Matt Rees's Blog, page 38

Forward: Palestinian society, warts and all -- and some mortal danger

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.

Bruno in Jerusalem

It's hard enough to get around the notorious Ein el-Hilweh Refugee Camp in Lebanon at the best of times. I can testify to that, having had a few sweaty-palmed visits to the place myself to interview the hardline Palestinian gunmen who rule the camp. Try doing it after calling on the head of the Aqsa Martyrs Brigades to eschew beards which "don't look good on your King Osama" and while dressed as "Austria's greatest gay superstar since Schwarzennegger."

But then we know that Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego Bruno has balls of steel--because we see them being wrenched about by a dust-buster in such a way that flesh and blood genitalia wouldn't be able to handle.

Baron Cohen's movie is out this week in the Middle East. The segment shot in Jerusalem got a big laugh at the local theater where I saw the film last night. Baron Cohen minces through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood dressed as a sexy Hassid (probably a first), and engages in a debate with a former Palestinian government minister and an ex-Mossad official in which he confuses Hamas and hummus. "I mean, why is Hamas so dangerous? It's just beans, right?"

It wasn't one of the Middle Eastern segments that scored highest with the Israeli audience, however. When Bruno is running down a list of Hollywood stars he wants in his putative talkshow, he's told that "Stevie Wunderbar" and "Bradolph Pittler" have turned him down.

Refusing to give up, he points hopefully at a picture of Mel Gibson and asks: "Der Fuehrer?" Proving that Gibson's drunken antisemitic rant to a traffic cop is more famous than Braveheart, that one got a round of applause in the theater.

Clitoris follows vagina on Cotterill blog

I've joined up with a few other crime writers to fill a single blog, International Crime Authors Reality Check, with original content. Last week Colin Cotterill wrote about his attempt to get a "vagina" into the title of one of his novels. This week, Colin has a hilarious post about his bemusing appearance at the Crime Writers Association's Daggers dinner -- at which Colin was awarded the "Dagger in the Library" for his excellent body of work. During the post, he notes that his name sounds like an adjective for the clitoris. (I was thinking he might have moved backwards from the vagina to another less specifically female spot, but there's always next week's blog for more bodily musings from the inimitable Colon Clitoris.) Tune in later this week for fellow bloggers Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and yours truly.

Dessert wars in the West Bank

It isn't only McDonald's that offers to supersize its food. In the most violent town in the West Bank, the local specialty is a hot cheese and syrup dessert called qanafi. Last month a Nablus baker made a qanafi that weighed 1,300 kg (1.3 tonnes). After the townspeople recovered from the sugar rush, a real estate developer put together a team this weekend to make a 1,700 kg qanafi that was 74 yards long.

The intention is to repair the image of a city damaged by nine years as the most dangerous place in one of the most dangerous regions of the world--by making enormous amounts of the thing Nablus would rather be famous for. The Palestinian Authority and Israel recently agreed to loosen military restrictions on the city a little. Of course, if you ate a few meters of the record-breaking qanafi (Guiness affirmation is awaited) it'd probably kill you -- but slower than a gunbattle. And what a way to go....

My favorite spot for qanafi is on the edge of the old casbah. It's called Aksa Sweets and it's always full of local men eating six-inch-square slices of the hot dessert. Qanafi's made with a base of elastic goats' cheese topped by a layer of noodles that look like shredded wheat, all drowned in a syrup so vibrantly orange that even Andy Warhol would have thought it in poor taste. The qanafi sits on wide circular metal trays, heated by a gas burner the size of an oil drum. Those who don't sit down take a big slice and eat it like Americans eat pizza, lifting it and seeming to pour it down their throats as they walk.

Part of the plot of my third Palestinian crime novel THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET revolved around my hero's attempts to defy the violence of the casbah to take his granddaughter for a slice of qanafi at a place based on Aksa Sweets. People eat qanafi all over the Arab world, but Nablus is where it was first made and the particular mix of goats' cheeses used here guarantees that it's the best place to eat it.

