In 1988 I wrote a novel about Mexico, Maximilian’s Garden. My agent sold it to a publisher and shortly thereafter the acquiring editor left to go back to her old job as a journalist. The book, abandoned by its shepherd, became that most dreaded of objects, an orphan, passed from editor to editor in the publishing house until, like a game of musical chairs, it landed on some unwitting editor who already had plans for retirement. The book was published in 1990 - sort of - fell into a coma and died.

I thought about that novel often after that, wondered what I could have done to prevent its untimely death. Had no idea. None at all.

Let’s back up a bit. If left to my own devices I’d still be writing books the way I wrote Maximilian’s Garden, with ballpoint pen on yellow legal pad.

Now that that’s out of the way, I can explain what happened to Maximilian’s Garden.

“Check out this Lanier computer, honey,” my husband said when the first monster home computers came out in the late eighties. “It’s revolutionary, memorizes what you’ve written and prints it out.”

He brought one home. I whimpered and whined. I told him I had my own way of doing things and what was I supposed to do with the thing, anyway.

Point of information: I’ve always been resistant to anything that involves understanding patent applications.

“Lanier offers classes in how to operate their machine,” he said.

He’s so reasonable.

I took a class. The Lanier wasn’t revolutionary. Each page had a discrete, inviolable number of lines. Try to exceed them - such as when you edit and rewrite - and the maneuvering required to do so was so onerous it made my eyes cross.

I threw out the Lanier, the pen and legal pad and began using an electric typewriter, which had its own set of problems. But never mind.

The Lanier gave way to the personal computer. PC Magazine began arriving in the mail at our house.

“Look at this, honey,” my husband said. “A personal computer is just the thing for you. You’ll save time. You can rewrite to your heart’s content.”

A computer promptly arrived in my office. Bit by bit, arguing and complaining, I learned how to write on it. I had to admit, it did save time, and I could rewrite and rewrite and rewrite without destroying a single tree.

Then something called the internet turned up. A gimmick, I thought to myself. Who needs to e-mail someone when you can pick up a telephone?

Of course, in no time my husband had us hooked up to cyberspace.

“Look at this, honey, something called e-books,” he said. “They put books on the internet.”

I liked reading books with words on paper. My husband loves gadgets. He began reading e-books.

It wasn’t until 2009 that I discovered that one of my books, The End of Marriage had been put on Amazon Kindle in 2002 by its publisher, who was one of the first to reserve electronic rights in book contracts. I had signed away electronic rights when I signed the book contract. Everyone did. No one thought there would ever be an advantage to owning electronic rights.

But I owned the electronic rights to Maximilian’s Garden. It was a book about Mexico. Mexico was in the news.

I reread it. It was like meeting an old friend and picking up the conversation where you left off 20 years before. But 20 years ago I was still a baby writer; I didn’t have the skills I have now. I decided to rewrite it, first page to last. I renamed it Children of Guerrero in honor of Gonzalo Guerrero, the first Spaniard to set foot on the Yucatan peninsula, the father of the mestizo.

So now Children of Guerrero is on the internet, an e-book that can orbit the world in a cometary flash of light. The business of delivering books to their readers is being reinvented as I write this. Who knows what magical discovery is on the horizon? All I know is that writers have been unshackled, their options expanded. Worthy books, long out of print, can be brought back and given second lives. With the internet nothing is lost. Books can’t be orphaned or killed. They float through cyberspace, an unimpeded ghostly chorus of the reborn.

I came home from my first Bouchercon with a bagful of books, a bunch of new friends and a bit of a cold, so forgive me if I keep this brief…

For those unfamiliar, Bouchercon is the Big Kahuna of mystery/suspense conventions. It’s a reader-oriented convention, meaning that authors have a chance to interact with fans, and vice-versa. On the author side, every year reads like a list of “Who’s Who” in the mystery/suspense world. This year’s attendees included Lee Child, Val McDermid, Denise Mina, Laurie King, Kate Atkinson, Gregg Hurtwitz, Michael Connelly, oh hell there were so many people just look here if you’re curious…

The point being it’s awesome and kind of overwhelming. For every person I got to meet, there were two more I somehow missed who I dearly would have loved to have encountered. There are panels galore, on every conceivable mystery-writing topic and on the publishing industry in general. We had a wonderful hospitality suite run by Sisters In Crime, Northern California, who kept the place stocked with an amazing range of snacks, and most importantly, coffee (Bouchercons primarily run on two things: coffee and booze).

