The Man of Twists and Turns

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 [...]

Malcolm Muggeridge (an old English literateur) once said that George Orwell “was no good as a novelist, because he didn’t have the interest in character.” Well, I didn’t need to tell you who George Orwell was, so you may doubt the judgment of the largely forgotten Muggeridge. But I think he was very close to [...]

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 man, with a breadth of writing experience in different genres that’s deeply impressive and carries with it an obvious love of his craft. His Viennese Mystery [...]

The Campaign for the American Reader blog empire’s flagship is the Page 69 Test. The premise 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 one you don’t), [...]

Crime fiction blog The Rap Sheet runs a weekly feature asking 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 a very early Maigret novel (1932) and not [...]

Crime writer J. Sydney Jones has a new blog called Scene of the Crime. He aims to interview writers about the impact on their writing of the location and sense of place in their novels — usually from far-flung countries. This week he features me on my Palestinian crime novels. Read on, for the full [...]

Often a novelist can humanize foreign affairs in ways a journalist can’t. To mark publication today of my new Palestinian crime novel The Fourth Assassin, I posted this for my regular column on GlobalPost. Though we do so at our peril, overseas events are easy to ignore. We flip past the foreign pages of the [...]