Here's how it's made:

As The (Palestinian) World Turns

Searching for a new script to get Hamas and Fatah to cooperate. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost

RAMALLAH, West Bank — Soap operas usually block out scenes with two cameras, one for each of the glaring opponents. The editor switches between each actor as they snarl and sneer. As for the plot, you can tune in every few months and nothing seems to have changed.

Sorry, did I write “soap operas?" I meant to type “current Palestinian politics.”

In the latest episode, Hamas — in the role of bad guy, at least according to most Western viewers of this particular soap — stares wild-eyed and affronted from the Gaza Strip toward Fatah in the West Bank. Fatah, playing the loose-living, stylish cousin, tosses its chin high and looks down its nose. Egyptian mediators pop in like script doctors searching for a new twist. But they come up with the same tired old plotlines.

Over a recent weekend, Egypt’s deputy chief of intelligence, General Muhammad Ibrahim, spent two days in Ramallah just trying to convince the different Palestinian factions that they ought to turn up in Cairo on July 25 for the next round in the “national reconciliation” talks — the seventh such meeting since the spring of 2007, when Hamas threw Fatah out of the Gaza Strip (and also threw some Fatah officials out of high windows).

Ibrahim’s suggestion, according to Palestinian officials, was for both sides to agree that Hamas would rule the Gaza Strip, while Fatah would control the West Bank.

Did I mention that he didn’t come with any new ideas?

The Egyptians hoped that if the two sides agreed not to be angry any more about the status quo, Fatah could be persuaded to contribute to rebuilding Gaza after the damage caused there by the war at the turn of the year. In return Hamas might consent to allow policemen from the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority to return to the Gaza Strip, the Egyptians suggested.

Ibrahim’s aim wasn’t to solve the entire problem of the Palestinian civil war, but rather to stanch the bleeding.

Without grabbing headlines, the blood is flowing. Hamas recently arrested a series of Fatah-affiliated Gazans who, according to human-rights organizations, face torture or injury during their incarceration. Fatah responded by rounding up more Hamas people in the West Bank.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas sounded in no hurry to make a deal when he said Sunday that he’d "accept any Egyptian proposal that ends the internal rift and lifts the siege imposed on the Palestinian people." Except the proposals put to him over the weekend, of course, which he appears to have rejected.

Like any good soap opera, the reason for such hardheadedness is trouble inside the family.

Fatah officials face a party congress in early August and are reluctant to make any concessions to Hamas. Such a move could make them vulnerable to attack by party rivals striking a tough guy pose.

That’s likely to make the talks next week in Cairo a waste of time, though the Egyptians vowed to press ahead.

Hamas has been talking more softly about regional politics, even as it’s been taking a hard line against its compatriots. In late June, the group’s Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal, said Hamas accepted the idea of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (even as he rejected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s current demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, calling it “racist, no different from Nazis.”)

Hamas seems to be in a bit more of a hurry than Fatah to make nice because of the desperate straits of Gaza’s population. Fatah refuses to budge in the Cairo talks unless it gets a true foothold in Gaza, where the Palestinian Authority pays the wages of civil servants and is largely ordering them to stay at home.

Even so, Hamas isn’t ready to roll over. It maintains the arrests of its activists in the West Bank were ordered by the Israeli army and the U.S. security coordinator to the region, Keith Dayton. (Israeli military officials say cooperation these days with the Palestinians is better even than during the years of the Oslo peace agreements — in the West Bank only, of course.)

Hamas also insists that the term of the current parliament be extended because, since it won a majority in the legislature in 2006, it has been unable to exert control due to international boycotts and, later, the civil strife with Fatah.

Perhaps Meshaal dropped his opposition to a two-state solution because he’s staring in the face of a three-state solution, in which Fatah gets an internationally recognized state in the West Bank and Hamas heads a pariah outpost in Gaza under the shadow of the Israeli war machine.

