An update from the Soho offices on Broadway:

I’ve been advised that some of my portrayals of the office at the Intern’s Corner may have erred on the side of frivolity. I assure you, it’s not all fun and games at Soho Press. This week was typical: nothing but sixteen hour workdays, bronzed muscle and soot. Comrade Justin in the Worker’s Publicity Sector gave the interns an extra hosing today, and promised an increase of up to four daily hosings as the summer approaches with its sopping humidity.

In celebration of meeting our quotas for the month of March, we interns have been granted the privilege of painting our sleeping quarters a less somber shade of gray. A truck full of paint buckets and brushes arrived this morning. Comrades Katie and Mark have set the example as usual: to keep in shape, they have taken to balancing Chinese watering buckets filled with unread submissions on their shoulders, huffing about the office in high-step while editing manuscripts.

The black clouds pouring from the smokestacks give the Manhattan sunset a beautiful red and green aurora, which we watch from the roof while swallowing raw eggs in preparation for another evening’s hard labor.

The Swedish title for the first part of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy was “Men Who Hate Women.” Which just shows that you can write a huge international bestseller and not know why people would read your book.

Larsson’s U.K. publisher changed the title to “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” With his original title, Larsson would’ve been a posthumous hit (he died in 2004 of a heart attack at the age of 50) in Sweden, where he was well-known as a Communist campaigner against racism and the extreme right. But he probably wouldn’t have beaten the rest of the recently popular pack of Nordic crime writers from Henning Mankell to Jo Nesbo.

It’s the title change and its focus on a character who’s both aide to the sleuth and victim of violent crime that made Larsson the second-biggest selling novelist in the world last year, after Khaled “A Thousand Splendid Suns” Hosseini.

All the other Nordic writers focus on the detective, which is after all the traditional route in crime fiction. We’ve bought 40 million Mankell novels to follow Inspector Wallander as he mopes his way to the villain’s doorstep.

You could read Larsson’s book like that, too: Mikael Blomqvist, magazine editor and irresistible ladies man, is commissioned to unravel an old murder mystery on a remote Swedish island. But it’s his assistant, a rape-victim filled with hate for her persecutors (the men who hate women), who’s really the heart of the book.

While Blomqvist is working the island case — a fairly typical “closed room” mystery, similar to the ones in which Agatha Christie’s sleuths used to inform us that “one of the people in this room is the murderer” — Lisbeth Salander is secretly setting up the vigilante vengeance that provides the book’s smooth twist in the tail.

No one reads beyond page 50 for Blomqvist. Just Salander. Which is why the work of a Swedish Communist is now being taken up by Sony Pictures for a Hollywood version probably to be directed by David Fincher (who made “Zodiac”), produced by Scott Rudin (“No Country for Old Men”) and scripted by Steve Zaillian (who won an Oscar for his adaptation of “Schindler’s List”).

So many readers warmed to Salander — the series has sold 27 million copies in 40 countries so far — that all three novels in the series have been made into movies in Sweden already. The first came out in the U.S. this month and the other two will be released in the summer.

USA Today urged viewers not to wait for the Hollywood version, calling the Swedish flick “indelibly great.” (Indelible, like a dragon tattoo, get it?) In an example of praising the atmosphere while half-overlooking a flaw in the central element of the movie, reviewer Claudia Puig wrote: “Though the relationship between Lisbeth and Mikael isn’t fully developed and a few plot coincidences feel contrived, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo artfully and intelligently fuses a punk sensibility to an epic tale.”

Maybe it’s wise not to wait for Hollywood, if it’s punk sensibility that floats your boat.

Of course, Puig’s quibble is a red alert for likely scriptwriter Zaillian. You have to buy Lisbeth and Mikael, otherwise “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is really a drag.

Let’s go back to the novel.

