Matt Rees's Blog, page 28

From Hitler History to Mahler Mystery: J. Sydney Jones’s Writing Life

Some authors exude the pleasure of reading and writing (and, believe me, when you meet them, you’d be surprised how many just don’t.) J. Sydney Jones is such a writer, with a breadth of writing experience in an array of genres that’s highly impressive and carries with it an obvious love of his craft. His Viennese Mystery series is a fascinating way to delve into one of Europe’s loveliest, most cultured cities – and damned entertaining, too. He’s also the man behind a great new blog Scene of the Crime, which focuses on the role of place in crime fiction – check out Syd’s interview with Berlin noirmeister Philip Kerr. Here Syd discusses his career and his ideas about writing.

How long did it take you to get published?

I started out in journalism, so I had a sense of accomplishment right off, publishing my travel pieces in newspapers and magazines all over the place. Books are a different animal, but again I went with travel first and had some good early success with walking, hiking, and cycling guides. I wrote eight novels, though, before I got my first one, Time of the Wolf, published.

With the current “Viennese Mystery” series, things were easier. I had a bit of an author platform with several well-received books about Vienna and an agent who is most savvy. First query landed us the book deal.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

Tried and trusted here: you can look a lot further and do a lot worse than E.M Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. Another classic is Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction. These will not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I just love the erudite discussions in both.

What’s a typical writing day?

I get to work about nine in the morning after I drop my son off at school. I try to devote the first hours of the writing day to the current fiction project--currently the fourth book in the Viennese Mystery series. Then some exercise--tennis, if I am lucky--and lunch, followed by more mundane freelance stuff in the afternoon that also helps to pay the bills.

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

Each of the books in the Viennese Mystery series features a famous historical figure of Vienna 1900. Requiem in Vienna focuses on musical Vienna: the composer Gustav Mahler is the target of an assassin and my protagonist, the lawyer and private inquiries man, Karl Werthen, is hired to protect him. The books are a blend of historical whodunit and literary thriller with more than a dash of historical/cultural/food lore thrown in.

Here’s what a Kirkus Reviews critic had to say of the current series installment: “Sophisticated entertainment of a very high caliber.”

How much research is involved in each of your books?

There are decades of research in the books. Explanation: I started researching Vienna 1900 long ago for my book, Hitler in Vienna. Since then I have continued to read heavily in the period, but for each book I still need to bone up on the historical folks I am featuring. Some writer once said that research was sort of like writing without the creative sweat. I enjoy the research; I probably commit about three months to each before I even begin the plotting. And thank whomever for the Internet--I can even get full editions of Viennese papers of the time online.

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

Karl Werthen is a successful lawyer and sometimes inquiry agent, an assimilated Jew, and a distinct Viennophile. And I haven’t got a clue to where he comes from, other than a shared love for Vienna. He just appeared full-formed on the first page of The Empty Mirror, the initial in the series. A minor character, he elbowed his way to the forefront by the end of the first draft; the series concept actually had the real-life father of criminology, Hanns Gross, as the protagonist. A crusty old curmudgeon, Gross tugs Werthen away from his safe wills and trusts gig back into criminal law in that first one, to prove the artist Gustav Klimt innocent of murdering his model. But it just worked out so much better to use Werthen as my lead and Gross, the pompous pro, as the sometimes sidekick.

What’s your experience with being translated?

Somewhat odd. For example, my Hitler in Vienna was first published in Germany. I originally queried publishers there in German, and it was bought sight unseen (Hitler, at the time, was a hot topic). When they received my doorstopper of a manuscript in English and realized it needed to be translated, they were none too pleased. But they sucked it up and published anyway.

Then when trying to sell the English-language rights, I had a hell of a time convincing editors in England and the U.S. that no, they would not have to have the book translated. I already had the English original of the manuscript.

What books have influenced you?

As a young man I loved the lyricism of Steinbeck. Lee from East of Eden is still one of my favorite fictional characters. And of course there was Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Then during the almost twenty years I lived in Vienna, I became an avid reader of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British authors. Blame it on the British Council. A wonderful resource in its day with massive armchairs around a humming ceramic stove. Thomas Hardy became my literary hero; I open one of his novels and begin reading his scene-setting on some desolate heath in the south of England, and I get actual chills. The language just works for me. And Conrad. Don’t even get me started on Conrad--and the bugger wrote in a second language! A guilty pleasure also became the works of J.B. Priestley, especially his Good Companions.

Did these books influence my writing? Who knows, but they surely have made my life fuller. Le Carre, of course, pushed me in new ways with dialogue and plot, as did the early fiction works of Paul Theroux (Saint Jack, Picture Palace). I wish I could make my dialogue sparkle and crack they way those guys do. But this catalogue could go on for some time. Basta.

