With US diplomats roaming the streets of Jerusalem, it’s like the intifada never happened.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

JERUSALEM — It’s like the intifada never happened.

American diplomats mobbed the streets of Jerusalem this week. Even Iran point man Dennis Ross, whose sad-sack demeanor was a frequent feature of the Oslo peace process, stopped by to keep the U.S. defense secretary, the Mideast peace envoy, and the national security adviser company.

Meanwhile, in Palestinian politics, where hatred of Israel once brought everyone together for secret terror summits, Hamas again hates Fatah, which hates Hamas and also dislikes itself. In Israel, the two most powerful men are Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak.

Just like the old days. Before the five years of violence known as the intifada that began in September 2000, when Palestinian riots turned into gunbattles and the Israeli army reoccupied all the Palestinian towns it had evacuated during the previous seven years of the peace process.

Except there’s one reminder this week that the intifada actually did take place: Fouad Shoubaki is still screwed.

The man who ran military procurement and budgets for Yasser Arafat was convicted by an Israeli military court Wednesday of handing on $7 million worth in arms to the Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, which used the weapons to kill Israelis during the intifada.

The court also found Shoubaki guilty of paying $125,000 (from Arafat) to fund the voyage of a ship called the Karine A. When Israeli commandos from the Shayetet 13 — the equivalent of the Navy Seals — captured the Karine A in January 2002, it was carrying 50 tons of guns, missiles and material, loaded on board by Hezbollah operatives off the Iranian coast.

Though the intifada was 15 months old at the time the Karine A was captured, many in Washington and other world capitals became convinced that Arafat really did think he was at war with Israel. They stopped talking about “putting the peace process back on track.” Until recently.

The Palestinians put Shoubaki in jail in Jericho. The Israelis said all along that he was just a fall guy being held for appearances sake. In 2006, when it seemed Shoubaki might be released, the Israelis raided the Jericho jail and captured him. His trial lasted three years.

In the court, Shoubaki claimed to “have sought peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis and to build neighborly relations.” He said he was close to current Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, who’s considered a moderate in favor of peace talks with Israel (although he won’t talk to them just now).

But the court also heard that Shoubaki admitted some unneighborly actions during his interrogation by the Israeli domestic security service, the Shin Bet.

He was the go-between for Arafat’s contacts with Imad Mughniya, a top Hezbollah operative believed to have been behind the 1983 bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks and the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that killed more than 300 people. (Mughniya, whose bloody resume was much longer than can be detailed here, died in a car bomb in Damascus in February last year. Hezbollah factions, the Syrian government and the Israeli Mossad have all been blamed for his killing at one time or another.)

Shoubaki maintained, under interrogation, that he was just following orders. Arafat signed off on all the payments and it was a time of war, so Shoubaki can’t be held responsible, he argued. At his sentencing next month, the 70-year-old looks certain to get life.

Shoubaki’s activities seem to belong to a distant era, now that the Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank are following orders from their U.S. adviser, Gen. Keith Dayton, and Israeli officials describe cooperation as better even than during the Oslo period.

But it’s only a few years, really. Many of the same people are in power on both the Israeli and Palestinian sides. The same is true of much of the U.S. negotiating team. While they may not be capable of messing up on the scale Arafat managed in the early years of the intifada, there are signs that what seemed like momentum two months ago is fizzling.

The U.S. had demanded a freeze on construction in the Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Special envoy George Mitchell was here this week trying to get the Israelis to agree to a partial freeze. Israeli officials say the Americans are now attempting to get the Israelis to stop some construction in return for a removal of restrictions in certain ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlements.

But such new construction will take up Palestinian land just like the settlements whose expansion Israel is on track to halt. And the settlements which will get the green light are where the building is most frenetic, because of high birth rates among ultra-Orthodox communities.

The Palestinians, too, are repeating the mistakes that led them to bring the Oslo edifice down about their own heads. A meeting set for next week in Bethlehem to reform the ruling Fatah faction may not go ahead, and even if it does it won’t sweep away as many corrupt old hacks as the party’s young guard wants.

Last time that happened, the young leaders decided to destroy the peace process, which formed the power base of the old cadres, so that Arafat would have to turn to them for support. It didn’t work out, of course, but there are plenty who might want to have another shot.

