How long did it take you to get published?
I got a deal with my second book, which I finished about seven years after starting the first. Between the two enterprises there was a bit of a gap, though.

Would you recommend any books on writing?
I never read any books on writing when I was starting out. That was probably a mistake. The best book I’ve seen subsequently is Master Class in Writing Fiction by Adam Sexton (published by McGraw Hill). You’re supposed to read a particular novel before each chapter, which is a good approach.

What’s a typical writing day?
Someone once said that the writing life involves brief intervals of creativity punctuated by long intervals of staring into the fridge. That about sums it up in my case. That said, since becoming a father three years ago, I’ve had to cut down on the fridge time.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?
The Einstein Girl is a historical novel inspired by the relatively recent discovery that Albert Einstein had a daughter in secret. It’s set in 1932, on the eve of the Nazi assumption of power, when Einstein was poised to flee Europe for America, and unfolds as a psychological mystery. I was inspired to write it because, in the course of my researches, I began to see some fascinating parallels between Einstein’s intellectual obsessions and his highly unusual private life.

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?
In sketching out a book I’m guided more by instinct than anything. I think that’s something writers develop over time, and which becomes sharper the more they write. I don’t think I’ve ever adjusted a story because I don’t see it conforming to a model. More likely I’ll adjust it because I don’t find it satisfying or compelling enough.

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?
Did I mention that when I was fifteen I took it out of my pants and whacked off on the 107 bus from New York?
Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint.
If you are going to indulge in rhetorical questions, make them good ones.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?
Humbert Humbert’s description of Dolores Haze in ‘Lolita’ (“She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.”)

Who’s the greatest stylist currently writing?
Don DeLillo or James Ellroy

Who’s the greatest plotter currently writing?
Tom Wolfe

How much research is involved in each of your books?
It varies. I did 18 months research for The Einstein Girl. Typically it’s about six months, and usually involves a visit to the main locations. It isn’t just about accuracy and background. Research gives me ideas and helps me shape the story.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?
I agree with those people who say ‘character is plot and plot is character’. I usually start with a premise and then try to develop a character who can exploit the potential of that premise to the maximum.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?
I stumbled into writing thanks to a cocktail of creative frustration, naivety and a nasty lung infection. It was never a compulsion. I write now because I enjoy it (when it’s going well) and because I’m unlikely to excel at anything else.

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?
If you find out, please let me know.

What’s your experience with being translated?
Good translators don’t just translate well, they write well, giving your book a voice as distinctive and pleasing as your own (or more so!). In my experience, good translations make a big difference to the reception of a book – and you know you have a good translation if the foreign reviews go out of their way to praise the writing or the style. However, it seems to be largely pot luck as to whether you get a good translation or merely an adequate one. Recently, I think I’ve be particularly lucky in Germany and Spain.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?
I started making proper money with my third book, but it’s been very up and down since then. Now that I have an expanding family to worry about, I’m looking to broaden the scope of my activities. The sale of vital organs (my own) is not ruled out.

How many books did you write before you were published?
One.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?
I’ve never actually been on a book tour. I live in hope.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?
There are plenty of lame ideas in my Ideas File, but the weird ones are actually the more promising ones.

But the detective story was a solace to those who lived in such ugly times. In the model employed by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, the story ended with one criminal fingered by the detective. Everyone else turned out to be innocent. Order was restored. It was as if the writers were saying, Don’t worry about what you read in the newspapers; everything can be fixed and only a small minority are making the trouble.

In my Palestinian crime novels, the opposite is true. Everyone’s guilty. That’s the reality I found in Palestinian society, as disaster befell it in the last decade – an intifada, a civil war, and now a horrible stand-off between rival factions. Not any one person’s fault.

I believe that’s a better reflection of the world in which we live. My novels are entertainments, but they aren’t layered with the conservative perspective of the “Golden Age.” I don’t want readers to think that there’s nothing wrong out there, so long as the detective nabs the sole bad guy in the library.

Crime novels today are grittier than the work of Christie. They tend to be closer to the atmosphere of Raymond Chandler, who wrote that the Golden Age stories “really get me down.” But the Chandler ethos of a lone knight facing an utterly corrupt world is largely ignored.

That’s why there are so many novels these days about pedophiles and psychopaths. Such characters are beyond the pale of behavior in which we could imagine ourselves participating. To commit a crime in such novels is to mark oneself out as a deviant. As soon as the deviant is nabbed, the society can go back into its usual calm manner.