What would such states look like anyway? These days, despite the money flowing into the West Bank from the U.S. and the cash smuggled to Hamas by Iran, they’d be fairly sorry specimens.

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said this week that the population of the Palestinian territories was about 3.9 million, with 2.4 million people in the West Bank and 1.5 million in the Gaza Strip.

Of those, 25 percent are unemployed. With plenty of time for bad daytime TV.

Gimme a Break Dept. #89: He looked like a movie star!

Earlier this week I noted that I dislike writers describing a character as looking like a particular movie star. I cited a few examples from Elmore Leonard (which touched some nerves among fans of the Great Detroit Coolster) and one from Dan Brown. Now I bring you a real corker from The New Yorker.

The magazine's latest issue (at least the latest one to get through the Israeli postal system to me) contains a complacent little profile of Nora Ephron. In it, the writer quotes Ephron's sister as saying that their father "might as well have been Ben Bradlee." He then goes on to explain: "To understand this, all you really need to know about Bradlee, who was the executive editor of the Washington Post during the Watergate era, is that Jason Robards played him in 'All the President's Men,' and that it was very good casting."

Really? That's all I need to know? Brought down the President of the US--doesn't ring a bell. Looked like a moderately famous movie actor--oh, right him!

Maybe I was harsh on Elmore. I criticized him for writing (in two separate stories) that a character looked like Jack Nicholson. Not good, but at least I have a picture of Jack and the character he plays (again and again). Jason Robards? Do we all have a picture of him?

You see, I think of him as the bandit in "Once Upon a Time in the West." Was Ben Bradlee like that?

Or maybe what the New Yorker writer meant was: "Ben Bradlee was like Jason Robards when he was playing Ben Bradlee and not anyone else." Which makes about as much sense as describing him the way he did.

Really, real fiction... and Welsh detectives

The new blog I've started with fellow crime writers Christopher G. Moore, Colin Cotterill and Barbara Nadel has a new post from me today. It's about why I came to write so-called genre fiction. It starts like this:

Writers have it all wrong. They think they need to learn about other writers. I studied English literature at Oxford University and I read all I could find of the sort of literary criticism that makes a novel seem like a piece of East German economic analysis. Three years later, I hadn’t learned a thing — except that it was
fine to have a room you could take a girl to without having to sneak past your mother, Guinness isn’t good for you, and the deputy bank manager at Lloyd’s on Broad Street with the goatee and the bald head didn’t just /look/ like Ming the Merciless.

Then I read Dashiell Hammett. Before he published novels, Hammett was a Pinkerton detective. What he wrote was real. I could smell the places he’d been for the Pinkertons, feel the punches he’d taken, think the way he’d had to think to outwit true criminals. I’d been reading Marxist critical theorists on Daniel Defoe and French deconstructionists whose scribblings about the “stereographic plurality of significances” were intended to tell me that whatever I thought a book was about was, indeed, what it was about–except that it wasn’t, was it. Or was it?

Read the rest on International Crime Authors Reality Check.

The excellent UK crime fiction blog It's a Crime features me in a post about the growing number of Welsh crime writers. Tartan crime (Scottish writers like Ian Rankin) has long been big and It's a Crime notes the recent wave of Irish crime writers--I'm a fan of Gene Kerrigen, Bob Burke, Declan Burke and Stuart Neville. Now she says it's time for the Welsh, noting some other up-and-comers.

Let's hear it for the Taffia!

(Perhaps I should explain that to my American readers: the English slang for a Welsh person is "Taff," because the river through Cardiff the capital is called the Taff and few English ever venture further into Wales than that. Therefore a Welsh mafia would be a Taffia...Amaze your friends with that one.)

Elmore Leonard's 11th Rule of Writing

I’ve always enjoyed Elmore Leonard’s novels and seen him as one of the true stylists of popular fiction. In a review, I even described my pal Christopher G. Moore as the “Elmore Leonard of Bangkok” and I meant it as a compliment. But I have a bone to pick with the great Elmore.

