News from the North

2020-12-31T23:59:00.002-05:00

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The mind of the single-issue man

2008-07-03T15:25:00.001-04:00

Today's Montreal Gazette contains, on its op-ed page, a stunning apologia for Robert Mugabe written by Mohamed Elmasry, national president of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

I have neither the time nor inclination to detail how astonishingly wrongheaded this piece is - though what the hell, I'll pick at a few points: 1) it hasn't been about the white farmers for at least five years now, and anyways, the "land reform" wasn't; 2) the 2002 election was highly questionable and is now hardly relevant; 3) the country is in ruins not because of "Western sanctions" but because of jawdropping kleptocracy and mismanagement; 4) describing widespread violence, starvation as a political tool, and other horrific abuses as "clumsy" is, to grossly understate, a wee bit disingenuous.

But what is actually interesting about this piece is the glimpse it gives us of the single-issue mind: a person who has only one sociopolitical litmus test, and views all events through glasses tinged with that colour. Elmasry's a smart guy - aside from being head of the CIC, he's an engineering professor at the University of Waterloo. (I'm pretty sure he taught one of my classes there. My memory of him is vague, but I was not exactly a faithful student, so that's true of most of my former profs.) But he appears to be utterly incapable of analyzing a person, or a situation, in any light other than "does it challenge the Western hegemony? If so, is good, and if necessary we will twist our minds and arguments into Moebius pretzels to support it! If not, is bad, and we must condemn!"

He's not so different from the many who take all criticism of Israel as anti-semitism, or the even more who see everything in terms of gender politics. Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if his type is a near-majority. But most such people use weasel words and pretexts in an attempt to seem reasonable. You rarely get to see so stark an attempted defense of the indefensible as this. It's weirdly fascinating, in that car-crash way.

How to rent a car

2008-06-30T14:43:00.001-04:00

1) Get a driver's license. These are remarkably useful things to have, especially in North America.

2) Get a credit card that insures rental cars against collision and loss. Such cards often charge an annual fee, but will pay for themselves if you rent as rarely as once a year - buying that insurance from the rentacar company often costs ~$15 per rental day. Make sure that card is paid up, as the insurance may lapse if you're past due, and bear in mind you have to use it to rent the car.

3) Book online, in advance, preferably with at least one Saturday-night stay. I generally use Expedia to comparison-shop the various major chains, then go to the cheapest chain's corporate site and book a car there. I rarely wind up paying more than $25/day.

4) You don't need to provide a credit card number to rent a car, so feel free to book more than one, just in case.

5) Save money when you book. The bewildering rentacar business model includes all manner of "promotion codes", "discount codes", etc. Taking 30 seconds to find such a code online at places like RedFlagDeals or MouseSavers (of all places) can save you 15-20% or even more. Also, check the company's "Deals" page for special offers. Also, note that renting for a week can be cheaper than renting for 4 days.

5) Watch out for gotchas. Your mileage may not be unlimited. You may not be allowed to drive out of province/state/country, or if you do, the terms and conditions may change dramatically. (For example, Thrifty and Dollar in Quebec forbid you from leaving Quebec; Enterprise changes from "unlimited mileage" to "expensive, limited mileage" if you cross the border into the USA; Avis does the same trick on weekends.) Don't lie; many rentacars have onboard GPS trackers.

6) If renting in Europe, or actually anywhere outside of North America, either be comfortable driving a stick, or make it very very clear that you want an automatic.

7) If you are going to a faraway place, you may need an International Driver's License, which your home country automobile association can provide. However, it's an annoyance and only lasts one year. In practice, rich countries generally just accept each other's licensing systems, and poor countries are more willing to rent without such paperwork, so I've only ever needed one of these in South Africa, which only accepts foreign English-language driver's licenses. (Quebec's licenses are in French. This has never been a problem in the USA, but can be elsewhere. They also don't obviously indicate date of birth, which is annoying.)

8) Look for smaller, independent car rental places if you don't have a credit card, or if you're under 25, or if you want to rent a luxury car, or if you want to rent long-term. In particular, I recommend Super Cheap Car Rental if you need a car in California, esp. long-term, and you're not automotively vain: they provide well-used but well-maintained vehicles for reasonable monthly fees that include all insurance. Also, they're nice people.

