Of course, 4,000 people would also be alive who are now dead. In the course of writing about that destruction between 2000 and 2006, I saw some terrible things, experienced some frightful emotions, and internalized shocking facts about the world around me. It would’ve been easy to become depressed or to descend further into the post-traumatic stress disorder that nipped at my mind quite frequently.

Mozart saved me from that. I used to listen to his music in my armored car as I drove through the dangerous roads of the West Bank or on my iPod as I huddled in my Gaza hotel after a day dodging through refugee camps where Palestinians and Israelis were fighting it out. The Maestro’s great works soothed me, enabled me to achieve an emotional calm, when all around me was horror and chaos.

I didn’t use the music to ignore what was happening. Rather the music kept me open to the world around me. I didn’t have to shut out the horror; I could watch it and try to understand it. Because the great Wolfgang was sending me musical signals about the beauty and peace that exists at the core of every man. We only need listen to Mozart to know that he speaks to this part of us, and his immense popularity and immediacy is a sign that it truly is something we all possess.

There’s a good deal of research about Mozart’s music and its phenomenal ability to calm all kinds of disorders and, certainly, to soothe us when we’re stressed. Kids with attention-deficit disorder have been shown to concentrate better if Mozart is playing in their classroom. Epileptics are less likely to have seizures if they’ve been listening to Mozart (an element I worked into the plot of MOZART’S LAST ARIA.)

I found the last six symphonies were the most relaxing, and the piano sonatas. I think that’s because there’s an even greater clarity in these pieces than in some of Mozart’s other work. It’s also in these pieces that he hits the sonic frequencies particular to him which appear to be behind the curative effect of his music – frequencies scientists have found NOT to occur in other great composers like Beethoven or Brahms. (Listen to those other guys and it’ll be good for you, but it won’t really calm you and it certainly doesn’t have the same effect on A.D.D. or epileptics.)

At the worst time of the intifada, in 2003, I took a vacation with my wife in Austria and the Czech Republic. I wanted to experience some calm in the mountains, see some beautiful cities, and hear lovely music. I found all those things, but I also stumbled across something that made me come to life creatively.

The trip became an impromptu Mozart tour – but not necessarily the Mozart you might expect. We happened to pass through the tiny village in the mountains near Salzburg where Mozart’s sister lived as the wife of a boring local functionary (and where by chance his mother had been born). I started to think about this sister, who was called Nannerl (German for “Little Nanna.” Her full name was Maria Anna.) She had been almost as talented as Wolfgang, but she was cooped up in the mountains while her brother became famous in Vienna.

As a writer of crime fiction, of course, I also started to think about her response to his death.

Later, I was having dinner with Maestro Zubin Mehta, formerly the musical director of the New York Philharmonic and now holder of many top positions in the world of classical music. I asked him which of all the great composers he valued most highly. “I’d find it hard to live without Mozart,” he said.

That started me thinking about those people who had lived with Mozart. After his death at only 35, what had it been like to live without him. To have known and lost one of the greatest geniuses in the history of the world.

Over the course of many research trips to Vienna, I came up with the idea of posing Maestro Mehta’s question through Mozart’s sister. A musical prodigy who’s forgotten to history except as a footnote in stories about her famous brother, she knew him better than anyone. What might’ve been her response to losing him?

I hope that MOZART’S LAST ARIA comes close to the actual emotional experience Nannerl would’ve had. Based on real historical research it also posits some new ideas about who might’ve been behind the Maestro’s murder….

In this engaging, well-paced book from crime novelist and journalist Rees (The Collaborator of Bethlehem), Mozart’s estranged sister, Madame Maria Anna Berchtold von Sonnenburg (called Nannerl by her family), travels to Vienna to investigate the mysterious circumstances of her brother’s sudden death. According to Nannerl’s sister-in-law Constanze, Mozart had premonitions of murder before he died. In Vienna, Nannerl finds a web of deception, scandal, and fear revolving around the colorful, dangerous Freemasons, implicating Mozart in shadowy activities and pointing to his death by poison. Meanwhile, Nannerl’s own musical career—once overshadowed by her prodigy brother’s—is revived as she pays tribute to his compositions. Despite her reservations, she finds herself drawn to a powerful baron, himself caught up in all the intrigue. Combining Dan Brown or Elizabeth Kostova–style historical conspiracy theory with cozy detective novel, Rees’s latest offers a genuinely felt reverence for the power of Mozart’s music and its lasting impact in the world.

The joke, of course, is that no one could imagine the Pope as a sexual object, whether alive or dead. The same might be thought to be true of classical musicians. While Shakira shakes her “fanciable” ass on every video, classical musicians are supposed to be much stuffier.