I just read a book of Elmore’s short stories from 2004 titled “When the Women Come Out to Dance.” In many ways it’s superb. The title story turns on the particularly American kind of hardness and determination that takes a character who is not bad into a situation that leaves them ineradicably among bad people.

So what’s the problem? Movie stars, that's what.

In one of the early stories in the book, a character is described as being a “Jill St. John type.” I looked her up. She doesn’t appear to have had a major movie role for about 28 years before Elmore wrote the story, but I suppose her bikini-clad appearance in an ancient Bond film made an impression on him.

In two – not one, but two – of the later stories in the book, there’s a character who’s described as looking like (or smiling like) Jack Nicholson.

This isn’t the work of a great stylist. This is on the level of Dan Brown. (Remember that in The Da Vinci Code, Brown’s hero, the dumbest professor Harvard ever employed, is described thus: “He looked like Harrison Ford.” I wonder if, after the movie came out, later editions updated that to “…He looked like Tom Hanks.”)

This would be a cheap technique if a journalist used it. For a writer with the descriptive powers of Elmore, it’s a real shame.

In his famous 10 Rules of Writing, Elmore says: “Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.” That’s probably why he didn’t write “He looked like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining’ in the scene where he’s coming through the door with the axe and shouting ‘Here’s Johnny’ with a demented enjoyment on his face.” Too much detail.


Well, if you were trying to describe Elmore, how would you do it? Here’s his picture. I could describe him as “looking like Roger Whittaker.” Mean anything to you? Perhaps you don’t recall much about British easy-listening music of the 1970s. If you did, you’d have a picture. But why should you?

That’s exactly why I don’t like to see Elmore describe a character as looking like a particular movie star.

That doesn’t mean Elmore’s style should be discounted. (Read his 10 rules below. They’re very good in a folksy American sort of way.) But let’s first add an 11th rule: Don’t describe characters as looking like a particular movie star.

Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules of Writing
These are rules I’ve picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I’m writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what’s taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.
1. Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a character’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want.
There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s “Sweet Thursday,” but it’s O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
3. Never use a verb other than “said” to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with “she asseverated,” and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said” . . .
. . . he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs.”
5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.
6. Never use the words “suddenly” or “all hell broke loose.”
This rule doesn’t require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use “suddenly” tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won’t be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories “Close Range.”
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” what do the “American and the girl with him” look like? “She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.” That’s the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.
9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you’re Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
And finally:
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he’s writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character’s head, and the reader either knows what the guy’s thinking or doesn’t care. I’ll bet you don’t skip dialogue.
My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.
Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can’t allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It’s my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)
If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character—the one whose view best brings the scene to life—I’m able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what’s going on, and I’m nowhere in sight.
What Steinbeck did in “Sweet Thursday” was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. “Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts” is one, “Lousy Wednesday” another. The third chapter is titled “Hooptedoodle 1” and the 38th chapter “Hooptedoodle 2” as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: “Here’s where you’ll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won’t get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.”
“Sweet Thursday” came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I’ve never forgotten that prologue.
Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

Nasty nargila and biblical heat on video

My favorite little coffee shop in Jerusalem’s Old City is just inside the Muslim Quarter, behind the Church of the Holy Sepulcher where Jesus is believed to have been crucified, buried and resurrected.

Once you’ve sucked on the tobacco in this café, even hanging on a cross with nails through your hands and feet would be a relief. It's like smoking a three-foot-long unfiltered Gauloise.

But I keep going back. I like the location -- down the steep narrow alley outside the café, a short walk takes you to the Cotton Souk and straight onto the Temple Mount by the side of the Dome of the Rock. I like the environment, too. The men (only men) puffing on their nargilas are friendly and talkative. The volume on the radio is unpredictable. The electricity keeps cutting out. The plaster’s peeling from the walls, and the toilet is a stomach-churning masterpiece by a coprophiliac Jackson Pollock. Yes, it’s a great spot.