Shoubaki may be going to jail forever, but his old pals might soon need his Rolodex.

I’m very proud that my Palestinian crime novels are being published in 22 countries. Just this week I received copies from my Japanese publisher, Random House Kodansha, where THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM is just out. They’ve done a wonderful job, putting together a small, delicate edition and a mysterious cover. Of all the languages so far published, this is the first one where I really couldn’t understand a single word on the page. Which makes it so much more enjoyable to look at the columns of symbols running down the page and to think: “I wrote this…sort of.” It makes it mysterious, even though I know what happens in the end… Next, I’m looking forward to Omar Yussef in Greek.

Here’s my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

You can tell a great deal about a people from the conversations in language textbooks. After all, they aim to teach you the words people speak, but also the character of those teaching them and what it might be like to live in their society.

I first cottoned to this when I learned Spanish. My textbook included a basic conversation between a woman and her boyfriend. It went like this:

Maria: I love you! Do you love me?

Pablo: What is love, anyway?

Maria: I hate you!

See? Passionate, fiery Latins.

The same was true of Middle East languages. My Hebrew textbook featured highly critical know-it-alls (“Do you like this actress?” “I’m not crazy about her.”…. “How is the ice-cream here?” “It’s okay, but I know a better place for ice-cream.”) Thirteen years on, I have a more nuanced view of Israelis, but these conversations are still a good basic tool for understanding their deep sense of insecurity and need to assert themselves.

And the Palestinians? My first textbook of Levant Arabic featured conversations in which a fabled character named Jouha, known to be stupid, would end up being so stupid he came full circle and turned out to be cunning:

Neighbor: Jouha, can I borrow your donkey?

Jouha: I don’t have a donkey.

(Donkey brays inside Jouha’s house.)

Neighbor: You do have a donkey. I can hear it.

Jouha: What’s this? You don’t believe me, but you believe my donkey?

If you follow the peace process in the newspapers, surely there’ve been times when you’ve wondered if the Palestinians were being so absurd in their negotiations that they must have some secret, cunning plan up their sleeves? But they were just being dumb.

It turns out Jouha’s stupid AND mean. Which would make him a pretty good member of the Palestinian negotiating team. Not that the Israeli negotiators don’t have more than a touch of Jouha in them…

In my Omar Yussef novels, I try to capture the rhythms of Arabic speech. I also translate directly a number of very formal Arabic phrases, rather than simply putting them in a transliterated italics as is often done with snatches of foreign dialogue. I believe it gives the flavor of speech, and also a sense of how people relate to each other in a traditional society.

For example, there’s nothing poetic about “Good morning,” and what’d be the point of just italicizing “Sabah al-kheyr”? But try this: “Morning of joy.” To which you respond: “Morning of light.” Now that’s beautiful. And it’s what Palestinians say to each other every day.

When my characters receive a cup of coffee—the ritual that accompanies every meeting in the Arab world—they say “May Allah bless your hands.” The person giving them the coffee responds, “Blessings.”

There are, of course, Arabic phrases like this for so many situations and they often convey something beyond the basic meaning of the phrase. For example, in THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, my latest novel, a character tells a priest “Long life to you.” Omar and all the other characters present understand immediately that this means someone else has died. (The unspoken part of the phrase is, “…but eventually you’ll die like the guy whose death I’m going to tell you about.”)

How does this affect the plot or pacing of my books? Well, in some thrillers, a character can jump through a door and start berating everyone in sight, even beating them up. In Palestine, he has to—absolutely has to—wish them blessings from Allah and inquire after their health first.

If he didn’t, he’d be showing himself to be a really, really bad guy. And that would be giving away the ending.

I’ve been writing for a new blog founded by me and three other crime writers. One of them, the ever-inventive Christopher G. Moore, came up with the idea for a competition. He got the idea after I suggested in a blog post last week that my Palestinian detective character Omar Yussef ought to stand for Palestinian president. Here’s what Chris wrote on the blog and how to enter:

A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog

How to win a free book.

The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.

I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.

The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.

The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.

Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com

Fiction—and lately in particular crime fiction—can take us deep into alien cultures, through the emotions of the characters who act as our guides, translators and social commentators. The more alien the culture, the bigger the challenge to a Western author. Zoe Ferraris took on Saudi Arabia, one of the most closed cultures in the world, and succeeded. Her first novel “Finding Nouf” gave readers the excitement of discovery and the fascination of educating ourselves about a place we know so little—despite its importance to our own lives. Ferraris lifted the veil on this repressed yet fascinating culture, through a mystery based around the disappearance of a young girl. Her detective, Nayir Sharqi, is a desert guide from Jeddah but, true to contemporary Arabia, almost none of the action goes on in the desert. Instead, he spends his time as a nervous interloper in the compounds of the rich and in restaurants where men and women are allowed the forbidden frisson of actually dining together. It’s great to know Zoe’ll be continuing her series, because one of the things I took from “Finding Nouf” was a sense of the hidden depths of Saudi culture and family life, and a desire to know more. How did Ferraris do it? Here’s her explanation:

How long did it take you to get published?

Roughly ten years. It took a year to write the novel, then I spent years revising it while working on other projects and looking for an agent. Once a publisher bought the novel, it took two years for the book to hit the shelves. People tell me this is normal, but I never used to believe it. As far as I was concerned, I was waging a war against the demonic forces of evil to fulfill my destiny.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I say pick up anything that inspires the hell out of you and makes you wish you’d written it. Find that thing no matter what it is: TV, radio, and your neighbor’s chit-chat. You’ll learn everything you need to know from paying attention to what you love.

What’s a typical writing day?

Wake up, go to the computer and write. It doesn’t matter what it is – new writing, editing, compiling ideas, as long as I do a little writing first thing in the morning, it’s like some kind of hoodoo-voodoo that seals my fate for the rest of the day. Then I go swimming, walk the dog, eat lunch…and am drawn back to my computer like Li Grand Zombie.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

My latest book, CITY OF VEILS, is coming out next spring. It’s a sequel to FINDING NOUF, which is a mystery set in Saudi Arabia. My protagonists return – Nayir, a devout Muslim who is looking for love in a country that makes it difficult for him to interact with women, and Katya, a female forensic scientist who struggles to solve crimes in a male-dominated profession. I’ve also introduced two new characters – a Saudi homicide investigator and an American woman whose husband disappears, leaving her stranded in Jeddah. This novel is faster-paced than the first one, and I got to write about things that fascinate me: the lingerie industry, men with multiple wives, and the largest sand desert in the world.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

I guess it’s formula from the mystery genre. That’s the straight answer. Most things occur outside of the formula vs. originality question. Sitting down at the computer is about hounding out those things that really excite me, and facing up to my inconsistencies, and trying to figure out what my protagonist would really do if he was thrown into a sandstorm.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

Am I allowed more than one? Say, about twenty?

The first one that comes to mind, the one that always makes me choke up is the final sentence of Italo Calvino’s short story All At One Point. The story is about life at the beginning of the universe, when everything existed all at one point, and how cramped and frustrated we all were sharing an infinitesimally small point with the entire universe. But this wonderful woman, Mrs. Ph(i)Nk0, decides to make pasta for everyone – “she who in the midst of our closed petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, ‘Boys! The noodles I would make for you!’ a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same moment the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation…making possible billions and billions of suns, and of planets and fields of wheat…” Can you tell I’m Italian?

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

I am scanning the bookshelf and discovering that all of my favorite stylists are now dead.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Robert Ludlum…is still alive, yes? And I know George R.R. Martin isn’t dead yet. He’d better not be, he’s got another three books to write, and I’m still WAITING.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

Ten times as much as I ever need. I spend half my time researching. In fact, it takes a firm act of will to stop researching and get down to the business of telling a story.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?

From my ex-husband, who took me to a jacket souq in Jeddah and insisted on buying a trench coat because he loved Columbo and wanted to be like Peter Falk and go out and solve mysteries. Later, my character developed from all the men I knew in Saudi who were looking for wives but couldn’t find them because they had such a hard time meeting women in a gender-segregated society.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

Yes. It’s nothing graphic, but my parents owned a cabin in the Rocky Mountains and every weekend of my childhood we would leave the comforts of civilization for this utterly isolated grotesquerie of a house. Pretending that electricity, telephones and grocery stores were inessential, everyone threw themselves into it but me. I didn’t like sharing space with bears and cougars, knowing that the closest doctor was about a twenty mile walk through the woods. My defining moment was, at seven years old, seeing the stars in a clear mountain sky and learning that each of those pinpoints of light was actually a distant sun, with possible planets around it, and that in that whole wide universe we knew of no other life. Billions of suns, and….it’s just us? I was horrified.