It’s 554 pages in my U.K. paperback version — the first book of three equally chunky volumes, remember. Much of that is the sort of thing you might read in a campaigning magazine such as Expo, the publication of which Larsson was the editor. It’s written in the chatty simple language that magazine — and, increasingly, thriller — editors like, because it’s direct and lacking in imagery, so you keep turning the pages. You’ll never have to stop and say, “Hey, ‘She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.’ Nice image, Stieg Larsson.”

(You won’t, because that’s Raymond Chandler. “Farewell, My Lovely,” chapter 18.)

That’s no problem for a screenwriter. Hollywood can do its own wisecracks, and other literary imagery is usually dropped before an actor opens his lips.

Zaillian can surely cut most of the lengthy portions of the book which Larsson probably liked best. There are long disquisitions on rape statistics in Sweden and background segments on the local business scene. Take Lisbeth’s repeated rape by her legal guardian. It leads to a page and a half of this:

“Guardianship is a stricter form of control in which the client is relieved of the authority to handle his or her own money or to make decisions regarding various matters.”

There’s more: “Taking away a person’s control of her own life … is one of the greatest infringements a democracy can impose … For the most part the Guardianship Agency carries out its activities under difficult conditions … Occasionally there are reports that charges have been brought against some trustee or guardian who has…”

If Karl Marx had written “Das Kapital” in the evenings as a thriller, it might’ve had more zip than Larsson’s preachy liberal legalisms. Just so long as Engels had changed the title to “The Guy With the Dialectic Theory.”

Niels Arden Oplev’s Swedish movie version boils down to a 152-minute procedural that’s quite televisual in its look. That’s too long for a Hollywood thriller, so Zaillian will have to pare it even more.

So what’s left when you take out the tedium? (Don’t get me wrong, a lot of readers tell me they love the tedious parts of Larsson. They soothe you when you’re sick in bed or trying to take your mind off work at the beach. You forget your troubles, immersed instead in how rotten it is to be a Swedish woman.)

Which returns us to Lisbeth. She drives the narrative and, perhaps because women fall too easily for Mikael, she’s where all the sexual tension lies, too. (The book is big on titillation and the Swedish movie doesn’t skimp on a graphic rape scene.) It’s Lisbeth who’ll take you beyond the statutory confrontation with the villain. She makes the book memorable.

Better hope Hollywood doesn’t change the title.

(I posted this on GlobalPost.com)

When you live in a foreign place, it can become home. You forget how foreign it is.

Then you go to another foreign country, only to discover that it doesn’t seem so foreign. And you realize that the place you live actually IS extremely foreign.

That’s what happened to me during the last week, when I toured Germany to read from my third Palestinian rime novel THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET (just published by CH Beck Verlag as “Der Tote von Nablus.”) Read the rest of this entry »

An update from the Soho Press offices on Broadway:

Blue skies after a rather blustery weekend. It’s St. Patty’s day and all of New York is doin’ the Irish. Justin the Publicist is putting a new spin on an old tradition: he’s dumping Earwigs down the shirt collars of those in the office not wearing green. He figures, let the insects do the pinching. Editor Mark Doten’s “secret project,” a 2300 page novelization of the classic film “Rush Hour 2″ (C. Tucker, J. Chan) was blown out the window and scattered across Harlem by the weekend gale, so he started celebrating early, putting away Irish Car Bombs since early Sunday morning. We’re calling them “Dublin Bubblebaths” in an effort to be more PC to our friends from the Emerald Isle. At lunchtime Bobby the Other Intern passed out on his desk while doing copy editing. We discovered green beer in his thermos. We sprinkled shamrocks and glitter around his body, put a green bowler atop his head and wrote lewd comments from the debaucherous “sleep-rechauns” in Sharpie on his cheeks. Do I smell a good plot for the next Soho Crime thriller? Pictures will be posted shortly.

Side note: if you can locate the end of our office rainbow you’ll find a pot full of Amazon Kindles buried under its tail.