Thanks, Syd. Fascinating insights.

Thanks for the opportunity to chat, Matt.

Who'll play Omar in the movies...?

On the My Book, The Movie blog, I was asked to write about who I'd choose to play Omar Yussef in the movies. Here's what I wrote:

I had no need to think of an actor. Not until I’d finished writing the book. Then the thinking really started.

The Palestinian sleuth who's the hero my books, Omar Yussef, is based on a real Palestinian friend of mine who lives in the Dehaisha Refugee Camp on the edge of Bethlehem in the West Bank. I had no problem visualizing him when I wrote about Omar, because I saw him most days. We spent a lot of time together and, with a gentleman as frequently cantankerous as my real-life chum, believe me, I got the full tour.

Then came publication of the first of my Palestinian crime novels, The Collaborator of Bethlehem. The estimable Marshal Zeringue invited me to write a post for this blog. Instead of having a famous actor always in mind, I had to run through potential candidates.

My wife insisted Pacino was just right for Omar. But I preferred the quiet, gentle Swiss actor Bruno Ganz – who proved he could do cantankerous when he played Hitler a few years ago in Downfall.

At the Leipzig Book Fair last year, my Berlin-based film agent chatted with me about some negotiations with a German tv channel which wanted to make a series based on Omar. As we talked, crowds of local kids dressed in “Manga” costume milled about (apparently this is some Japanese animation thing that has cult dressing-up status among people young enough to make me feel very old.) He asked if I had an actor in
mind for Omar. I mentioned Ganz.

“No, it won’t work,” Roland said.

“Why not?” I asked, as I was bumped from behind by some German kid dressed up as a vampire samurai.

“He’s not Arab. It really ought to be an Arab. But it’s difficult to find an Arab actor who’s well-known enough to carry a production and also speaks German.”

“So Pacino’s out too, I guess.”

“Well, movies are different from tv,” he said, “and if it sold in America, things might be different, too.”

I think they might be different now that The Fourth Assassin has been released. In this new installment of my Palestinian series, Omar comes to New York for a UN conference, only to uncover an assassination plot. The suspect: his own son.

I’d guess the New York setting might make the series seem just that little bit less dauntingly foreign – without betraying its core and making it into just another American detective story.

Which leaves me free to name names.

So here it is: Tony Shalhoub. He showed great dramatic range in The Siege, which was written by Lawrence Wright, a journalist colleague of mine who later won a Pulitzer for The Looming Tower, a nonfiction account of the story behind the 9/11 terrorists. Shalhoub had a nice cameo in 1408, an otherwise typically over the top Stephen King thing. I don’t really watch tv, but I gather Monk is great.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: Tony Shalhoub’s an Arab. He’s descended from Lebanese immigrants.

I hope that’s good enough. I mean, don’t make me find an actor big enough to carry a Hollywood movie who’s actually Palestinian…

The Daily Beast and The New York Times

My new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is one of five "This Week's Hot Reads" on The Daily Beast, which is also the hot read of the web these days. The Beast says of my book and its Brooklyn setting: "Rees paints a meticulous portrait of the post-9/11 community of Little Palestine and the tension of cultures trying to co-exist."

Meanwhile, The New York Times Book Review highlights the paperback release of my previous novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET in its Paperback Row column, calling the book "provocative and humane." Seems The Times'd rather print a nice photo of me than one of Jimmy Carter, too. Well, the old boy had his time in the sun.

Euro Bestsellers, UK-US Blockbusters

Crime novelist Simon Beckett wrote a few days ago in The Guardian that he’d had no idea he was the best-selling British novelist in Europe until statistics were announced last month. Not surprising, because at home no one has a clue who he is.

The n author of a series about a forensic anthropologist (hard to define, but it involves a lot of descriptions of decomposing bodies in gruesome detail, which’re rather well done) recounts his astonishment that he plays to big crowds, in particular in Germany.

I can vouch for this. I saw him in Hamburg at a festival at which I also appeared last year. He read before a crowd that filled a hall the size of an aircraft hangar and which treated him as if he were Brad Pitt. I was quite surprised by the women rushing his signing table. I'm not German -- I hadn't the foggiest notion who this fellow was.

Meanwhile, at home in Sheffield, Yorkshire, acquaintances approach Beckett wondering if he can make a living from writing, unaware that he’s sold millions of books. Unaware, because hardly any of them are sold in the UK.

Beckett’s article highlights a phenomenon among writers – not just in the crime genre. I come across quite a few novelists from the UK and the US who’re best sellers in European countries, but can’t get more than a handful to turn up for readings in their home countries. I think there’s more to this than differences in national reading tastes.

