I think not. Most people would sympathize and agree with her.

What’s infuriating isn’t that Certinty has deprived me of a relatively small amount of cash, although lots of small amounts can add up to the difference between making a living and going broke, but the fact that he’s stolen from me, my agent, my publisher and a few other people along the way.

Writing for a living is a precarious business, especially for a brand-new writer who has a way to go yet to become properly established. If the book doesn’t sell well enough, possibly because stolen copies are doing the rounds, my excellent publisher is less likely to commission any more books. I’ll have to find another way of earning a living (not for the first time) and there’ll be no more from this ‘good norse writer’ – legal or otherwise.

You never see a ‘company’ handcuffed and paraded before the press. But in this part of the world, pictures of flesh and blood criminals often appear in the newspaper or on TV.  Mostly, they are low-level criminals who were caught holding the illegal goods. Holding the bag so to speak.

They are presented at press conference with rows of uniformed officers looking on as the accused sits in front of desk loaded with parcels containing contraband. Most of the time the parcels contain drugs.

Next time you look at a drug suspect sitting handcuffed as kilos of drugs are displayed, remember this deliveryman was paid to deliver a product.

Now and again a missing piece of the story pops up in the press.

The accused at the table is the tip of iceberg but what sunk the Titanic laid underneath and it was huge. Organized crime is the forces that build this force of criminal nature. It creates, operates, manages and controls a chain of supply; a chain of distribution, and it has operational chiefs, people of influence and status, as well as significant financial and legal talent. In many ways, it is like many other businesses. All of this chain is to source, process, and distribute without undue risk to the principals who earn windfall products from a product that is illegal. Meth possession will likely land the end user in prison.

The end user is at the same level as the delivery guy, the poor mule, who sits alone. Those are the two faces you see over and over. What about the others? Isn’t it time for at least a show of looking inside the organization part of organized crime?

The recent case of 30 Thai hospital and clinics supposedly implicated in buying and selling pills with the active ingredient called pseudoephedrine, an essential chemical compounded needed to make meth—one extremely nasty, ugly drug—is a rare look at a hidden part of the chain. Let’s get out of the way a couple of things that you should know about meth and crystal meth before we get to the hospitals and clinics. These drugs put people in the hospital or the grave. Here are some of the short term and long-term effects: panic and psychosis, convulsions, seizures, permanent damage to blood vessels of the heart and brain, liver, kidney and lung damage. That’s enough. You don’t have to examine every last body to know when you are in the presence of a massacre either.

Last year the Guardian reported: “The number of methamphetamine users in Thailand will reach 1.1 million this year, the head of the country’s anti-drug police told the Guardian – equivalent to one in every 60 citizens.”

That’s a big, profitable market.

According to the Bangkok Post, police found a senior pharmacist at Udon Thani Hospital had a role in diverting some 65,000 cold and allergy pills out of the hospital. Another pharmacist at a hospital in Uttaradit is implicated in using his hospital to launder 975,000 pseudoephedrine-based pills. The upcountry hospitals are under investigation. The reported number of pills from various hospitals and clinics no matter how many times you read them simply don’t add up in the story. They rarely do in such cases as it seems math and journalistic skills rarely come together in one person in Thailand. The upshot is that a huge quantity of the pills with the essential ingredient to make meth was being sold out of the backdoor of hospitals and clinics.

There was no report of any arrest being made of anyone from a hospital or clinic.

The story about how a vast hospital and clinic chain pumped millions of pills into the meth chain of production wasn’t discussed. As a classic case of how the free market model of capitalism really runs when left without adult supervision, is itself illuminating. As this was a story about hospitals and clinics, you gather they’d run a photograph of such a building. That didn’t happen.

Would you like to guess what ran picture the newspaper ran with this story instead… give up? Three delivery people at a table surrounded by a platoon of cops and right in front of them were 2.5 million speed pills and 50 kilos of crystal meth.

We get the message. The story is about the role of hospitals and clinics in the meth production in Thailand. But none of those people wanted their picture in the newspaper. The pool of photography subjects is pretty obvious from the arrested mules. These are the human livestock of the drug business. The same class of people who were hunted down and some 2,500 killed some years ago during the last ‘war on drugs’ in Thailand.

