The Man of Twists and Turns

The “Golden Age” of the detective story was the 1920s and 1930s. It was a turbulent period. In Britain, the General Strike. In the U.S., the Depression. Civil war in Spain, and in Germany the rise of the Nazis. Red scares everywhere, fascists too.
But the detective story was a solace to those who lived in [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The Irish Times has a thought-provoking article today under the headline “How the world became one big crime scene.” It’s by Declan Burke, ace Irish crime fictioneur and also one of the most active bloggers on the subject. You’ll find reference to my Palestinian sleuth, Omar Yussef, but Dec also delves into other areas of [...]

JERUSALEM — Time was anyone with an interest in the Middle East could be guaranteed a couple of books a year would be brought out by U.S. journalists based in the region. Now many of those correspondents are history, with news bureaus closing and those that remain cutting back. The new books written by Americans [...]

The company you keep can put the culture around you in a new light, let you see it as you haven’t before.
That’s true when I travel to different countries and discover that readers in Germany have a particular take on my Palestinian crime novels which differs from the way they look to Americans, for example.
I [...]