The best part for me was that I got to hang out with a bunch of awesome writers from Soho Press, and a team from Soho Press itself. I’d had the pleasure of meeting a few fellow Soho authors, Cara Black and Stuart Neville, on previous occasions, but this was the first time that I got to meet James Benn, Henry Chang and Jassy MacKenzie. What a great bunch of folks. I know this because we traveled as a pack. Just call us the Soho Criminals. Oh yes…there may be a band…watch out, Bouchercon St. Louis…

Here we are in front of M is for Mystery, preparing for our pre-con kick-off event. I think for many in the audience the highlight was getting to hear from publisher Bronwen Hruska, publicist Justin Hargett and marketing maven Ailen Lujo, who together provided an inside peek at the workings of a publishing house, along with a taste of their real passion and enthusiasm for the business.

On Saturday, we trooped over to Oakland to do a meet and greet at the Northern California Independent Bookseller’s Association convention. After that, I sort of strong-armed the group into taking the ferry back to San Francisco (we’d BART-ed over). Okay, look, the ferry is awesome! It just is. Only takes a half hour. And it was a beautiful day.

Here are Cara and Jassy enjoying the cruise.

And here are the Soho Criminals assembled. I was really happy that everyone liked the experience as much as I do. If I lived up there, I’d commute this way as often as possible.

Publisher Bronwen Hruska, Henry Chang and Jassy MacKenzie, at dinner in North Beach.

All of us, post-pasta coma…

Central to all Bouchercons is the hotel bar. It has been rumored that Stuart Neville and I closed the bar one evening. This is not exactly the truth. One Gary Corby was also involved. Gary is a fine author and a great companion. He is also Australian. And a Vegemite pusher. I offer as evidence the photo below…

I will neither confirm nor deny that a tube of the stuff made its way into my suitcase and home to Venice Beach…

To sum, if you read or write mysteries, thrillers, suspense novels, or even strange literary hybrids such as Rock Paper Tiger, you owe it to yourself to get to a Bouchercon. Just watch out for that Corby guy. I hear the Vegemite is addictive…

“That’s okay, we’re Americans.”
So said my wife several years ago, at the Dorchester Hotel in London. We were on a research trip to visit locations for my Billy Boyle World War II mystery series. I had wanted to stay at the Dorchester Hotel, where General Eisenhower first bunked when he came to London in 1942, but the tab for one night was roughly equivalent to our monthly mortgage, so we decided to have tea at the Dorchester instead.
Another shocker. The cost of tea for two was about the same as the price of our hotel room for one night. It was one block from Hyde Park, and while not in the Dorchester class, it was a nice joint, and not cheap. Deciding to economize, we skipped the pink champagne course and went with an alcohol-free tea.
Big mistake. It was torture watching all the other afternoon tea-goers sip that refreshing, cool pink bubbly. We finished our sandwiches, and as the scones and clotted cream were about to be served, we informed our waiter, attired in white tie and tails, that we’d decided to have champagne after all. Drawing himself to attention, he informed us that it was not done to have champagne after the sandwich course. That’s when my wife uttered those words that made me proud.
“That’s okay, we’re Americans.”
He brought the champagne. It was delicious.
This disruption of the afternoon tea routine also loosened the fellow up a bit, and we were soon chatting about the history of the Dorchester and its role in World War II. He brought out a book on the history of the hotel, and proudly pointed out that the reinforced concrete structure gave the Dorchester a reputation as one of the safest buildings in London during the Blitz. The hotel was built in 1931 with the public areas on the lower floors covered by a three-foot thick concrete roof to support the weight of the rooms above. The elegant entrance was protected by sandbags, and bombs struck a number of times across the road in Hyde Park.