Not that we really need a lesson in the obvious.  Yet we have come to not question the lesson any more. We assume those in the picture are those in the story. Even though we’d likely never find a factory worker’s picture in a story about he CEO of Ford or Shell Oil. In the illegal drug business, it is the employees, the working class, those who drive the truck who become the face of the problem, who get all the press coverage.

It is unlikely to happen during the lifetime of anyone now alive that your descendants will open an electric screen and look at faces of high-level officials from the private and public sector sitting at a table handcuffed for their role in the drug trade. Things don’t work like that at the present time in most places. Getting a piece of the chain in the illegal drug business is a guaranteed way to getting your hands of some of the massive profits.

Life is good when you’re rich.  Unfortunate for a few mules lost along the way. But as Darwin taught us we inhabit a world of survival of the fittest. And a degree in pharmacology also helps.

The Guardian informs us that the adult novel being prepared by the author of Harry Potter may prove to be a crime novel.

Perhaps JK Rowling will agree to write for this blog of ours.

Then again perhaps not. Only because she clearly already has her own outlets into the web-o-net. The Guardian quotes something she “tweeted” in its article. It also quotes tweets about her book-to-be from Ian Rankin and Val McDiarmid. This blog, in comparison to the world of Twitter, is a venue for ivory tower philosophizing and Tolstoyan word counts.

I haven’t yet read the Potter series, because (a) my oldest child is four years old and I hear that it might scare him and (b) because I resist all things hyped and therefore was not among the adults reading it on the train on the way to work a few years back. Still, JK has been one of the few elements of publishing in the last decade to have been hugely profitable, keeping the industry sort of afloat, much like Dan Brown. (I have read Dan Brown, and I certainly hope JK’s books are better than his…)

Perhaps her move from children’s fiction into crime is an attempt to gain literary acceptance by the lit fiction snobs, while also producing a book that more than three dozen people will want to buy? After all, John Banville writes mysteries under another name (and I bet they sell better than “Doctor Copernicus,” his excellent, erudite and moderately unfathomable novel about the Polish astronomer who developed the concept of the heliocentric universe, didn’t have much sex, and was quite nasty to his family.) Ian McEwan’s “Saturday” is a crime novel, though fewer people get slashed in it than in his earlier literary works, like “The Comfort of Strangers.”

The Guardian speculates that, as a declared fan of Dorothy L. Sayers, JK is likely to turn in a manuscript that’s a “Poirot-esque” cosy. I assume they refrained from writing “Wimsey-esque” because no one but JK Rowling reads Dorothy Sayers any more and therefore wouldn’t connect her to Lord Peter Wimsey or even know who he was. They might think it was a misspelling of Wimpy-esque and wonder why JK was writing in the style of an old British hamburger chain or a company that builds housing for the lower-middle-class.

I think it unlikely that JK’s book will be Wimseyesque. I’ve only heard a little of the plots of Harry Potter, but I suspect she’ll be far grittier, more startling and even rather scarier than any of the “Golden Age” novelists.

That doesn’t mean I expect Greg Iles-style psychos probing toddlers with power tools. But the crime will have to be pretty nasty. After all, given the kinds of gruesome shit that goes down in contemporary crime fiction, if the villain isn’t a total sicko, who would even notice that it’s a crime novel?

There’s a faded scrap of paper pinned up over my desk, taken from the NUJ’s magazine a long time ago and setting out Orwell’s often-quoted six rules from his essay ‘Politics and the English Language.’ Apart from the fact that it doesn’t mention the internet or daytime TV, that essay is as relevant to day as it was then, and Orwell’s rules are no worse for being quoted yet again;

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.

3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.

4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.

5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

6. Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.

I just have to lift my eyes above the top edge of the laptop’s lid to see these in clear view on the wall and although the magazine article it was scissored from all those years ago is yellowing and faded, it’s a vital reminder that keeping it straightforward generally works best.

It’s also a sometimes painful reminder that all of us fail in this department at some point, letting something go that could have been less pompous or more precise.

I grew up in a houseful of books and after graduating from Biggles, etc, there wasn’t much for it but the grown-up shelves. There were Dad’s books, Maugham, Hardy, Kipling, Tolkien Dylan Thomas. Another shelf up and scattered round the house were Mum’s books, Robert Graves, Georges Simenon, Margery Allingham, Sjöwall & Wahlöo, Evelyn Waugh, Lawrence Durrell, PG Wodehouse and Patricia Highsmith.