9) In the USA you're often asked if you want "liability insurance" for ~$20/day (which is sometimes more than the car itself!), and it's incredibly hard to get a straight answer on whether you actually need this or not. In Canada the cultural context is such that the notion of going to and/or doing anything in the USA without copious insurance, lest you break a leg or get sued or something equally awful, is perceived with great trepidation. My impression is that rental car companies are generally required to provide the legal minimum of liability insurance, but I dunno whether this covers you out-of-state. In general I turn it down and then drive nervously.

10) Sometimes one-way rentals are very cheap; I once got a one-way rental from Phoenix to L.A. for $9.99/day and no extra one-way charge, presumably because Avis had a glut. Sometimes they're very not. Sometimes it's free to return a car to a different location in the same city where you rented it; sometimes it's not. Check in advance.

11) Check the car for damage before you drive it away, lest you get charged for it later. Although the one time this happened I sent them a scorching email and they immediately dropped their claim.

12) If your license has been suspended, don't rent from Thrifty, as they will actually check. (This is how I found out my U.S. license was suspended some years ago. I had been renting cars regularly from other companies for months.)

13) You will have an noticeably easier time at the U.S./Canada border if you're driving a rental car; the guards presumably figure "well, they might be dodging the cops, smuggling drugs, and planning to work here illegally, but hey, no problem, they'll never escape the wrath of Hertz!"

14) Don't return the car late. You get a "grace period" of maybe an hour, or even less; after that they start charging you usurious fees. Also, try to return it full, or they'll charge you amazing amounts for the gas you didn't put in the tank, and then rent the same car, unfilled, to the next customer and tell them to bring it back with the needle where it began. I think rental companies actually make most of their profits from surcharges and insurance.

15) If you leave something in the car, they're actually really good about getting it back to you; Avis once mailed me (prescription) sunglasses I had forgotten from California to Canada, on their dime.

16) If you drive a rental car to Burning Man, try to wash it thoroughly and then bring it back at a 24-hour automated-return location, because the employees will be rather upset with you, and not without reason (the engine will be coated with playa dust even if you never popped the hood.)

we love it when our friends become successful

2008-06-20T18:32:00.002-04:00

Check it out: my friend Nigel Dickinson just won a 2008 Press Photographer's Year Award, which is quite prestigious if clumsily named, in the "Features" category, for his stunning Cambodia travel photography.

Myth America

2008-06-12T22:05:00.003-04:00

From Thomas Friedman's latest column:

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats’ nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America’s image abroad than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

...Every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary — something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine — that it revives America’s revolutionary “brand” overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned...

For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the “idea of America” — this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

What he's talking about is the myth of America.

That myth used to be incredibly powerful, especially in poor countries where people lived in a kind of oppressive stasis, of which Egypt is an excellent example. The myth was that somewhere across the Atlantic there was a better place, a land of hope and opportunity, a meritocracy that accepted people of every race and creed and nation, where if they worked hard they could not just succeed but transcend their otherness and become an integral part of this magical place; and you too could go there - heck, you already know people who know people who already have, maybe you never will but you could, and if you did, hell, your children could grow up to become President!

And every Hollywood movie and Michael Jordan T-shirt helped reinforce this myth. Not everyone bought into it, certainly, maybe not even a majority, but those who did held on to it tight. (And in my experience, gentle suggestions to such people that what they were describing actually sounded a whole lot more like Canada got dismissed out of hand.)

We're not just talking Nigeria and Egypt and India here; a similar attitude, a view of America as a place where you don't just whine about problems but you solve them, America where the government gets out of your way and lets you build your empire, and/or America where the future is forged, was pretty common across the developed world, too. Most Brits would admit a sneaking sympathy to that view, and I think it's part of where Le Monde's famous Nous sommes tous Américains headline on 13 Sep 01 came from.

And then, over the last seven years, as all of that goodwill aimed towards America disintegrated, the myth of America died with it. Its believers discovered that the land of hope and opportunity was actually the land of Dick Cheney and Abu Ghraib, and they felt bitter and angry and cheated.