Though Beckett claims to be bemused by his situation, I think it can be explained by the differences in the ways books are sold in the US/UK and in Europe. American and British bookshops (and publishers) see their business as being carried by a few blockbuster books. A New York Times Magazine profile of James Patterson by Jonathan Mahler last month highlighted this trend and the effect it has on other non-blockbuster books. Anyone not on the blockbuster trajectory can find it hard to set up readings in stores and almost impossible to get journalists (tv, radio or print) to do interviews.

When I’ve traveled in Europe, however, I find myself touring smallish bookshops which consider it a necessary part of their business to host writers. Then there's a broad array of literary festivals, too. In each city, there’s a wide range of media ready to do interviews, even with first-time authors. Consequently a book not of the blockbuster type can attract publicity which – in the US and UK – would rarely be given to anything but a blockbuster author whose name you (and the journalist concerned) already heard a thousand times.

I suspect this won’t change soon. Why not?

For one thing, booksellers are more conservative in their ordering than ever. Largely due to the economic crisis – which resulted in Barnes and Noble having a dreadful 2009 – and insecurity about the future of publishing in an e-book age, big stores are ordering ahead only for one month at a time, rather than the three months or more publishers are accustomed to. That makes it hard for publishers to plan a big print run for all but the sure things.

As if things weren’t bad enough in publishing, the situation is compounded by worries in the journalism world. It’s hard for a journalist to take a stand against market trends these days. I’m a former journalist and I can state categorically that if there’s one group of people with more qualms about what the future holds for their industry than publishers, it’s journalists.

So how to get around this? Well, if you're a reader, why not follow the German bestseller lists? Here's one which recommends the best new crime novels each month. You'll find a broader range of reading and books which might surprise you. You'll also be ahead of the sales figures back home and be able to get a front row seat at the scantily attended readings of the next Simon Beckett.

Why's a Palestinian sleuth in Brooklyn?

I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read.

Until now I’ve published three novels about Omar Yussef, my Palestinian schoolteacher/sleuth. Omar has been described as the Philip Marlowe of the Arab street, the Hercules Poirot of the Near East, Sam Spade fed on hummus, and Miss Marple crossed with Yasser Arafat.

Why then is my new Omar Yussef novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN,/a> set in New York City? Not in the Middle East, the Near East, Palestine, the Levant, the Fertile Crescent, or any other place where Yasser may be fornicating with dear old Miss Jane Marple.

I lived in New York six years, until I came to Jerusalem in 1996. I know it better than any city outside the Middle East. I had a lot of fun in New York. Maybe too much fun. In no other place in the world can a young man so overindulge in the temptations originally offered in the city of Sodom. Which in reality is close to where I live now in Jerusalem. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at the place.

I know New York with my eyes closed. Literally. In my twenties, after leaving some bar or club, I blacked out on every line on the subway map.

I dated women from every borough of the city, from Westchester and upstate. From the 201 area code (dare I say, New Jersey.)

I married a girl from the North Shore of Long Island, and in my continuing effort to know New York in all its facets, when we divorced, I married a beautiful woman from the South Shore of Long Island.

But each time I returned, no matter how well I thought I knew the place, New York seemed different. The change became most apparent after 9/11. I wanted to understand it through the eyes of Omar Yussef.

That’s why he finds himself in Brooklyn in THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. Visiting the area of Bay Ridge that has become known as “Little Palestine,” for the influx of Palestinian immigrants.

Little Palestine isn’t a community of Palestinian intellectual émigrés, such as sprang up in European capitals in the 1970s. It’s a new wave of young men mostly, saving to bring their families over, working two or more jobs. Theirs is a typical American immigrant story.

Except for the FBI agents going through their trash.

The Bureau didn’t uncover any broad conspiracy in Little Palestine. But it did add to the tensions between the Arab community and other New Yorkers after the attack on the Twin Towers.

That’s the situation into which I wanted to place Omar Yussef. Mutual distrust, after all, makes for good crime fiction.

In Brooklyn, it also happens to be real.

Jerusalem Zoo: Penguins before pols

Here's a whimsical video explaining why the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is the best vantage point from which to observe the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- superior even than a Gaza refugee camp or an Israeli military base. Seriously. And yet not.