Then there was A Homage to Catalonia, which I picked up probably because there was a picture of men with rifles on the cover and something about war on the back cover. I devoured the book during a family holiday in Spain, and considering Franco was still alive and very much in power at the time, I can understand why my parents were relieved when I had finished it.

George Orwell’s stark account of his time fighting on the losing side in the brutal Spanish Civil War that served as a dress rehearsal for WW2 was a revelation and my teenage years were punctuated at intervals by Coming Up for Air, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Animal Farm, the terrifying menace of 1984, the Road to Wigan Pier, Down & Out In Paris & London, and the rest.

It’s said that many of the tastes you develop in your youth will stay with you for the rest of your life and although I’ve managed to leave Biggles (mostly) behind me, I still have a fondness for those now deeply unfashionable children of their own time, Maugham, Hardy and Kipling – and Orwell. Mind you, the sound of a canvas, wood and wire Tiger Moth overhead still brings a lump to the throat.

Writing didn’t come easily to Orwell. What made him a great writer wasn’t so much the adroitness with words that he forced himself to learn, but the questioning sharpness of his eye as an observer that must have come naturally. Writing was something that Orwell fought with and my guess is that his determination was to write, not to be a writer. Nota bene, fledgling writers, there’s a clear difference there between the two. Orwell won his personal battle with the written word, and in the process learned to produce English that is a model of clarity that leaves his work, even sixty-two years after his death, looking remarkably undated.

He had more than his fair share of the 20^th century’s best lines; ‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others’, not to mention the concepts of newspeak and thoughtcrime that people who have never read one of his books can quote. I once worked for a company where the staff habitually referred to the offices as the ‘Ministry of Truth’, with the original building, Senate House , that Orwell based his Ministry of Truth on coincidentally less than a mile away.

Whatever is personal failings (Cyril Connolly,  a now largely forgotten contemporary of Orwell’s, dropped the remark that Orwell ‘could not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry’), there are few observers and commentators on the twentieth century who have managed to get under the skin of life and events – and stay there  – as sharply and accurately as George Orwell did.

A couple of weeks ago a man visited a lawyer’s offices in Reykjavík. There’s nothing unusual about that. In this debt-stricken country, lawyers prosper and collection agencies are one of the few real growth industries.

It seems that this particular man had borrowed a relatively modest amount of money to buy himself a motorbike. Again, nothing out of the ordinary there. Except that the he had defaulted on his bank payments and the accumulated interest, fees, etc amounted to roughly seven times the original sum.

That’s also nothing out of the ordinary. But this time something snapped. We don’t know just what, as the case is still under investigation. However, the man pulled a knife and stabbed the lawyer before being pulled away and disarmed by another of the legal eagles, a former sporting hero who was also injured in the fracas. The man who was on the receiving end of the attack was still in hospital in a coma at the time of writing.

In South-East Asia or Central America, this might hardly be news, but this happened in Iceland – supposedly one of the most peaceful, safe, law-abiding places in the world.

The news of this struck an unnerving chord with me.

A year and a half ago I was still deep in writing Cold Comfort (yes, this is partly a shameless plug for my new book, published in the UK this week) and during a visit to Iceland was talking to one of my wife’s numerous cousins, someone I’ve known well for the best part of thirty years. This was someone who had come very badly out of the financial crash and who has since become part of the exodus, emigrating to start afresh abroad.

At that time the crash was still very fresh. The full force of  the government’s swingeing cuts that left the police, health service, education and every other aspect of the public sector fighting to make ends meet was starting to bite hard. People were losing their homes and jobs at an alarming rate in a country that hadn’t seen any genuine hard times since the herring disappeared a generation ago. Iceland’s rickety, small-scale, seafood-based economy had been solid enough for recessions in neighbouring Europe to pass virtually unnoticed. But that changed as the owners of Icelandic banks decided that they wanted to be world-class players.

When we were talking, the cousin had lost one job, counted himself lucky to have found another to tide him over for a few weeks, and was preparing to ship out. We were talking over what had happened, and he said, almost out of the blue; ‘you know, someone’s going to snap one day and kill one of those bastards.’

By ‘those bastards’ he meant any one of the myriad moneymen who were either pulling in the debts that people had accrued as the payments on those wonderful foreign currency loans went through the roof, or else one of the bankers who sold those loans and financial packages so energetically in the months and years before the crash.