I was tucking into a slice of qanafi at my favorite vendor in the Nablus casbah yesterday when a gang of Palestinian reporters and officials intruded on my guilty pleasure. This was at Aqsa Sweets, which readers of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET will know as the place favored by the hero of my Palestinian crime novels Omar Yussef because it has a perfect blend of the cheeses of different Syrian and Palestinian goats in its qanafi (topped by semolina and drenched in syrup.)

Mayor Adly Yaish was among the crowd. As he steamed his way through a plate of qanafi, he informed me that he, the Nablus region’s governor, and the city’s police chief were touring the casbah to draw attention to a law soon to come into effect that’ll make it mandatory for vendors to show their prices. It’s one of the economic reforms introduced by Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, a Nablus native, intended to change the chaotic and often corrupt nature of the Palestinian economy.

A few minutes of jawboning with me, a forkful of qanafi raised for the cameras, and then the dignitaries were off into the narrow alleys in search of price tags. Read the rest of this entry »

As I trawl about the Middle East to gather material for my Palestinian crime novels, I love to come upon a stinking squatting-toilet, its evacuation hole bubbling with dark, sinister turds and the air strong with the scent of barely digested, unhygienically prepared lamb kebab. I adore such a khazi on sight, because no one cleaned it up for me or tried to create an illusion that it was just like a toilet in Manhattan or Munich or my mother’s house. Read the rest of this entry »

Kingsley Amis said that “a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.” That’s because Kingsley, bless his nasty old socks, was probably too busy spoiling someone else’s. Believe me, a bad review leaves a bad taste all day long.

That’s not because of any insecurity I feel about my writing. If a review is bad, I know the reviewer got it wrong. It’s the mere existence of negative thoughts about me and my work floating around out there, even if it’s only an aside in an otherwise positive review – that’s what makes my lunchtime hummus taste like glue. Read the rest of this entry »

A National Public Radio foreign correspondent mucker of mine used to have a list of seven ways for journalists to grow old gracefully. His premise, which is self-evident to anyone who’s been a reporter, was that daily news was an undignified thing to be doing in your 40s. I can’t remember the whole of the list. It included writing op-eds for your newspaper (which seemed more or less like retirement), teaching journalism at a university (also retirement, but somewhat scorned by other hacks), and maybe the seventh was dieing. Undoubtedly the most prestigious way to proceed, according to that list, was to write nonfiction books. Nina Burleigh has a most graceful career, indeed. Read the rest of this entry »

An update from the Soho Press offices on Broadway:

There was a brief interruption in labor today. Ailen in Marketing burst through the door post-lunch screaming: “Stop the presses!” The presses were stopped. She had picked up a tape casette of the 1997 Batman Forever soundtrack for $1.70 from a homeless man in Union Square Station. We spent much of the hour taking turns karaoke-ing Seal’s classic “Kiss From A Rose” and talking about the bronze era of film. Tragically, editor Mark Doten made a grammatical mistake, forcing us to reset the “No Work-related Accidents for ___ days” sign to 0. We were only three weeks away from 724, a new Soho Press record and a PB for Mr. Doten.

In financial news, Soho Press is doing its part to help out the recovering economy. We’ve hired three hundred unpaid interns, creating a bevy of new jobs to boost the struggling publishing industry. They have been divided into two teams: Team A and Team B. Team A is building sleeping quarters capable of housing three hundred unpaid interns, while Team B is boiling copious amounts of coffee in large bathtubs to keep Team A fueled and high-energy. Details to follow.

I have a lot of good reasons for staying in the Middle East as long as I have. While the main thing keeping me here 14 years and counting may truly be inertia, I also enjoy being an outsider, researching my Palestinian crime novels on site, visiting the Palestinian towns whose atmosphere of violence, decay and liveliness makes me feel so creative.

But let’s get real: I’m here for the coffee.

There’s no place outside Italy where there’s a more sophisticated coffee culture than Israel, and nowhere on earth do you find yourself cajoled into drinking as much coffee as Palestine. Read the rest of this entry »