From this awkward Anglo-American encounter emerged several interesting tidbits that have become part of the Billy Boyle stories. Looking at photographs of suites at the Dorchester circa 1940, I imagined the rooms inhabited by Billy and his good friend Lieutenant (Baron) Piotr Augustus Kazimierz, otherwise known as Kaz. The last survivor of a wealthy aristocratic Polish family, Kaz has made the Dorchester his permanent home and provides a home for Billy between his adventures.
When I learned how secure the hotel was, immune to all but a direct hit, I daydreamed about sitting in the lobby, sipping champagne, as the Blitz raged outside. That figment of imagination stayed with me, so in the first book (cleverly titled Billy Boyle), Kaz and his true love Daphne Seaton meet for the first time at the Dorchester, and fall instantly in love. They stay at their table as their companions run for shelter, toasting each other and holding hands as the bombs drop outside, churning up victory gardens in Hyde Park.
There have been other serendipitous encounters while researching the Billy Boyle novels. In 2007 on a trip to Sicily to gather information for Blood Alone, we stopped by a farm which was on the site of a small but critical battle on the day after the invasion, when the Germans tried to counterattack and almost reached the landing area with their tanks. A small group of paratroopers, GIs and men gathered up from the beaches halted the attack on a ridgeline above the coast road. An Italian-speaking friend had visited the site, ten years previously, and had given me a letter of introduction, since my few words of Italian could never have sufficed.
I wanted to ask permission to walk the ridge, to get a sense of what the terrain was like, to get a feel of how the ground would have felt as Billy lay on it. What we didn’t realize was that it was Easter Monday, a special holiday in Italy, when family gathers together and food is abundant.
The farmhouse was surrounded by a gated wall, and I worked up my nerve to clang on the gate and offer this letter in Italian, from someone who’d been there years ago. A young man half-opened the gate, and mistaking us for lost tourists, started pointing down the road.
”Gela è l’est di qui.”
I held up the piece of paper, and he tried once again to tell me how to get to Gela, before reading it through. Then a smile broke out on his face and he raced inside, calling “Papà!”
The owner of the farm (Papà) and his wife escorted us into the courtyard and the family gathering. We were treated as guests by the entire extended family. We were the center of attention. We spent the entire afternoon eating, drinking and walking the land. We frantically thumbed our Italian-American dictionary as we searched for the right words.

I had heard about Sicilian hospitality, but this was the real thing. The sincere welcome (not to mention the fabulous food) helped to shape the Sicily that Billy encounters in Blood Alone, as he struggles to overcome amnesia in his wanderings over the Sicilian landscape.
But there was more to the day. The patriarch of the family, Cristofero, seated at the center, above, had gone through great lengths to keep the original battlefield intact. He proudly showed us the pillboxes and fortifications which still dotted the ridge above his fields of oranges and artichokes.
He also created a monument to the battle, which passersby can see from the road. On it are these words, so simply stated, so powerful.

Extreme were the losses. Supreme was the heroism, and from the sacrifice of these men is created the new history of Europe.

Each research trip has uncovered not only historical data, but essential truths as well. Whether at afternoon tea in London, or on Easter Monday in Sicily, everyday people have been the truest sources.

The present Israeli government seems to make a specialty of dropping the ball. The only thing the top ministers won’t drop is the buck. They’re very adept at passing that.

Testimony last week revealed the lack of responsibility at the top of the Israeli government. Before a committee investigating a fouled up military operation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have both said they take responsibility for the attempted takeover of a Turkish boat May 31 which left nine of the protesters aboard dead. Of course, they immediately added that “taking responsibility” doesn’t mean they were actually “responsible” for what happened.

That was someone else.

Netanyahu said it was Barak’s fault. Barak said it was the army’s fault, and also Netanyahu’s fault. On Aug. 11, the army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, testified. He said he “takes responsibility” for the operation, and then argued that it wasn’t a failure. In fact he was “proud” of the soldiers who took control of the boat, which was steaming toward Gaza to break the Israeli blockade.

So that’s all cleared up then. Nobody was responsible for the failures of the raid. But the raid was also a good thing. Even if it did result in the broadest international vilification of Israel for some years.

Read the rest of this post on my blog at The Man of Twists and Turns.