This week I stopped in to shoot a video for my next novel, THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be out in February. The book’s set in Brooklyn. My Palestinian detective Omar Yussef travels there to visit his son, only to find a dead body in his son’s apartment. The action of the book takes place mostly in Bay Ridge, which is becoming “Little Palestine” due to an influx of Palestinian immigrants. There are also chapters around the U.N. in Manhattan and in Coney Island.


My videographer David Blumenfeld and I decided to shoot the atmospheric background shots in Brooklyn. My pieces to camera: in the café.

As David set up the lights and the two cameras, I negotiated with the fellow who serves the coffee to make the place a little quieter for our recording. I asked if he’d mind turning off the radio (“It doesn’t really work anyhow,” I told him, as the radio cut out once again. “But when it does, people like it,” he said.) and the noisy fan (“What fan?” he said, wiping his sweaty moustache. “Oh, that thing.”)

I hoped the nargila would throw off some atmospheric smoke, as it usually does, giving our shot a noirish quality. The particular brand of tobacco bubbling through the water pipe that day was the nastiest I’ve ever encountered. And no smoke. Just an invisible poison that left me hacking through my script and reaching for my glass of coffee.

(Incidentally, in the Jerusalem accent a “nargila” is an “’argila,” because they often drop the opening syllable of a world. Thus, the only place in the Arab world where they can’t pronounce “al-Quds,” the word for Jerusalem in Arabic, is Jerusalem. They call it “al-‘uds” here.)

After a couple of hours of sucking on the nasty pipe and clearing my throat with thick, cardamom-flavored coffee, I’d done the script in English, French, Italian, and German. I was too jittery to sit there any longer. David and I hauled our equipment to the beautiful Austrian Hospice, a hotel and coffee shop on the Via Dolorosa.

On the roof of the Austrian Hospice, David filmed me reading the opening chapter of THE FOURTH ASSASSIN. It was the height of the afternoon sunshine and I was unwisely wearing a black shirt (trying to look noirish again). David pulled out a big reflector disc to direct light to the unlit side of my face. It blinded me. “Isn’t that how King David defeated the Philistines?” I said.

When in Jerusalem, you know, stick to the Bible.

We’ll be editing the video for THE FOURTH ASSASSIN this month and posting it to Youtube. Meanwhile, you can see the videos for my first three books on my website.

“What happened to the third little pig, Daddy?”: Bob Burke on pig detectives and his Writing Life

Anyone who’s perused the crime fiction section of their bookstore knows the joy of finding something original among the tired old shelves of loner detectives who play by their own rules on the mean streets of some dingy inner city. The clichés of the genre were uppermost in my mind when I chose to write about Omar Yussef, a schoolteacher and detective in a Palestinian refugee camp on the edge of Bethlehem. Irish writer Bob Burke has not merely blown the crime formula away like Dirty Harry's Magnum – he’s used them as the source of much of the fun in his great new novel “The Third Pig Detective Agency.” Bob’s first book in the series is populated by characters from nursery rhymes and fairy tales. His detective is the surviving Little Pig (after the Big Bad Wolf ate the first two) and his mean streets are in Grimmtown (as in The Brothers Grimm of fairy tale fame). In my review, I wrote that “Third Pig” is “undoubtedly the most whimsical hardboiled detective novel ever written, and it's utterly delightful.” As you’ll see from this interview, so is Bob Burke.

How long did it take you to get published?

Since I started taking writing a bit seriously, about three years – but I was lucky.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

In terms of what I got out of them, I’d suggest two: Stephen King’s On Writing for its very straightforward, no nonsense approach to putting pen on paper (as well as being a very honest autobiography) and Carole Blake’s From Pitch to Publication which shows how the industry works from first draft, through getting an agent, contracts, publication etc. Both are invaluable for anyone starting out.

What’s a typical writing day?