His remark stayed with me and I thought it over, back and forth. I already had most of the central plot of what I was working on, but wanted a sub-plot to run alongside it, and came up with Jón the plumber. There’s nothing unusual about Jón the plumber’s predicament. He’s an ordinary blue-collar working Joe and I know a dozen people like him in Iceland who have taken a hit to a greater or lesser extent in the last few years.

Without giving away too much, Jón the plumber snapping under the pressure and trying to take things back into his own hands after being beset by circumstances became an integral part of the plot of Cold Comfort. He’s certainly not based on anyone in particular. There was no need to. There’s someone like him in every town and village. He just jumped off the screen.

The real-life case of the man who stabbed the lawyer has been greeted with shock in the Icelandic media, but  deep down, there’s no real surprise that this has finally happened. If there’s surprise, it’s not that this has occurred, but that it took so long.

When I wrote the story of Jón the plumber that roughly parallels the sad tale of the guy who stabbed the lawyer, I had no

real belief that something like this would actually happen. Icelanders tend to take the brickbats that life throws at them, complain loudly, and wait for the next one. In a law-abiding place like this it’s rare for people to take the law into their own hands, and seeking physical revenge for a perceived wrongdoing is something that belongs in the Saga Age, not in comfortable present-day Iceland.

It sends a shiver down the spine.

Cold Comfort is published in the UK by Constable & Robinson on the 15^th of March as both paperback and e-book.

The hardback US version was published by Soho Crime in January.

Cold Comfort will be published as Kalter Trost by Lübbe Verlag in Germany on the 20^th July and by Karakter in Holland as Schrale Troost later this year.

(This continues my series of autobiographical vignettes, intended to demonstrate the neuroses, ambition, talent, chance, mischance, place, alcohol and attitude that go toward the creation of a writer. The tales may be instructive or proscriptive. This one concerns work –– something writing should never be.)

In the summer after my second year at Oxford, I found a job at Andre Deutsch. Though I worked in the mail room and answered the telephones, I had found a place in the world of books. It also dawned on me as I came up the long escalator at Tottenham Court Road Tube station, that I had probably done my last day’s work in a crappy job.

Deutsch was a small publisher in London’s Bloomsbury area just along Great Russell Street from the British Museum. Unlike today’s publishing megaliths, it was run by one man, the eponymous director, Andre Deutsch. Hungarian-born, he was the charming patriarch of a firm which fitted in its entirety into two townhouses. He was the publisher of great names like V.S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Ogden Nash.

The realization that I had graduated from the depths of my previous employment in supermarkets, DIY megastores, kitchens, and building sites was almost enough to make me happy. Unfortunately I was 20, which meant I was a boy in a rush, unable to enjoy the moment and doomed constantly to wish himself somewhere else until the age of about 41 when I eventually saw that I had it pretty good.

The first job I managed to hold down for any length of time was when I was 16 at a DIY warehouse in Croydon. One fellow asked me to carry his bag of cement on my back to his car, which I did. He gave me a 10 pence tip. Which wasn’t much, even in 1983.

The DIY store was in a sleepy suburb of Croydon called Sanderstead. Eager for the bright lights of West Croydon, where there were frequent knife fights on the street, I secured a job at the new Ponderosa Steakhouse there. And found myself in the middle of a knife fight in the kitchen.

I was hired as a fry cook. My job was to take the plates of steak, chicken and fish grilled by a big West Indian fellow, Irving, and a cocky young blonde fellow, Dave, and to add fried chips, fried onion rings, or baked potatoes. I did this in the company of a Greek lad named Christos. Bad blood soon developed between Dave and Christos, mostly because Dave liked to suggest that Christos wanted Irving to put his meat in Christos’s deep fryer. If you see what I mean.

While the ugly banter accumulated layers of spite, I spent my nights wrestling the baked potato tray out of the oven. It was above head height and the tray expanded during cooking so that it would only come out when yanked rather hard. In the process a dozen or so superheated baked potatoes would cascade onto my face and arms, sometimes even crushing the brown Smurf hat I was compelled to wear.

One night after closing up late, I was draining the boiling fat from the fryers and the other boys were cleaning. Dave squeezed Christos’s backside. The Greek wheeled on him with a long carving knife. Irving jumped between them. Dave was pressed to the grill by Irving’s bulk, which tipped over on him because of Christos’s momentum. On moment they were writhing against each other, yelling insults and warnings, the next they all went suddenly still and quiet. If I hadn’t been there, I think they’d have kissed. Maybe they did the next night, because I quit on the spot.