But then: Obama. The son of an African, with dark skin and a Muslim name, runs for the presidency. The Party Establishment has anointed another candidate (uh, at best a gross oversimplification, but we're talking story not reality) - but this is not a prime ministership; it's the people who vote, not the party. And the American People sweep this son of a Kenyan Muslim to the threshold of the presidency!

If you squint at him from far away, Barack Obama is practically King Arthur back from Avalon to save the day: he is the myth of America incarnate, just when that myth was believed dead.

(For the record, he would have been my third choice, after Richardson and Edwards.)

Islands in the slums

2008-06-09T13:00:00.014-04:00

This NYT article about a gated community in India is a really good snapshot of what the developing world is like today.

As money flows into an impoverished nation, first you get a few tiny islands of First World development, usually in the capital: embassies, presidential mansions, five-star hotels. Inside you find armies of servants in ill-fitting uniforms ready to obey your every whim, for labour is cheap. But the lack of infrastructure still tells. I've been in many luxury hotels with little garbage cans for soiled toilet paper placed beside the toilets because the plumbing still isn't up to much, generators that hum all day and night, and menus which are largely theoretical. (I know, poor me.) Outside - often, literally, immediately outside - all is filth and chaos, and the streets are clogged with crowds of the malnourished. Beyond major cities the roads are often so bad it can take all day to travel a hundred miles.

Then the pockets of wealth begin to metastasize: four-star hotels in secondary cities, private estates, luxury tourist resorts. Public transport begins to shift from cramped tro-tro/matatu/dalla-dalla minivans to slightly-less-cramped buses (which invariably play movies and music at EXTREMELY LOUD VOLUMES) and, especially if they were lucky enough to be colonized by the British (hey, it sure beat being colonized by the Portuguese!) rickety but serviceable railways. A couple of decent roads appear, although bizarrely this often happens first in remote, little-travelled regions, rather than along main arteries. Internet cafes and privately owned cell phones become more visible, even in local-residential areas. Shantytowns swell up in the outskirts of cities as young people flock from rural areas to try to get a taste of their nation's growing wealth. Usually they fail. Meanwhile, in the cities, a tiny middle class begins to develop.

Almost invariably, in old cities, a suburb-like region without historical inertia and ancient buildings becomes the epicentre of the modern earthquake, and the first entire region of the country to go semi-First-World: Miraflores in Lima, Pudong in Shanghai, Ma'adi in Cairo, Juhu in Mumbai, Pétionville in Port-au-Prince. It's where the rich live, where the modern shopping malls and cinemas go. And it's flooded, needless to say, with poorly paid servants and security guards. Gated communities like those mentioned in the above article develop elsewhere. Meanwhile the slums grow to epic proportions.

Then - and this is in some ways the most interesting stage, one that China went through in the last ten years, and that India is going through right now, and perhaps one that Paris went through 150 years ago - highway and sewer networks are built, shantytowns become slums and those close to wealth are razed, and the formerly isolated pockets of development begin to reach out and connect to one another, like merging drops of water, until you get multiple connecting avenues, regions, even entire cities of money and modernity, all still surrounded by bitter, grinding poverty. Shanghai today, for instance: not just First World but actually Next World, having in many ways leapfrogged New York and London. (Maglev railways, anyone?) People flock from around the world to live there, at the coal face of the future, and huge expat communities grow.

Meanwhile, not so far away, in the same country, slum dwellers sleep ten to a room, and subsistence farmers still eke out a living as they always have.

Free to a good home! Or even yours!

2008-05-20T10:46:00.005-04:00

I am very pleased to announce that HarperCollins Canada, in conjunction with the paperback release of Invisible Armies, has released the entire book online, for free, until June 30th. (I've been pushing for this for quite some time now.) Tell your friends!

eta: hey, I think Invisible Armies just got the best book blurb ever, from none other than Bruce Sterling: People who aren't morons and like thriller novels ought to read this.

etaa: Shout-outs have also cropped up in The Globe & Mail, Quill & Quire, and - woot! - BoingBoing.