That same year, Star Wars came out, offering (to my child’s mind at least) the possibility that we weren’t alone, that in fact the universe was full of Wookies and droids. A few years ago I realized that my worst fears revolve around isolation, and that in all of the novels I’ve written, my protagonists face it down one way or another.

Of course, why I chose to become a writer when isolation bothers me so much is still a puzzle.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

After getting published, it turns out you’ll have two jobs: continuing to write, and marketing your book. Arrange your own book tour locally – at bookstores, libraries, community gatherings. Even doing something once a month can be a help.

What’s your experience with being translated?

It goes like this: foreign publisher buys the book, translates it, sends you a copy. You open the book, scratch your head, close it, appreciate the cover art, then put it on the shelf. Sometimes you pass the shelf and wonder if they changed whole swathes of text, and if you’ll ever find out.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

I make a living at it now. I was lucky that my first novel sold in a number of countries, and all the advances added up to a living wage.

How many books did you write before you were published?

I wrote two, plus a number of unfinished projects that just ground to a halt. However, the two I did finish both went through so many overhauls that it was almost as if I’d written ten novels.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

I’m not sure I have anything that qualifies as officially weird, but the furthest back of the back-burner projects is a non-fiction book about the way soldiers talk. I have a whole stack of anecdotes, collected over the years, involving how creative and shocking and wonderful their use of English can be.

Journalists often dream of turning the more dramatic events to which they’ve been witness into fiction. Relatively few do so successfully, and certainly not with the panache of Dan Fesperman. He has stood out from the crowd of journalist-turned-thrillerists since his fabulous debut “Lie in the Dark.” It was based on his time reporting from Sarajevo during the Balkans War. It’s more informative than any history of that war, because it brings with it not merely dates and death tolls, but a much more important glimpse of what it’s like, emotionally, to live in a war zone. The graft that goes along with conflict tends to be ignored by historians, too, but for a crime writer it’s the most important element. “Lie in the Dark” won the Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger (not the last time the CWA awarded its first-novel prize to a former foreign correspondent reusing his experiences for fiction…. I won’t keep you guessing. I mean, me. Last year, for “The Bethlehem Murders” aka “The Collaborator of Bethlehem.”) Though it seems like a risky venture to ditch a journalistic career for something as financially iffy as writing fiction, Dan has made it work. He also notes that in these days of internet-fuelled media-industry carnage, he probably chose a more secure profession. I’m glad he did.

How long did it take you to get published?

Nearly forever. Or, in layman’s terms, almost two years after I finished my first manuscript. Just finding an agent took about a year and a half, mostly because a couple dozen told me to go take a hike, or, in the memorable words of one of the more callous rejections, “It is obvious from your letter and your submission that you know little about either querying or novel writing.” So maybe that’s why it seemed like forever, when, in the larger scheme of things, I suppose it didn’t really take that long. Or maybe it was that I waited until the age of forty-one to complete my first manuscript.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

Only Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, and within that slender volume only E.B. White’s brief but graceful essay on style. Anything beyond that and you’re only reading to avoid the looming confrontation with the keyboard.

What’s a typical writing day?

A typical ideal day, when things are going great and I’m deep into a manuscript, involves waking up with snatches of dialog already circulating like moths in the attic of my mind, followed by a quick cup of coffee consumed as I’m putting those thoughts to the page, followed by a solid three to four hours of writing, then maybe a bowl of popcorn for lunch, a few hours of re-writing, then a run and a shower, followed by several more hours of work until I look up at the clock and realize, “Oh, shit! If I don’t stop soon there won’t be any dinner on the table and it will be 7:30 and everyone in the family will be screaming for flesh, half-starved.” Followed by eight hours of sound sleep in which I dream about the characters in the book as they busily go about solving all of my pending plot problems. Which is partly my way of saying there is no typical day, only good ones and bad ones and ones in which, just when you’re thinking the day will be a total loss, you find yourself scribbling furiously in pursuit of some new thought that has just solved every problem you’ve encountered during the previous three weeks.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