I think this is why Scandinavian crime novels have been so popular. Readers like the fact that, while the detective wrestles with the psycho, the society depicted is clearly not so very flawed. As soon as the psycho is nabbed, Sweden will return to its pleasant, polite way of life—something that’s easier to envisage than it would be in a novel set in, say, Bangkok or Gaza. Even in his recent novel, “The Worried Man,” Henning Mankell describes his detective as being no more than “worried about the direction of Swedish society.”

Worried! Can you imagine Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, being no more than worried? He lives in a society that’s engulfed in disaster. He knows everything’s going to hell and he’s aware that nabbing a single bad guy won’t change that.

The golden age method ought to have been overtaken by reality in a post-Holocaust age. Hannah Arendt wrote of the banality of evil, meaning that people don’t choose good or bad, they just go along. We’d like to see bad guys as pure evil, deciding firmly to commit horrible acts, while the truth of the Holocaust and many other dreadful events is that people are much more likely to operate in a kind of malleable denial.

It’s a vital insight. Yet so many crime novels are still written as though Hitler never happened—as if one wicked man can be blamed for what millions of others simply went along with. History makes it clear that every one of us is guilty; everyone needs to do a reckoning with their past. It can’t just be resolved by a cunning detective who spots a few clues and thus sets the world to rights.

This perspective is, I think, not only more realistic, but it’s also more respectful of the characters and the reader. If I were to suggest that a single detective could fix Palestinian society, I’d be saying that real Palestinians could do just that if they’d only speak up. I know it isn’t that easy.

That’s why in my books everyone’s guilty. In my third novel, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, I had in effect three endings. Omar thinks he’s found the culprit. Then in the next chapter, he sees that there was another dimension, with someone else responsible. Then in the final chapter, he sees even greater breadth to the deception and wrong-doing.

I did that partially to provide the twists that readers enjoy. But I also wanted to reflect the complexity of the Palestinian situation. It could, of course, just as easily be done in a novel set in Idaho, where no doubt there are contradictory dimensions to reality that I could only guess at. Just because US political commentators divide the country into Red and Blue states doesn’t mean places can be so easily categorized.

Some readers have told me that my novels are depressing or pessimistic. That shows that some people come to crime novels—books about killing—to be uplifted, or to be shown that everything is right in the end. What these readers respond to is the sense in my books that once the bad guy is gone, everything remains in a dangerous state of turmoil. They find that depressing; I think it’s as enlivening as a dip in a freezing cold mountain stream, refreshing and letting you know what it is to feel the world around you.

I don’t intend to leave readers feeling cosy. I want them to look at themselves and consider how they’d respond to such an extreme situation. We encounter so few extremes in our Western lives these days. It’s good to face such things, even if only in a fictional context.

Bielefeld (population 330,000) is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia. Or is it?

Since the 1990s, there has been a widespread internet campaign to convince Germans that this town doesn’t exist. It began as a light-hearted battle over computer codings between some fellows in Bielefeld and others elsewhere (who took a different view of the coding and decided to fight back.) Even though most of them know it exists (or do they?), Germans often respond to mention of Bielefeld with the words, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

This is because the town is rarely visited, doesn’t have a regional accent of its own, isn’t mentioned in the news very often, and had for a long time a railway station that looked boarded up. There are also few monuments or great buildings there, because…well, you can thank the USAAF and the RAF for that. (Bielefeld isn’t far from the Ruhr and was heavily bombed in World War II.)

The city council once released a statement titled “Bielefeld does exist,” but they released it on April Fools Day. So it looked as though the city council even was saying Bielefeld didn’t exist.

But I went there. And it does exist. In fact, it’s quite nice.

I did a reading before a good crowd at the Beit Tikwa Synagogue. Which used to be a church until the congregation grew too small. (A year and a half ago, there was a protest against the conversion of a Christian place of worship to a Jewish one. The protest was lead by a fellow named Riefenstahl, nephew of Hitler’s favorite filmmaker Leni, and frankly someone who ought to, shall we say, avoid Jewish issues, just as a matter of good taste.) Beit Tikwa is beautiful, as is Katharina Lustgarten, who organized and introduced my reading.

If a synagogue seems like a good use for an old church, a restaurant is even better. A one-time church in Bielefeld is now Gluekundseligkeit, a swanky Asian restaurant with a long bar down the aisle. In armchairs on the altar, you can drink wine where the pastor used to bless the holy wine. I had a very fine stewed duck.