During school term I get my sons to school and am back at the house by 9:30 (probably still asleep). I’m definitely not a morning person so after a refueling session with coffee, I start by checking email, blogs, twitter and doing any publicity bits and pieces that may have arisen (aka arseing around on the web). Once I’ve evolved from zombie to something approaching human I start on whatever story I happen to be working on and work through until about 5pm, with numerous refueling stops along the way (coffee, must have more coffee). I never worry about word counts as long as I have something on paper (or on PC to be more accurate). Eventually something tangible appears from the combination of brain, caffeine and willpower.

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

Harry Pigg – sole survivor of the unfortunate Three Little Pigs incident and self-styled master detective – is hired by Aladdin to locate his missing lamp. The trail leads Harry through a maze of unreliable informants, mysterious strangers, not-so-dastardly villains, occasional beatings and an unpleasant encounter in a sewer. Is it great? Most people that have read it seem to like it, which is all I can ask for. It’s certainly a different take on the traditional detective novel.

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?

The formula for the detective story (particularly the hard-boiled type) is so well established that it provided the perfect template to work with – and take the piss out of. I just wanted to approach it from a slightly skewed angle but still work with all the conventions that people are familiar with (and probably expect). I’d like to think that my take on it has some degree of originality that will make readers want to come back to it again (and again and again and…)

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

Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of these gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17__ and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first took up his lodging under our roof.

It’s not great literature but that one line, the opening to “Treasure Island,” opened up the world of story to me. With that book I went from reading stories that were short and illustrated to a more intimidating volume that was rich with text and had no pictures. Almost immediately I was sucked into the story, all sense of intimidation gone as the narrative carried me into a true adventure story. Even now, Treasure Island remains one of my favourite reads.

The line that made me laugh the most (and still does) is from The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett: Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

If I might be permitted to go all literary and pretentious, the passage that sends shivers down my spine is the last page or so of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce where he describes the River Liffey flowing into the sea. Yes, most of the rest of the book is impenetrable and I don’t claim to have made any sense of it but that one piece is accessible, evocative and so beautifully written

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?

John Connolly. His ability to mix wonderful prose, engaging characters and compelling storylines make me want to weep every time I read one of his books. He’s also managed the difficult task of injecting his otherwise dark stories with a vein of black humor that never seems forced or inappropriate.

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?

Jeffrey Deaver. Take an impossible situation, throw in a series of plot twists and end with a satisfying and logical conclusion and you have a recipe for one of his books.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

A quick shufti through the Bookmarks section of my web browser shows one link: an online version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Make of that what you will! In fairness, there’s such a rich treasury of nursery rhymes and fairy tales that I can “gleefully molest” (as one reviewer put it) that research isn’t as necessary as it might be for anything else I may write.

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

I’d finished telling The Three Pigs to one of my sons and he asked, with typical child curiosity, “what happened to the third pig after the story was over?” I didn’t even have to think about it, the image of that third pig becoming a detective sprang almost fully-formed into my head. All I had to do then was work with it and develop a story.

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

I think that discovering the power of storytelling through early exposure to Treasure Island and subsequently with Edgar Rice Burroughs and Tolkien fuelled my imagination and gave me the urge to tell stories. Unfortunately there’s no hint of any trauma in the orphanage, wicked stepmothers or being sent out to steal by a shifty guardian in my childhood.

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

Flog the web to death. Blog about it, twitter about it, link to blogs with similar themes. Also, local papers are always interested in the “local lad does good” angle and will more than likely welcome an approach, which may lead to other media taking an interest.

What’s your experience with being translated?

I’ll let you know if it ever happens!

Do you live entirely off your writing?

Not yet. I do some part time IT training in tandem with my writing but hopefully one day…

How many books did you write before you were published?

One. Again, I know how lucky I’ve been.

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

A book tour, now there’s an aspirational goal.

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

Well, if having a pig detective trying to find Aladdin’s lamp isn’t weird enough, I don’t know what is. Seriously, I think that any idea, regardless of how outlandish, may have the germ of a story in it somewhere. It may just need some nurturing and the occasional reality check before it ever becomes part of a coherent narrative.