I moved on from there to the Sainsbury’s supermarket in Purley. Had I not worked there, I expect the Sainsbury boys could’ve afforded a few more old masters or perhaps even a divorce from Nigella Lawson, such was the quantity of meat pies, yoghourts and Scotch eggs I consumed in the cosy little corner of the storeroom allotted to me.

It’s possible that I displayed some attitude there, because when I eventually quit the personnel manager said, “I think that’s for the best.” I told her it was a shame really, because I felt myself to have been on a rocket ship to the stars with Sainsbury’s but had come to be disillusioned with the company’s ideals. “As I say,” was all she said.

In any case, I had acquired an extraordinary dislike of the manager. After one stock-taking night, I handed him my account of how many vanilla puddings and packets of smoked ham occupied the long fridge on my deli aisle. He glanced at it and tossed it back to me. “No continental sevens,” he said. His voice was South London, nasal, contemptuous, no lip movement.

“I thought they looked nice,” I replied. “Anyway I didn’t know we weren’t supposed to use them.”

“You was told,” he barked.

“I … weren’t,” I stammered, unsure if using correct grammar would’ve made him doubly upset.

His balding, ginger-haired deputy once told me I could be on a rocket ship to the stars if I stayed with Sainsbury’s. This was when he was trying to convince me that I should apply for the company’s management programme instead of studying at Oxford, where I had secured a place, perhaps because of my predilection for the continental seven. “You go to uni, you’ll end up with a stuffy job at a bank, when you could be working here,” he said, gesturing expansively at the dog food and the cat litter.

During my first university vacation, my Dad found me a job on the building site where he worked in central London. It gave me a deeper respect for my Dad, as I joined him on the freezing, midnight-dark platform at East Croydon Station at ten to six in the morning. I shivered in my donkey jacket, but my Dad had already done a half hour of yoga and was eager to be at his day. Which technically started while it was still night and about five hours before I would’ve got out of bed had I been back at college.

We were trying to stop a hospital falling down. A massive wing of the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital had unintentionally been built over the underground stream of the River Fleet. And it was listing rather to one side, slipping down into the caverns of the river.

I would arrive at work still long before sunrise and share a cup of tea with a fifty-year-old Irish navy. Paddy, for indeed this was his name, slept in the park and was never quite sober or coherent. He smelled worse than a town near my childhood home in South Wales where the steelworks pumped out the noxious raw-fart of methane and coal-tar gas round the clock. Then I would set off with Vic, the West Indian carpenter, to put up shelves and tear out other shelves which had been warped by the tilt in the building.

Vic was in his late fifties. He didn’t get a lot of work done. He liked to tell me to “take it cool and easy.” It took him about five seconds to pronounce all the Os in “cool.” Gurdip Singh, the foreman, used to urge me to get Vic to work faster. I told him he ought to take it cool and easy. He lost his cool at that point. Or that may have been when he found me, Vic and the lift man playing cricket with a length of wood and a wadded up rags and twine.

The best part of the job was when a young Irish lad and I did something which today would probably fall foul of a dozen safety laws. Even then it seemed pretty reckless and irresponsible.

A long wall of cinder block had to be demolished on the sixth floor. We did this with gusto, smashing a sledgehammer through the light bricks. Then we were supposed to fill wheelbarrows and take the debris down the lift to the dumpster.

But we saw a short cut.

The dumpster was below the end of our corridor. It was only seven or eight yards from the building. If we threw the bricks down, we’d save a great deal of time. Time in which we wouldn’t have to work, because the foreman had told us our job would take all day.

Workers on building sites prefer, incidentally, not to do any work.

So we cheerfully hauled ten-pound bricks off the sixth floor, landing most of them in the dumpster below. Some of them missed. And none of the workers passing the dumpster en route for the canteen were injured, though one of them shouted something at us after a near miss. He was from Newcastle with a thick Geordie accent. We’d have had no idea what he was saying, had we been doing anything other than dropping bricks on him from a height of eighty feet.

After university, instead of returning to Andre Deutsch I decided I’d see the world through journalism. Little did I know that a whole host of crappy jobs – though jobs no one else would know were crappy – awaited me. (Read on, next week.)
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The wait for a successor to Amadeus is over.  MOZART’S LAST ARIA by Matt Rees www.mattrees.net
www.themanoftwistsandturns.com