Rock musicians like to note that, had they not discovered their talents for destroying ear-drums, they’d have been criminals. It adds some edge to their pampered personae. Here’s my claim to edge: had I not been a writer, I’d have been locked up long ago, but not in a jail. At best I’d have been sedated.

I know this for sure, because when I’m between drafts of a novel I feel the old madnesses creeping up on me. The dark resentments whose origins I can’t quite nail down. The tension around the center of my chest and the heavy breathing and the tight jaw and the voice in my head telling me this isn’t fair, whatever it is. The flickering fantasies penetrating my mind when it lacks the focus that otherwise keeps it calm.

My wife sees all this before I do, at least consciously. “Maybe you ought to work on something else while you’re waiting to start a new draft,” she says, gentle and delicate, as if she were waiting for me to respond with an angry “I’m all right, dammit.”

I have to take a break, you see, because writing a novel requires for me at least 10 drafts. Read a book 10 times straight and see if you don’t get bored with it. Or really pissed off.

So when I get through a draft, I take a week or so before I get back into it. As the end of the draft approaches, I start to fret about that week. I can’t take an actual vacation, because I always tell myself that I don’t know precisely when I’ll reach the end of the draft and therefore I can’t book a trip in advance. I try to line up some reading related to the subject of the book, but sometimes the books turn out to be duds or I’m done with them in a day and a half.

This time, as I take a break between drafts of my novel about the Italian artist Caravaggio, I find myself sweating it out in the desert heat of Jerusalem. Enervating, indeed. I’m already a little fevered in any case, because I’ve been deep in the psyche of Caravaggio, who was both a brilliant artist and a duelist with an explosive temper.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower, so far…)

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be called “West Bank Story,” of course, and will be the tale of the rivalry between two gangs, one Fatah and the other Hamas. I’ve already scored a couple of the numbers (“Aisha, I just met the mother of a girl named Aisha” and “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and…I’d best not talk about it because the Hamas guys won’t like it.”)

I do have quite a track record at developing disastrous failed concepts for musicals. I’ve been driving my wife crazy with these ideas for years. This is inspired by the large number of distinguished writers who’ve penned opera librettos and discovered that writer-turned-lyricists have a special graveyard all their own in Hell. Vikram Seth, Russell Hoban and, most recently, Ian McEwan have turned their hand to it. None of them seem to be rivals to Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s greatest librettist, no matter how hard they’ve tried.

Which is why I’ve always thought it’s a better idea to write a failed musical. After all, did you ever see a musical that didn’t seem like it would’ve been better left in the librettist’s bottom draw – or in this case, his blog? Believe me, I know: I saw “Falsettos” on Broadway.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working on failed musicals which fall into the category first popularized by the Buddy Holly biosical (biography-musical, new word all my own) “Buddy” and recently by Green Day’s “American Idiot,” in which music people already love is jammed into a ridiculous storyline. (Ridiculous storylines are de rigeur in the Middle East, so maybe the Palestinian musical isn’t so silly…)

That brought me the following list of future Tony Award Winners:

BLOOD ON THE CHANTILLY LACE: A detective discovers that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died when their plane came down only because gangsters wanted to rub out the third, largely unremembered passenger, The Big Bopper.

FUGUE! The life of J.S. Bach, fun-loving father of 20 and writer of the scariest piece of music ever (Toccata and Fugure in D minor for organ).

I’M A BELIEVER: The songs of The Monkees performed in Gregorian plainchant by monks.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

I was the first journalist to interview James Snyder when he arrived in 1997 from a sinecure at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to head the Israel Museum, the country’s premier cultural institution.

Snyder had neat white hair, a trim build encased in a seersucker suit, and a black tie. This, in a land where dressing up means putting on a T-shirt that has sleeves. As I listened to his East Coast drawl, I took one look at him and figured he wouldn’t last.

Devotees of the Israel Museum can be thankful I was wrong. Snyder just completed a $100-million renovation of the museum, transforming a much-loved but confusing jumble into a sleek, user-friendly building.

After three years in which visitors could, more or less, only see the Dead Sea Scrolls and a large model of Jerusalem in the time of Herod’s Temple (still at the full entrance price), the museum reopened its full collection last week. The flashy redesign has attracted masses of Israelis and foreign tourists without making the place seem overcrowded.