God, I’m terribly awkward about plugging my own books, but maybe for a moment I can channel the spirit of some wonderfully gabby PR person who has just shut the cover, and, hopefully, is totally enthralled by what she has just read. So, let’s see, it’s a literate, intelligent thrill ride down the deepest corridors of the 20th century’s darkest history – most of it occurring in Germany – spent in the company of a rather personable American male professor and a mysterious and fairly tormented young female historian from Berlin. Both of them are on the trails of the doings of an old spy and an old arms maker, whose deeds of purported heroism and venality may have actually been something else altogether, and may even now hold the key to further heroism and venality. Which is why several others folks want to keep our two historians from succeeding. In short, it’s still the same old story, the fight for love and glory, a case of do or die. And if I continue in this vein, I’ll violate copyright law (if I haven’t already), so I’ll stop.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?

I try at all costs not to write by any formula – either self-imposed or by genre – but from time to time I do find myself obeying a small voice in the back of my head that keeps saying things like, “Pacing, you idiot!”, or “If you don’t kill someone soon, then I’m going to jump out a window, and so will half your readers!” I haven’t yet discerned whether that voice is coming from one of my editors, who has somehow managed to install a sinister micro-command module in the room where I write, or whether it’s the same voice which, when I’m cooking, always yammers, “You know, this would taste a hell of a lot better if you’d just throw it in the deep-fryer.”

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“I was looking right into Anne’s face, and doing so, I knew, and knew that she knew, that this was the moment the great current of the summer had been steadily moving toward all the time.” That’s from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, at the culmination of eight pages of sinuous sexual tension that has been building in a wonderfully lyrical account of a youthful summer romance. Basically, the book’s narrator is about to lose his virginity, and in this one sentence Warren captures all the sweetness and aching of youthful longing better than anything I’ve ever read. Even when I go back to it now I’m transported to one of those lonely summer nights when the whole world of experience seemed to lay just ahead, and every girl I cherished remained just beyond reach, yet there was also a palpable sense of potential, a realization that the era of fulfillment was nigh.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

This is going to be much lengthier than what you probably had in mind with that question, but Thomas Flanagan wrote an outstanding historical novel. The Year of the French, about the 1798 “rising” in Ireland. Within it was perhaps the best summation by imagery of an entire nation that I’ve ever come across, and I’ll share it with you in slightly truncated form (am I again violating copyright law? Well, at least this time it’s for a selfless cause):

“We are a land of ruins. Norman keeps and towers, and the queer round towers of which no man knows their antiquity, shattered manor houses of the Tudor times, the roofless abbeys and monasteries savaged by the men of Cromwell, their broken arches gaunt arms against the tumbling clouds, strongholds of O’Neills and O’Donnells, Burkes and Fitzgeralds, bashed and battered away, moss and ivy creeping over their stumps as they lie dreaming beneath the great sky of Ireland… As though in this land all, everything, has been sentenced from the beginning to break apart, fall into pieces, powerless against our harsh divinities of rain and wind and weed and tall grasses. All in ruin, the ruin of a world, sacked and burned and smashed, by Danes and Normans and Irish and English.”

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

I’ll say Jonathan Lethem, but I’ll say it with hesitation because he still has so many books yet to write, and to date has been a bit of a ventriloquist, channeling a lot of different voices (almost all of them wonderful to read, mind you). I also hesitate because most of my favorite stylists have either died – John Fowles comes to mind – or have wandered a bit from the path, such as LeCarre with his recent propensity to preach. I’ll also nominate a fellow who, with less timid editors, would perhaps be soaring in the grandest tradition of Southern baroque, and that would be Pat Conroy. But I’m guessing that due to his huge commercial popularity, his editors tend to cower and hold their blue pencils in abeyance, and as a result they often leave some of his more damaging excesses intact. Pare them away and you’ll discover a great deal of beauty, even for those who might find his work overly sentimental.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Arturo Perez-Reverte comes to mind. So does J.K. Rowling (ducks). But for a single book it would be hard to top Ian Rankin’s performance in Black and Blue.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

As much as it takes. With The Arms Maker of Berlin, that meant a full month of looking through declassified OSS records in the National Archives, plus two weeks of traveling in Bern, Zurich, and Berlin. But I was cheating a bit, too, because I’d lived in Berlin for three years back in the mid-90s, and had done loads of news reporting on lots of the issues of guilt, shame, and complicity that come into play in the book. So I like to think I went into it fairly well armed with insight.