I dined there with Andreas Schnadwinkel, a pal who writes for the Westfalenblatt newspaper, and Thomas Wolff, an imposing actor at Theater Bielefeld, who read from my work at the synagogue and at another reading in nearby Bad Oeynhausen the previous night.

Thomas and I repaired to the old part of town and a bar, where we chatted about the kinds of things only writers and actors would find interesting or useful (how to tap into spirit energies to create a character and to experience an emotion…) That central area also was quite lovely.

Then I was on to Cologne. On a local radio station, I mentioned during my interview that I had been to Bielefeld the previous day. “You know,” said the hostess, “Bielefeld doesn’t exist.”

Maybe I was tricked.

Someone should look into this, Oliver, because I don’t think it’s just coincidence, and I know you’ll agree. I think you’re the man to expose it.

You said in an interview published this weekend that Hitler was “a Frankenstein,” and then went on to add that the Dr. Frankenstein who created him was an amalgam of U.S., British and German industrialists. You added that the Nazis killed more Russians than Jews and opined that, in spite of this, we tend to think of the Holocaust as a Jewish thing. (You said something else about having “walked in Hitler’s shoes…” but let’s just put that aside for now.)

On the one hand, Oliver, you’re an oaf who has had to apologize for his “clumsy association” about the Holocaust. Well, the art world needs oafs from time to time. Because on the other hand, Oliver, we all ought to remember that reality is much more sophisticated than the explanations of history which are handed down to us, honed and narrowed until they read very simplistically, ignoring inconvenient facts and allowing people to shout down those who point out such facts.

I agree with you that the historical reality of Nazism was more complex than the cartoon version beyond which political correctness doesn’t allow us to stray. I differ with you in that I don’t think “the most powerful lobby in Washington” (translation for those who don’t speak Stonish: “Jews”) are responsible.

How do I know? Well, the Palestinians do the same thing with their history and it isn’t because they’re so powerful in Washington, is it? (Otherwise, why did you, Oliver, make a documentary in which you ran around Ramallah trying to get five minutes with Yasser Arafat, who’d obviously never seen “The Doors” and didn’t seem very interested in you.)

Like anyone else’s explanation of history and nationhood, the popular Palestinian version of how they came to be who they are is a self-serving fiction. That’s what the detective hero of my Palestinian crime novels, Omar Yussef, aims to deflate, and that’s why I made him a history teacher who’d have the knowledge to see through contemporary political myths. Israel’s founding myths also (I’m sure you’ve read Israeli academics Benny Morris and Zeev Sternhell, so you’ll know what I mean) are at least 65 percent B.S. and much trickery with smoke and mirrors.

Just to prove finally that this is neither a Jewish technique nor a Middle Eastern problem, get this: even the Welsh are in on this sort of thing. My own people invented an entirely new history for themselves in the mid-nineteenth century. They had a perfectly interesting real history, but a famous old mythmaker from Glamorgan decided to pump up the druidical elements (all smoke and no mirrors). He added choral competitions and had little girls dress up as jolly witches on the national saint’s day. Bingo, a colorful nation with a strong sense of identity.

I once met a rabbi who said, “You’re from Wales? Not much history of pogroms there. But then, not many Jews either.” He’d obviously forgotten about the ransacking of Jewish shops by striking miners in 1911. Evidently, though he was deeply paranoid, he wasn’t quite paranoid enough.

Unlike you, Oliver.

I don’t doubt you’ll be convinced that the conspiracy has come down on you and forced you to issue an apology, as you did through your spokesman at Rubenstein Communications in New York.

Wait. Rubenstein Communications? Oliver, are you part of the conspiracy, too? Thinking conspiratorially, I might say that you stuck out your neck knowing that it’d be chopped off by the people who, as you point out, “fucked up United States foreign policy for years.” Was your plan merely to get publicity for your “Wall Street” sequel which is out next month?

If so, I’d better cancel this memo.

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 got to thinking about this when I was wandering the Nablus casbah this week with two German friends. An enthusiastic Palestinian fellow asked me to explain to them how much he appreciated Hitler, and as an afterthought he noted that all his people’s problems are caused by me and my compatriots from the British Isles.