Movie review: Breakfast At Tiffany's

2008-05-11T17:29:00.003-04:00

Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1961: Lula Mae Barnes (Audrey Hepburn) survives an abusive home, tweenage homelessness, and marriage at 14 to become a bipolar pathological liar who calls herself "Holly Golightly". She escapes to New York, where she lives off of prostitution, pornography, and organized crime. Paul Varjak (George Peppard), her new neighbour, is a writer-turned-rent-boy. Love blooms when she takes him shoplifting; but she rebuffs Paul in favour of being a rich man's mistress, even after her long-lost brother - the alleged reason for her mercenary greed - dies in an accident. Meanwhile, "Moon River" plays incessantly.

"Holly" is eventually arrested, and her sugar daddy rejects her. When she exiles her cat onto the mean streets of New York, Paul realizes just how crazy she is and tries to get away, but at the last minute she changes her mind and ensnares him. It seems clear from the ending that he will never escape.

Curiously, this paean to alcoholism, madness, and pack-a-day smoking is played as romantic comedy rather than horror/tragedy.

various publications

2008-04-14T11:25:00.009-04:00

I have an article about a maternity hospital in Haiti in the May issue of The Walrus, and a little essay about writing graphic novels up on the The Guardian's books blog.

I actually sent The Guardian this version first, which if you ask me was far more interesting and appropriate, but it got bounced for failure to comply with their house style rules, alas:

Panel One
Young Jon – chubby, bespectacled, geeky – stands in front of a rack of comic books, totally engrossed in an issue of The Uncanny X-Men. Batman, Spiderman and Superman stare out at us from the rack behind him.
Caption	Twenty years ago, this was what comics meant to me: melodramatic tales of implausibly proportioned superheroes.
Jon	This is awesome!
Caption	Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Panel Two
The same layout as Panel One. Present-day Jon – tall, strong, devastatingly handsome – stands in a modern bookstore, in front of a rack labelled "Graphic Novels", reading Louis Riel. Among the books behind him are Sandman, Maus, Palestine, Persepolis and Watchmen.
Caption	But they have long since escaped that literary ghetto, and of late many authors who made their names as novelists (such as Jonathan Ames and Mat Johnson) have turned their hands and minds to comics.
Jon	This is excellent.
Caption	So when Vertigo Comics asked me to script a graphic novel for them, my initial reaction was - pure trepidation.
Panel Three
Over Jon's shoulder as he stares at a laptop screen, on which is written: The Executor (a thriller about dark secrets and racial tensions in a small town near a Native American reservation)
Jon (thinks)	What am I doing? I'm a novelist. Words in a row, that's what I do, that's what I love. How can I turn my back on them in favour of pictures?
Caption	I needn't have worried. Anyone who has read eccentric British genius Alan Moore knows that elegant, inventive prose and compelling images can live in perfect harmony...
Panel Four
Close on Jon as he reads a book called Understanding Comics – and a light bulb goes on over his head.
Caption	...though that wasn't the direction I took for my first script.
Jon (thinks)	Aha! Visual storytelling. Like directing a movie in my head! I'll dive into the deep end and make it as visual as possible; strip the story down to nothing but pictures and dialogue.
Caption	Graphic novels are naturally cinematic, which is why so many – such as A History of Violence and Road to Perdition – have been adapted into excellent films.
Panel Five
Split panel. On the left, artist Andrea Mutti working at his sketching table. I've never met him but imagine him as Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life, except with more ears. On the right, an irate Jon reads from his laptop.
Caption	And like films, they're a collaborative medium. Authors are accustomed to being dictators, but comics are a bad medium for control freaks.
Andrea	Ah, yes ... the rules of visual storytelling, which I have been studying for twenty years, require a whatchamacallit here.
Jon	What is he doing? The script clearly calls for a doohickey, not a whatchamacallit!
Caption	A lot of negotiation and letting go of ego was required on both sides for the book to work. But I couldn't be happier with the results.
Panel Six
Jon leans back in his Aeron chair, reading The Executor in book form at last.
Caption	It's nice to be working in a burgeoning medium, and for a publisher eager to experiment, at a time when agents and editors speak grimly of the "declining readership" and "tough market" for most novels.
Jon	This is awesome!
Caption	But I think the main reason authors are turning to graphic novels is simply this: they're all kinds of fun to write.

don't miss

2008-04-07T17:47:00.001-04:00

And for those of you who have been living in a cave - or, if there's anything to the horror-audience stereotype, perhaps those of you not living in caves - my old friend Sarah Langan (we've known each other since our teens, lo these many strange aeons ago) last week won a thoroughly deserved Bram Stoker Award for the best horror novel of 2007, The Missing.