Where did you get the idea for your main character?

I needed a digger, a seek of larger truths, but I didn’t want him to be a journalist, and I also wanted him to be a fellow who from time to time let himself fall far to deeply into the wormholes of his work, and the occupation of historian was just about the only one that fit.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

No. No pain at all. In fact, I regret to say that my childhood was blissfully boring and uncomplicated, because I am well aware that all those writers who lived through sheer torment and Hell, and years of maladjusted angst in the aftermath, certainly seem to have a far easier time attracting huge advances and massive publicity. I personally blame my level-headed parents for this tawdry state of affairs, and firmly believe that the long-overlooked issue of the neglect of writers from well-adjusted childhoods should be explored immediately and at great length, beginning with, say, a guest appearance on Oprah, in which the cover of my latest book would be featured prominently amidst great praise.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

The one I just mentioned sounds about right.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Ten languages so far, but hit or miss from one book to the next. Rumanian is probably the biggest surprise to date, although I was also a bit shocked when someone from an Italian edition asked for permission to cut one fifth of the text. It was the one time in my life when I was glad I couldn’t speak Italian, because I said yes.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

Not really entirely, since my wife’s job provides our health insurance and a salary of its own. But, yes, I quit my day job as a newspaper reporter after the third book, The Warlord’s Son. At the time it seemed like a huge gamble, but given what has become of the newspaper industry it’s now apparent that remaining on the payroll of the Baltimore Sun would have been far riskier.

How many books did you write before you were published?

My debut novel was my first manuscript, thank goodness. One of the few benefits of being a late starter, I suppose.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

I had the misfortune of having a reading/signing slotted for the same night and time as the first presidential debate during the 2004 campaign, in a very politically savvy neck of the woods in northern California. Even the staff of the bookstore had the debate running on a TV in a back room. Heck, I wanted to watch it, too. About five people showed up, and I seem to recall that even one of them asked a political question.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

A novel about the experiences of an Englishman swept up along with the Mongol hordes in the year 1226, an idea triggered by a throwaway line in a biography of Ghengis Khan which mentioned that, just before sacking Budapest, they sent an Englishman into the city to present their terms for surrender.

My latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.

But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.

There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.

The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.

So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.

Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.

On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.

But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.

It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?

If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.

Or is that just fiction, too?

Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.

Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.

Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.

Poison? By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Yasser Arafat’s body lies in the back of the presidential compound, beyond the parking lot, in a mausoleum of stone and glass. Two guards in ceremonial uniforms that seem out of place in the camouflaged guerrilla world of Palestinian militias watch over the angled stone marking the former leader’s grave.

The gravestone gives Arafat’s date of birth in Arabic characters as Aug. 4, 1929, though researchers long ago uncovered a Cairo birth certificate stating that he was born three weeks later. The tomb notes his death as occurring on Nov. 11, 2004, a full week after the date of news reports from his Paris hospital that he was either dead or brain-dead.

The dates aren’t all about Arafat’s grave that is in dispute. Palestinian politics has been torn apart in the last week after a senior Palestine Liberation Organization official announced that the symbol of his people’s struggle had been the victim of a poison plot. Farouk Kaddumi named the two main conspirators as then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Kaddumi, who was head of the PLO’s political bureau under Arafat and nominally responsible for foreign affairs, is engaged in a struggle for control of the Palestinian national movement with Abbas. A conference of their Fatah faction is called for next month where young reformers close to Abbas hope to sweep away corrupt, older leaders. But the conference is to be held in the West Bank and Kaddumi, who rejected the Oslo Peace Accords, has never returned from exile.

That’s probably why he chose to reveal the “findings” of his investigation into Arafat’s death last week in the Jordanian capital Amman, according to senior Palestinian officials in the West Bank. But it doesn’t defuse the firestorm of rage unleashed in Ramallah where Abbas has shut down Al Jazeera, the international cable station that aired an interview with Kaddumi.