The new museum sticks with the general features of the older building, which was designed in the late 1950s and inaugurated in 1965. A series of modernist cubes, the old building was arranged along the ridge above the 11th-century Monastery of the Cross, and beside the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. The original designer, Alfred Mansfeld, intended the museum to blend with its landscape, like an Arab village.

Unfortunately, Mansfeld, a Russian-born, Israeli architect, also had the idea of making visitors walk the entire length of the museum — uphill, a distance equal to four stories, and outside in a city that sits in a desert and is quite hot nine months of the year — before they could enter. The walk was, to say the least, unpopular. Particularly because when you got to the top, you had to go down some stairs to enter the galleries.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

JERUSALEM — Israelis like to point out that theirs is the only democracy in a Middle East otherwise dominated by repressive regimes. Given the performance of legislators in the parliamentary session that just ended here, you might be forgiven for asking: with democracy like this, who needs dictators?

The Knesset, Israel’s parliament, broke up last week for its summer vacation. The speaker of the Knesset, Reuven Rivlin, sent lawmakers on their way with an interview in an Israeli newspaper in which he described them as “pathetic.” Several human rights organizations slammed as dangerous to democracy more than a dozen bills that passed preliminary readings. The most abiding image of the session was surely the gang of right-wing legislators heckling and threatening a female Arab parliamentarian who had been aboard a Turkish ship intercepted by Israeli commandos en route for Gaza.

In a letter to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week, Debbie Gild-Hayo, director of policy advocacy at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, complained of “14 dangerous draft bills” introduced to the departing parliament.

“The Knesset is supposed to be a bastion of democracy,” Gild-Hayo wrote. “It seems an increasing number of Members of Knesset believe that their job is to silence those who do not share their views.”

The most headlines were devoted to a confrontation between conservative legislators and Haneen Zoabi, the female Arab lawmaker. Zoabi was aboard one of the Turkish boats intercepted May 31 by Israeli troops, which resulted in nine dead among the activists on board. They were protesting the Israeli blockade of Gaza by trying to run it.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

In Israel, the Jews control the banks! They fill all the top positions in the media! They are behind all the major political powerbrokers! They even print the money!

Someone should look into this, Oliver, because I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and I know you’ll agree. I think you’re the man to expose it.

You said in an interview published this weekend that Hitler was “a Frankenstein,” and then went on to add that the Dr. Frankenstein who created him was an amalgam of U.S., British and German industrialists. You added that the Nazis killed more Russians than Jews and opined that, in spite of this, we tend to think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing. (You said something else about having “walked in Hitler’s shoes…” but let’s just put that aside for now.)

On the one hand, Oliver, you’re an oaf who has had to apologize for his “clumsy association” about the Holocaust. Well, the art world needs oafs from time to time. Because on the other hand, Oliver, we all ought to remember that reality is much more sophisticated than the explanations of history which are handed down to us, honed and narrowed until they read very simplistically, ignoring inconvenient facts and allowing people to shout down those who point out such facts.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

JERUSALEM — Palestinian negotiators said again this week they’d refuse to re-enter direct peace talks with Israel unless the current partial freeze on construction in Israeli settlements is extended when its term runs out in September.

But as a report released this week by the Israeli human-rights organization B’Tselem reveals, a real settlement freeze would have to be a very, very big chill.

B’Tselem’s report, called “By Hook or By Crook: Israeli Settlement Policy in the West Bank,” documents the massive scope of Israel’s settlement operation. It says that hundreds of millions of dollars are being paid to settlers, real estate developers and settlement municipalities as incentives to expand the settlements. It also highlights the manner in which every layer of Israeli bureaucracy continues to be involved in an expansion project that successive Israeli governments have pledged in international forums to halt.

For the human rights group, it’s not an issue of politics. Jessica Montell, B’Tselem’s executive director, said that the inequality of life in the West Bank — rather good if you’re an Israeli and pretty bad if you’re Palestinian — is the most objectionable upshot of the settlements, which she adds are illegal under international law.

“In the West Bank, your rights are based on your nationality,” she said.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.