Wall St Journal on 'The Fourth Assassin'

While in New York this last couple of weeks, I stopped into the space-age HQ of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on the Avenue of the Americas in Midtown Manhattan. Once my eyes had adjusted to the superbright white light everywhere, I settled into a studio for an interview with Jon Friedman (the man known around NY as "Mister Media") to talk about how I researched my new novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

'The Fourth Assassin' takes Page 69 Test

The Campaign for the American Reader blog empire's flagship is the Page 69 Test. The premise of the blog is this: open any book to page 69; if it grabs you, that's a better indication of whether you'll enjoy the book than simply reading the opening page. Try it on a book you like (and, maybe more fun, one you don't), it's pretty reliable. Blogger Marshal Zeringue asked me to submit my new Palestinian crime novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, to the Page 69 Test. Here's his introduction followed by what I wrote for him about page 69 of my new book:

Matt Beynon Rees is the author of the acclaimed series of novels featuring Palestinian detective Omar Yussef: The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award, A Grave in Gaza, The Samaritan's Secret, and the newly released The Fourth Assassin.

He applied the Page 69 Test to the new novel and reported the following:

The first three novels in my Palestinian crime series take place in the West Bank and Gaza. All the characters are Palestinian, with the exception of a couple of foreign aid workers. But I want my series to show the full extent of Palestinian life, and half the people in the world who call themselves Palestinian don’t live in Palestine. So my hero Omar Yussef hits the road.

The Fourth Assassin, the new book in my series, takes place in the UN on the east side of Manhattan, and in the section of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that’s becoming known as “Little Palestine,” as immigrants from the Jerusalem area make it their home.

Page 69 hits the two main topics that make the book compelling.

First, the alienation felt by a foreigner when confronted with the enormity and chaos of New York. I wanted to show how immigrants might turn inward, rejecting the society around them, becoming religious fundamentalists. Here’s the description of a subway ride from Omar’s point of view:

"The train rumbled at low speed onto the strangely terrifying superstructure of the Manhattan Bridge. Downriver, beyond the massive girders and the mesh of electric lines, the Brooklyn Bridge arched over the water. Its famous towers sprayed thick cables along its span. Omar Yussef felt as though he were flying out of control through the air, high above the river and the tangle of highway along the shoreline. An old Vietnamese man screamed into his cell phone over the noise of the train. The wheels rang like the slow beating of a giant steel kettledrum until the train slipped back under the earth, jumped to a different track, and picked up speed. ‘This is an unnatural way of traveling,’ Omar Yussef whispered."

Second, Page 69 contains an important spark for the mystery at the heart of the book. Up to this point, no one but Omar Yussef acknowledges that things seem awry. But now his sidekick, Bethlehem Police Chief Khamis Zeydan, says to him:

"‘My brother, I have a bad feeling about this visit. Some danger that I can’t predict.’"

Now if that doesn’t hook you, nothing will. Read on to page 70, eh?

The (Forgotten) Book You Have to Read: Simenon's 'Saint-Fiacre Affair'

Crime fiction blog The Rap Sheet runs a regular feature prompting authors to write about a "forgotten" book that merits new attention. This last week the blog's editor asked me to suggest a book. I wrote about Georges Simenon's "The Saint-Fiacre Affair" (aka "Maigret Goes Home"). It's an early Inspector Maigret novel (1932) and not what you'd expect, if you're used to the later, somewhat more cosy novels in the Belgian writer's series. It's a tough, atmospheric book about returning to the place of one's birth which -- for me -- has a personal resonance. Read on for my little essay about this great book -- and while you're at it, let me know what forgotten novel you'd have written about.

(Editor’s note: This is the 80th installment of our ongoing Friday blog series highlighting great but forgotten books. Today’s selection has been made by Welsh-born novelist-journalist Matt Beynon Rees, author of the Dagger Award-winning series of Palestinian crime novels featuring Bethlehem sleuth Omar Yussef. The Fourth Assassin, in which Omar uncovers an assassination plot in the Brooklyn Palestinian community, is published this week by Soho Crime. Rees also blogs at The Man of Twists and Turns.)

For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the place where I grew up. If I’d been a happy kid, I’d probably never have left. So whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode in Georges Simenon’s Maigret series, in which “le Commissaire” goes back to his childhood village.

The Saint-Fiacre Affair (also known as Maigret Goes Home) was originally published in 1932, three years after French Inspector Jules Maigret first made his appearance in a series that would eventually amount to 103 novels. The Belgian writer created a figure whose fat belly, soft hat, and pipe would become iconic.

Maigret appeared in so many movies and television adaptations--for Saint-Fiacre alone there’s a 1959 French-language movie with Jean Gabin and two British TV versions--that it’s easy to think of him with the cozy familiarity we often ascribe to endlessly reproduced old-timers like Miss Marple. But Simenon wasn’t willing to look at the world the way Agatha Christie did. He had a lot more in common with his great U.S. crime-writing contemporaries. In fact, in Saint-Fiacre, he makes the lugubrious Raymond Chandler look like a breezy teenage girl humming a happy tune as she skips down a sunny small-town street in her bobby socks. Imagine that.