While it's technically a sequel to her stunning debut The Keeper, which was a nominee last year - and, frankly, should have won - you really don't need to read Keeper first. But that's a moot point as you should rush out and read both right now.

pull me out of the air crash

2008-03-10T14:53:00.003-04:00

Well, that was unexpectedly exciting.

"International diversions are unusual," said the still-slightly-shaken stewardess over the PA, as we taxied towards Schiphol International. It was something of an understatement. I had heard of airplanes that took off aiming for one country but wound up landing in another - most notably in Gander on 11 Sep 01 - but until today it hadn't ever happened to anyone I knew.

I've had a fair number of interesting airborne expeditions. In ~~no particular~~ strict chronological order, they include a Douala-Harare flight that featured an abrupt and unscheduled stopover in Kinshasa, at the height of the Congo's civil war; careening across the Himalaya on a Buddha Air prop plane full of bags of apples, with cotton swabs for earplugs; a six-seater Cessna caught in the swooping up-, down- and side- drafts above the Grand Canyon; my solo skydive from 12,500 feet over Empuriabrava; a thunderstorm landing in the Papua New Guinea highlands; a flight into Iquitos, a jungle city unconnected by road, on an airline not permitted to fly into the USA; the C-130(?) US military cargo jet from Germany to Iraq, via "death spiral" landing, followed by the Anaconda-Baghdad-Anaconda Blackhawk shuttle; even the world's first credit-card-purchased flight from Kigali International. But I have never felt quite so nervous in the air as I did today.

I would have been fine if I hadn't begun to think he was actually going to try to land the thing. "There's high winds, but they say they've steadied off a bit, so we're just going to go down and take a look and see if we can land," the pilot chirruped in a cheerful Texan accent, and down we sauntered towards London Gatwick, until the sauntering turned into a bouncing, buffeting roller-coaster ride, more violent than any other turbulence I can remember offhand - and this was no puddle-jumper or diesel prop, this was a 767 - and yet the flaps rose, the landing gear dropped, the engine dialled back, and we just kept falling, falling, down so far that we could see land even through the thick clouds below, and I really thought he was going to go for it despite our continual erratic and violent near-quantum jumps in all three axes.

Then whoom, the engine screamed back to full power, the wheels went up, the flaps went down, and as we soared back through the unfriendly skies to something vaguely like cruising altitude, the pilot got on the horn and reported, with something like amazement in his voice, "It was 72 knots with wind shear at 800 feet down there, so tell you what, folks, we're just going to divert to Amsterdam, fuel up and sit tight 'til this weather clears up."

Good call, I thought. Then I thought, waitaminit, Amsterdam? But yep, seems the whole British Isles were being lashed by storm, and you know what they say about any port in those circumstances.

We probably landed on fumes, too; we'd come all the way from Atlanta. Alas, we were not allowed to deplane and enjoy the many delights of Schiphol aka Spliffol (is it true there's a hash bar?) - apparently nation-states look askance at unexpected airliner visitors. At least the flight was sparsely populated and I had a whole middle section to myself, enough that I could lie down with bent knees and sleep during our unplanned two-hour Dutch stopover. Gatwick was more welcoming at noon, and here I sit, back on Daventry Street, in one piece, and rather glad of it.

In other news, NoK has earned a few nice reviews from English and Australian papers:

The Sydney Morning Herald, my daily paper when Down Unda, calls it A scary and graphic thriller about a complex global conspiracy involving al-Qaeda, pan-African politics, gorillas, guerillas, murdered hostages, state-of-the-art digital technology and, inevitably, the CIA.

The novel begins at speed, with a group of British, American and Canadian tourists trekking through the Ugandan jungle on a gorilla-spotting tour. By the time the page numbers reach double figures, the guards are dead and the tourists' apparently Congolese captors are marching them towards the Uganda-Congo border, where the plan is to hold them to ransom.