Why is Abbas so mad about what could surely be have been dismissed as the ravings of an angry party rival of advancing years? (Well, actually Abbas tried that. His aides called Kaddumi, who was born in 1931, “a sick mind” and “demented.”) That didn’t fly because most Palestinians encountered on the streets of Ramallah on a recent weekend said Kaddumi’s accusation confirmed precisely what they believed happened to their old leader.

If there’s doubt about Arafat’s death, it’s largely because his successor Abbas has never released a report by Arafat’s French doctors on what killed “The Old Man,” as Palestinians call him.

There was no autopsy, yet reports emerge from time to time about what the French doctors suspected ended Arafat’s 35-year reign as head of the PLO.

In Israeli newspapers it has become accepted that Arafat died of AIDS and that Abbas covered it up because of the shame of that disease — an element I worked into the plot of my Palestinian crime novel “The Samaritan’s Secret.”

If there was no autopsy, the Israeli newspapers have written, it’s because the results would’ve been a shocking indictment of Arafat’s morals that would’ve dirtied the whole Palestinian struggle. But then Israelis always did like to demonize Arafat by suggesting he was a sexual pervert.

Now Kaddumi accuses Abbas of taking his supporter Muhammad Dahlan, a former head of Gaza’s secret police, to a meeting with Prime Minister Sharon where it was agreed that Arafat — as well as certain other Palestinian leaders who rejected peace with Israel — would be poisoned.

Kaddumi says he decided to publish the information only when Abbas ordered the party conference to be held in the West Bank town of Bethlehem on Aug. 4. He maintains that since Arafat’s death he’s the true head of Fatah and, therefore, he ought to decide where the conference takes place. (Palestinian officials in Bethlehem told GlobalPost recently that they doubt the conference will take place at all, because Fatah is so divided.)

Kaddumi isn’t the first to suggest Arafat was poisoned. In 2004, Arafat’s cabinet secretary Ahmad Abdel Rahman told the Arabic-language London newspaper Al Hayat that Arafat was poisoned “with gas” during a meeting at his headquarters a year before his death.

After shaking hands with a group of international and Israeli peace campaigners who had cycled to his besieged office, Arafat vomited. Later he told Abdel Rahman: “Could it be that they got to me? Is it possible that 10 doctors can’t find out what I’m suffering from?”

At that time, one of Arafat’s doctors told me that the leader had developed an infection in his blood that ultimately affected his internal organs.

When I visited Ramallah in those last days of Arafat’s regime, I found that people who spent a lot of time with the leader were deeply concerned. Not about Arafat’s blood, but about his state of mind. He went a year without washing the scarf he used to tie around his neck like an Ascot, one of them said. Another said he rambled about the old days in Beirut, whenever an aide would try to get him to address the disastrous situation of the Palestinian towns, which were subject to constant raids by the Israeli army.

It always struck me that one of them might have decided to put an end to the PLO chairman’s long decline.

When Arafat took a final turn for the worse, his long-time doctor, Ashraf al-Kurdi, prepared to come to him from his home in Jordan. Top PLO officials called Kurdi and told him not to make the journey to Ramallah.

Instead, Abbas and a few other PLO chiefs went with Arafat. They stayed by his side until he was dead (and then another week, perhaps, until they actually decided to announce his death).

Then they spent $1.75 million on his mausoleum. When he unveiled the completed structure in November 2007, Abbas said: “We will continue on the path of the martyred President Yasser Arafat.”

What kind of martyrdom it was, perhaps only Abbas knows.

Robert Rees (no relation) writes about my books in this week’s edition of The Forward. Admirably Rob read all three of the books before passing judgment, and a good review it is (as well as an interview, because we spoke for some time on Rob’s recent visit to Jerusalem). “Rees has created an award-winning crime series which provides a view of Palestinian society, warts and all, not previously available to a wider public,” he writes.

Referring to the latest of my Palestinian crime novels THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, he continues: “The local color — the dank, ancient casbahs, the bad mountain roads, the smell of angry, sweaty peasants — is rendered effectively. So, too, is the mortal danger. Yussef, visiting Nablus for the wedding of a policeman friend, is quickly sidetracked into a murder case, the consequences of which may prove catastrophic for the Palestinian Authority.” Read the full article.

Australian blog Reactions to Reading has a new review of the audiobook of my second Palestinian novel THE SALADIN MURDERS (published in the US as A GRAVE IN GAZA). Blogger Bernadette writes of my detective Omar Yussef: “If bravery is defined as taking action in spite of the fear you feel then Omar Yussef must be the bravest hero of them all” while also being a “terrifically believable character.”