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

Most readers who actually get to Maigret these days probably know the novels of the character’s heyday in the late 1960s, early ’70s--Maigret and the Wine Merchant, Maigret’s Boyhood Friend. By then, the inspector had slipped into a comfortable domesticity. He’d interrupt his investigation to see a movie with his wife or to sip a white wine at a café--even if he was still terse and hard when it came to the crunch. In reading those books, it’s easy to forget that in the 1930s and 1940s, Simenon was an exponent of a particular mélange of existentialism and gritty detective fiction that’s quite strikingly harsh even today. (Check out 1948’s Dirty Snow for a rough ride with a profiteer during the German occupation. There’s a guy who really doesn’t care about anyone or anything. In your face, Albert Camus!)

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

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

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

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

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

What am I reading?

On the "Writers Read" blog, which is run by the indefatigable Marshal Zeringue, the latest post features my most recent reading. It's not what you might think -- in other words, it isn't detective fiction (well, there's one such book, sort of...) and it's not full of books about the Middle East. Have a look at the historical fiction, travel writing, and investigative nonfiction recently on my nightstand (that's just a turn of phrase -- I don't have a nightstand and I don't read in bed.) Read on for the rest of my post.

Matt Beynon Rees has lived in Jerusalem since 1996. He covered the Middle East for over a decade for the Scotsman, then Newsweek, and from 2000 until 2006 as Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief. He published his first novel featuring Palestinian detective Omar Yussef, The Collaborator of Bethlehem, in 2007, which won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award. A Grave in Gaza and The Samaritan's Secret followed in 2008 and 2009. The new novel in the series, The Fourth Assassin, follows Omar to visit his son in New York's "Little Palestine" in Brooklyn.

A couple of weeks ago I asked Rees what he was reading. His reply:

Wolf Hall—Hillary Mantel
Simply the best historical novel for many, many years. Mantel’s portrayal of Tudor England, through the self-made politician and courtier Cromwell, is magnificent. It won the Booker Prize, which isn’t always such a recommendation. In many of the novels chosen for the prize, linguistic flash is chosen over characterization, leaving an emotional void for the reader. But in this case the prize committee got it right. Mantel’s characters breathe, even when they’re not central. One of the amazing things she pulls off in this book is to have a very broad range of characters who, without being central, manage to be rounded, returning here and there throughout the lengthy narrative with immediate life – they don’t need to be reintroduced; we already know who they are and how they think.

Nineteen Seventy-Four—David Peace
Peace’s “Red-Riding Quartet” (which includes other books also titled after the years in which they're set) is talked about as attempting to do for the UK in the ‘Seventies and ‘Eighties what James Ellroy has done for the US in the ‘Sixties. Namely to take the history we think we know and reveal the corrupt underside of it all. He’s successful in portraying the utter decay of Britain, revealing why voters were ready for the remaking of the entire country for which they voted in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher. He doesn’t quite – at least in this first volume – manage to link the lower regions of society with those who rule. There's no equivalent of Ellroy's chats between his fictional agents and J. Edgar Hoover, for example. That connection is spelled out, rather than shown. Also his period scene-setting is a little heavier than Ellroy’s – hardly a page goes by without some archetypal song of the era playing in the background on the radio or a tv show all Brits would remember going with the sound down. The biggest success of the book is creating a “hero” who’s almost – but not quite – repulsive enough for us to half-believe that he’s the serial killer.

In the Shadow of Vesuvius—Jordan Lancaster
For lovers of Italy, and most surely for those who enjoy the madhouse that is modern Naples, this cultural history of the southern Italian city is an enjoyable way to learn that it was always that way. A Paradise inhabited by devils, or a Hell that’s home to angels, as Lancaster puts it. She deals with the complexity of Neapolitan politics – through rule by Rome, various Spanish, French and Norman dynasties, and the desperate straits into which the city was cast by Italian unification – with a light touch.

Gomorrah – Roberto Saviano
Can you tell I’ve been in Naples in the last month or two? This young Italian journalist named names in his account of the Camorra, Naples’s mafia. In return he got death threats and a life in hiding under police protection. It’s a marvelous tour of the underside of a town where only last year no one could agree on where to take the trash, so it all piled up in the streets, in mounds higher and longer than buses. When you visit Naples, as friends of mine there put it, you either hate the chaos or you love it. Either way, this book reveals just why it is that the city works – or fails to do so – as it does.