But almost every aspect of the plot is more complicated than it seems ...

The York Press says (scroll down): A gripping and terrifying read. Evans is definitely a name for the future

The Lancashire Evening Post goes into more detail: In this scarily plausible thriller set in the heart of Africa, kidnap in the Congo is just a smokescreen for a devastating conspiracy [...] Full of pace and high drama in a world made more open and dangerous by modern technology, Evans's plots positively teem with well-drawn characters and terse, well-controlled dialogue. There are plenty of twists and turns and the non-stop action is guaranteed to leave readers breathless. Ya got that?

They also call me the master of the high tech, high concept and high adrenalin thriller, which would be more of an egoboo if it wasn't quoted word for word from my publisher-written publicity blurb.

Oh. Yes. They do say The only reservation about Evans's thrillers is his use of the present tense which may be designed to give the story more impact and immediacy but seems a pointless writing device that jars with the action and makes reading unnecessarily laboured.

Actually, Books One and Two are first-person past: I wrote Invisible Armies in third-person present basically because I thought of it as a cyberpunk novel and was aping Snow Crash, then decided I liked it enough to stick with it in NoK (after various interim drafts, including at least one, if memory serves, written as two storylines with alternating past and present tense). Have since moved back to past tense for my most recent work.

Does present tense really bug people that much? I suppose the correct answer is, as always, "not if it's done well." Hrmp. Oh well.

re-release

2008-01-18T08:44:00.001-05:00

At long last I can show to an anxiously awaiting world the covers for

a) the Canadian mass-market paperback edition of Invisible Armies, to be published on May 24th of this year:

b) the Canadian rereleases of Dark Places and Blood Price, which will be released five weeks earlier, on April 19th:

I think it's safe to say that I have now become, in at least one very literal sense of the word, a Big Name Author.

Reasons to be cheerful

2007-12-19T12:29:00.001-05:00

w00t¹! My fourth (published) novel, The Night of Knives, aka "the Africa book," is officially On Sale today.

The official blurb:

Veronica Kelly has come to Africa to start her life over. Still reeling from her divorce, she is grateful when a handsome stranger invites her on an expedition to visit gorillas in Uganda 's wild Impenetrable Forest . But the trip goes desperately wrong when the group of tourists are captured by brutal gunmen, marched into the lawless Congo , and held for ransom.

Then one tourist is executed.

And then another.

Their abduction is only the first move in a deadly strategic game that may consume entire nations...

This is a small UK hardcover printing, so you'll probably only be able to find it online at Amazon.co.uk et al and at specialty shops - the big paperback release will be in August. It's also on sale at Amazon.ca. Trade paperbacks should start appearing in the "overseas" markets ( Australia, NZ, South Africa, India, Singapore, HK, English bookstores in continental Europe, the occasional airport) sometime in January. I'll pass on details about American and Canadian publication and availability when they cohere.

In the meantime, shop early, shop often, shop again!

¹The word of the year. Clearly they're behind the times - careful readers will remember a brief digression on such leetspeak in Invisible Armies.

Haiti, Haight, I got a new complaint

2007-12-08T21:04:00.000-05:00

Well, I just got back an I wish I never leave now (where'd you go?)
Who dat martian arrival at the airport? (where'd you go?)
How many local dollars for a local anaesthetic? (where'd you go?)
The johnny on the corner was very sympathetic (where'd you go?)

I went to the place where every white face
Is an invitation to robbery
An sitting here in my safe ~~European~~ Canadian home
I ~~don't~~ wanna go back there again

Wasn't I lucky n' wouldn't it be loverly? (where'd you go?)
Send us all cards, have a laying in on sunday (where'd you go?)
I was there for two weeks, so how come I never tell (where'd you go?)
That natty dread drinks at the Sheraton hotel? (where'd you go?)

I went to the place where every white face
Is an invitation to robbery
An sitting here in my safe ~~European~~ Canadian home
I ~~don't~~ wanna go back there again

Now they got the sun, an they got the palm trees
They got the weed, an they got the taxis
Whoa, the harder they come, n the home of ol bluebeat
Yes I'd stay an be a tourist but I can't take the gunplay

Safe ~~European~~ Canadian home
Your safe ~~European~~ Canadian home
Your safe ~~European~~ Canadian home
Your safe ~~European~~ Canadian home

Poster child.

