The Man of Twists and Turns

Historical novels vie with crime and romance novels for the titles of most derided and most widely read literature. They’ve had a bad rap ever since the 19th century, when the swashbucklers of Alexandre Dumas looked pretty wooden next to Dickens, and cartoonish in comparison to the depth of Victor Hugo or George Eliot. There [...]

During my tour of Germany — well, more of a quick swing through the west, having had a vacation in Berlin — I stopped in at the excellent DRadio Wissen, a fairly new branch of Deutschlandfunk. These ladies, lead by the lovely Lena Staerk, certainly were quite funky. Also cosmopolitan, broadcasting for nearly two hours [...]

Recently, in this (cyber)space, I started to explain why I’ve turned to historical fiction, after previously writing a book of nonfiction and my four Palestinian crime novels. I wrote that historical fiction casts today’s deepest issues in an unexpected (historical) context and can therefore make us see them anew. It’s also a dramatic way of [...]

Writing of the disdain expressed for genre novels by critics, Raymond Chandler said that there were just as many bad “literary novels” of the type favored by critics as there were bad genre stories – except that the bad literary novels didn’t get published. In other words, there’s nothing inherent in so-called genre fiction that [...]

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

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

A book takes a long time to write, and then it takes a while to sell. And another while to sell in another country, and another after that. So a writer’s smile spreads across time.
My long-term grin widened this weekend, when I signed with my UK publisher for my next two books. Not only because [...]

World Cup fans, don’t fear hours of emptiness. Take up a work by an international crime fiction author. It’s the perfect replacement for your lost fix – and it’s a lot better for your soul, too.
Here’s why. As the World Cup unfolded over the last month, newspapers all over the globe were filled with articles [...]

Cairo is a place we all know to some degree, even if only the image of the pyramids and the Sphinx. A short visit there is enough to make you wonder about how much of this teeming metropolis you really don’t know. No writer gets so deep as Sanna Negus under the skin of [...]

I’m taking my revenge on the deployers of banal Facebook updates. I’m writing a blog post about my new couches.
Old couches recovered, actually. But I’ll get to that soon enough.
I had first thought to be avenged on the lame updaters by putting up a false Facebook status update of my own each day, attempting to [...]