I had just climbed up the old Turkish clocktower in Manara Square at the heart of the casbah with one of the Germans. I’d never seen the door at the bottom open before, but there was a policeman inside on this occasion and he generously allowed us to go up the ladder. On the first balcony, I stepped through more pigeon feces than I’d have thought could possibly gather in one place. It was crusty for an inch or two, then a little slushy beneath. I had a grin all over my face of the kind that tends to appear there when I discover a new corner in a place I’ve often been – and loved being there – before.

Above us swung the two weathered lead weights of the clock, there since the Ottomans built the tower 150 years ago. I leaned on the thin columns and Arabesqued stonework and looked out over the small square where I set an important scene in the third of my novels, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, in which my sleuth Omar Yussef attends a massed wedding organized by Hamas at the foot of the beautiful old clocktower.

When we descended, the policeman had been joined by two friends. One of them, a gregarious fellow in a red polo shirt, inquired in Arabic as to our origins. That my friends were from Germany excited him considerably. He told me that Germany was great and he very much liked — then he used a word which I couldn’t place. It sounded like the Arabic word for “releasing,” which seemed to make little sense. Was it some kind of sexual joke? I thought it unlikely, given that one of the Germans is a woman. That’d be implausibly crude for a Palestinian.

When he repeated the phrase, I saw what he was getting at. I tried a strained grin. After all I always try to be nice, no matter what opinions are expressed to me in Palestinian towns.

“What did he say?” one of my German friends asked.

“He says Germany is great and, uh, he likes Hitler.”

The red-shirted fellow backed up my translation with a flamboyant Nazi
salute.

“Shame on you,” said my friend, who’s from Berlin.

The other fellow in front of the policeman’s desk read her demeanor and asked me, “She doesn’t like Hitler? Why not?”

“Germans are ashamed of what he did,” I told him.

He nodded his head, accepting that idea. The policeman tried to quiet the red-shirted fellow. “We Palestinians like Germany, because Germany supports the Palestinian people,” he said. “But we don’t like Hitler.”

“Yes, we do. For sure. Ask anyone.” The man in the red shirt showed me his signet ring. It bore the seal of Abdel Hamid, the Ottoman sultan who oversaw the decline of the empire and was deposed by the Young Turks in 1918. “Abdel Hamid was great. The British came here in 1917. They made all our problems.”

My reading of Turkish history suggests that while Abdel Hamid made his own furniture for his palace, he was also paranoid and perhaps a little nuts. (For a fictionalized version of his story, I recommend “The Rage of the Vulture” by the wonderful Barry Unsworth.) On the other hand, I had two great-uncles who fought with Britain’s Imperial Camel Corps in Palestine in 1917. Everyone from Damascus-based terror chiefs to Bethlehem refugees have been both disapproving and amused by this fact. I chose not to enter into an appraisal of British involvement in the Near East with the Hitler fan.

There’s an old Bedouin phrase (though some people say the Chinese thought of it first): The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Well, one can assume that Hitler wouldn’t have been a big supporter of Israel, had he been around to see it. So the pro-Hitler statements of some Palestinians when confronted with a living German are a measure of their hatred for Israel more than anything else.

(I have an idea for a future Omar Yussef novel which will take place in Jerusalem, but will also involve some action from Berlin during the war years. Yes, there were Palestinians over there at that time…But I’m not going to give away the plot.)

As we walked on into the casbah, my German friend sighed. “Welcome to my world,” she said. “I get that all over the Arab world. But from Palestinians in particular. It’s the same for all the German correspondents.”

When I travel through the Palestinian towns, I hear all kinds of complaints about the West. Many assume I’m American, so they ask me to deliver an offensive message to George W. Bush, which I happily promise to do so if I ever bump into him. If it registers that I’m British they request that I let Tony Blair know he’d better not come to their refugee camp or they’ll make big trouble for him. I spend a lot of time in Tuscany, so it’s conceivable I might one day be at the next table to the orange-tanned former Prime Minister, and I’ll certainly inform him that he isn’t flavor of the month in Dehaisha Camp.

Among Palestinians, I like to emphasize that I’m Welsh. That usually leads to a brief pause and a change of subject. I’ve never been asked to pass on the anger of the Palestinian people to the head of the Welsh Assembly, or the Bishop of Llandaff, or Tom Jones.

But touring with some Germans gave me a new perspective on the places I’d been visiting for so long and what it’s like for others to go here. Next time some Palestinian bitches at me about my old pal David Cameron, I think I’ll be rather relieved.

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.