However, during the research for my new historical thriller MOZART’S LAST ARIA I discovered that the sexiest performers today are not the booty-shaking R’n’B divas, nor the pouting rockers (none of them has ever been able to compete with Joan Jett.) They’re the opera singers and clarinetists and pianists.

Followers of my blog The Man of Twists and Turns will have seen a couple of videos featuring the music from MOZART’S LAST ARIA performed by current musicians. I cite them here to prove my point. Check out Diana Damrau and tell me that when you hear this beautiful blonde Bavarian singing Mozart (as she does on her homepage), you don’t feel a stirring in areas you might have thought were as dormant as a dead Pope. She’s also evidence that the days of the fat lady singing are over. Opera divas are quite gorgeous these days.

Or there’s the Israeli clarinetist Sharon Kam who appears in a video on my blog playing another of the pieces from my novel. A prominent performer around Europe, she’s much more expressive on stage in her body movements than most soloists. I will stop here before I get into further Cook-and-Moore territory with comments about the shape of the clarinet and where the soloist places it… (And after all Spike Milligan’s orchestral penis substitute was a different woodwind which he dubbed “Pink Oboe.”)

This is all more than idle comment on a few good-looking women, of course. There’s an important artistic point to be made. And now that I’ve given you links to what Pete and Dud would’ve called “the crumpet,” I shall make that artistic point.

As I was writing MOZART’S LAST ARIA, my closest musical consultant was Orit Wolf, a wonderful Israeli concert pianist who’s married to a great friend of mine. We discussed at great length the techniques she uses to enter the spirit or mood of a piece of music before she plays it. But in talking to Orit it became clear to me that the sensuality of classical music is unrivalled by other musical genres. The stereotypical image of classical music is as stiff and elitist. While the places where the music is performed may often seem elitist, the performers themselves are deeply emotional and yet focused in their sentiment.

I tried to bring this sensibility to the writing of MOZART’S LAST ARIA. To make the book sensual, even if it takes place in a cold Vienna winter. To bring us so close to the emotions of the characters in the book that we feel as though they are beautiful music working on our own feelings.

I think I have it right, naturally. Whereas the dead Pope fixation leads Pete and Dud to attempt arson on the BBC (see their Ad Nauseam album of 1978), my sense of the sensuousness of classical music gave rise to a novel that I hope readers will find…. sexy.

In the case of such writers, some of those 25 million may have degenerative diseases and others may be plain stupid, but in all likelihood about 24 million of them will remember a writer whose book they read, let’s say, two years ago.

Nonetheless the expectation remains that a book a year will be forthcoming. So do all crime writers have one good idea a year? Or do ideas take longer to gestate? And if they do, where does that leave the writer who needs to get words on paper right now.

In the case of my latest novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA (out now in the UK, but not until November in the US), it was eight years between the initial idea and publication. A most un-crime-fiction-like timescale.

It began with a trip I took with my wife into the Salzkammergut, to find peace among the mountains and lakes at a time when we were living through the Palestinian intifada in Jerusalem. There we stumbled across the remote house where Mozart’s sister Nannerl had lived and a fascination with her was born.

It was nurtured through future visits to Vienna, to Prague (where Mozart’s operas are still performed in the Estates Theater, scene of his “Don Giovanni” premier), dinners with Maestro Zubin Mehta at which we discussed our mutual admiration for the great composer (though it shan’t surprise you to learn that his understanding of the music is on a somewhat, ahem, more elevated level than mine…)

All this was before I began to scribble notes and plot diagrams and to read every letter Mozart wrote and to walk Vienna searching out the places where I wanted to set scenes and to listen, listen, listen to all his music. Oh, and to learn to play the piano so I could play Mozart, but the less said about that the better, because sooner or later someone’s going to want to hear me play and I oughtn’t to inflict that on anyone.

Meanwhile, I wrote four of my crime novels set in present-day Palestine (and Brooklyn’s Little Palestine.) They came quicker. Perhaps because after the first book, THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM, I had a set of characters to whom I could return. The events I described were often based on stories I had covered as a journalist, so there were readymade anchors for the plot—things which had actually happened, which I had heard described or even seen for myself.

The most important element, though, of putting yourself in a position to write a book a year is a matter of managing your head. Last night I was chatting with a fabulous author, Evan Fallenberg, who noted that the idea for the great novel he just published came to him when he was lying bed after waking up. My ideas for the novel I’m about to begin working on came while I was meditating and developed on my regular walks home from the gym. In other words, when I wasn’t forcing myself to think anything through.

I’ve come to believe that remaining creatively open, focusing on relaxation and not overstimulation, allows the brain to unleash itself. If our fingers could keep up, we could type a dozen novels a year—if only we’d set our brains free.