I’m also delighted that while she acknowledges the book has a political context, she doesn’t feel I was lecturing her.

Hi everyone. I’m guest-posting, hoping Trin’s readers will stop and say hello, read what I have to say, maybe ask a question or two.

A question I’m always asked, Where do the ideas for your books come from? As close as I can come to an answer is to say that an incident or character calls out to me to be written. I begin without any plot in mind. It’s sort of like wandering into a store, looking around, examining the goods, and deciding what to buy. The actual act of writing is the catalyst that carries me forward. Each step unlocks another door.

What is easier to answer is where events and characters come from. They’re everywhere. Newspaper articles, experiences I’ve had, experiences someone else has had, people I meet, people I know, people others know and tell me about. Overheard conversations are a great source for dialogue. Lots of writers say they write in cafes, and I think they’re not writing at all, they’re listening in on the conversations going on around them and taking notes. Family members are a great source for characters (you have to alter characteristics so they don’t recognize themselves). And all that gossip at family get-togethers about who’s doing what with whom? Invaluable. A few times my sister has said to me, “The way you wrote that scene isn’t the way that thing happened to me in Ensenada at all.” Or someone will say, “I bet that policeman in ‘The End of Marriage’ is my Uncle Joe,” when it isn’t his Uncle Joe at all, it’s someone else’s Uncle Frank or George or Bill, or a combination of all three.

For example, on one of my research trips to Texas before I began to write “The Texicans” I met Dr. Milt Jacobs, a native Texan and amateur historian. He took my husband and me out to dinner at the Barn Door in San Antonio (fabulous steaks; and I don’t get a commission for mentioning that – not even a free dessert), and after dinner we went over to his house to see his Texas memorabilia, a fascinating collection of photographs and letters. Sort of offhandedly he said that he had an ancestor who walked from the East Coast all the way to Texas. On foot. Walked. Across the plains. By himself. Dr. Jacobs’ casual remark was the spark that created the character of Joseph Kimmel in “The Texicans.” A man hardy and stubborn enough to walk from New York to Texas deserves to be the hero of a book.

Another question I’m often asked is how long it takes me to write a book. I do so much rewriting and work at so many other things at the same time that I’m never sure how long a book takes to complete. About 15 years ago I wrote a novel about a 17-year-old Jewish girl who escapes Lithuania one step ahead of the Nazis and ends up in Shanghai, where she enters the dark world of the black market and becomes a rescuer of abandoned children. Including the time spent on interviewing Shanghai refugees and making a research trip to China, the book took almost two years to complete. My agent sold the book, the publisher loved it, the editor loved it, and a few months later the publisher cancelled it. No explanation. I put that book away and wrote three other books that did get published: “Goodbye Saigon” (optioned for film by 20^th Century Fox/Dick Zanuck), “Between Sisters” and “The End of Marriage.” Two years ago I pulled the book about Shanghai out of the drawer, rewrote it and named it “Lilli.” I also changed agents. We’ll see what happens with this version.

Sometimes I’m asked what my writing routine is. I don’t write for any set number of hours a day, but I do think about writing all the time. Sometimes an idea wakes me up at four in the morning and sends me upstairs to my desk. Sometimes for days I do nothing but write. Sometimes for days I do nothing but read or work in the garden.

About a month ago I came to a crucial point in a novel I’m writing and needed more time to think about it. My husband and I also wanted to spend some time with our three granddaughters, who are 17, 16 and 12. Their summer schedules are hectic: the 17-year-old is getting ready to leave for NYU in September, the 16-year-old is in a volleyball league and the 12-year-old is on a water polo team. It required a logistical feat to get them all together at the same time. The three of them slept in our guest bedroom (they didn’t want to be apart), giggling late into the night, the hum of their voices reminding me of the toddlers they once were. Days were spent doing whatever they wanted to do. We played miniature golf and went to the beach and ate and shopped and kissed and hugged and laughed, and I was sure I could feel the hours ticking away until they were too old to want to spend time with us. I was also sure that sometime in the future one of them will say, “The girl in your new book is me, isn’t it, Grandma?”

Copyright Nina Vida 2009