Into the unknown.

The slums of La Saline.

Sometimes the world seems very big.

At the mobile clinic.

Port-au-Prince panorama.

Children in developing nations looooove having their picture taken and shown to them. Especially if, as is often the case, they've never had their picture taken before.

and I ain't seen sunshine since I don't know when

2007-10-18T03:34:00.000-04:00

Notes from my visit to San Quentin State Prison last month:

Take the 101 North across the Golden Gate Bridge, follow the signs for the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge onto Sir Francis Drake Blvd, keep going until you reach the LAST MARIN COUNTY EXIT sign, bear right, and you'll find yourself in the tiny, quaint little hamlet of San Quentin, a few dozen houses and a post office in search of a village, entirely dwarfed by its most famous residence.

I drove through the open VISITOR PARKING gates, and readied myself in my rental car. I'd already dressed appropriately: no denim, no blue or orange, no open-toed shoes, nothing "provocative", and above all, no cell phones or recording devices. Carrying only wallet and car keys, I walked back up to the main gate, where the guard on duty was opening and checking the trunks of all of the many cars filing out of the grounds.

We congregated near the entrance - "we" being myself and a group of Corrections students from Pittsburg; I'd talked the prison's Public Information Officer into letting me tag along. We handed our ID to the gate guard. There was some drama regarding the acceptability of one woman's capri pants; then, it turned out I and one of the students were not "cleared" - our names weren't on the computer. The students' professor, a former San Quentin CO named Eric, really nice guy, turned up, all the problems were soon resolved, and we entered through the vehicle gate, signed in on a clipboard, and walked past the Golden 1 Credit Union ATM onto the grounds of perhaps the most infamous prison in the United States.

The first view was anticlimactic. Just more houses to the right, and a strip of old colonial-style buildings along main street, parking to the left. San Quentin Village On The Grounds: some of the prison employees actually live inside the gates. To the left, a spectacular view over the northern arm of the San Francisco Bay, past the gracefully arching bridge towards Richmond. And dead ahead of us, looming, the pale beige battlements of what looks very much like a medieval castle, complete with crenellated battlements atop the main entrance; San Quentin Prison.

Sergeant Luna, our guide, outlined a few protocols. "If you hear a buzzer going on and off, stop and stay close to me. If you hear a whistle, same thing. If we get into a hostage situation, I want to make perfectly clear, under no circumstances will we release an inmate, but we have trained CRT teams" (aka SWAT) "and hostage negotiators on the grounds, so just stay cool and follow their instructions. And mine. I'll probably be with you if that happens."

About thirty seconds later, as we approach the battlements, we hear a buzzer going on and off.

Not an emergency, it turns out: rather, part of the Weapons Transfer protocol, as guns are transferred from an incoming van into the extremely secure armory just outside the wall. There are no guns whatsoever permitted inside the wall (other than on the gun-walks, as explained below.) While the weapons are transferred we stand motionless below Tower #1, which kind of looks like an enormous chess rook, right opposite the main gate. "Used to be a gas-cooled machine gun on that tower," Eric reminisces, "they'd fire into the bay every so often, make sure it was still working. Took it down a few years ago." He nods sadly.

From here we can see a red brick building seemingly inset into the massive prison walls. The initial prison building, but not the initial prison here - that was a ship anchored offshore during the 1849 gold rush, holding eighty of the worst of the worst. It was soon overcrowded, and the red brick building built. The numbers 1890 are set into the stone above the castle gates. The castle is built with arched windows, all now barred with green-painted metal set into the stone; the doorways are covered by hinged shutter-like grids of solid metal.

At the main entrance we sign in again at a desk in an antechamber, our hands are stamped, and the stamps are checked to be sure that the word PASS now glows on our hands under ultraviolet light. We continue into an airlock-like structure, barred on both ends, which according to its signs is called a "sallyport" and fits 10 people. One door closes and locks, the other unlocks and opens. This happens automatically, which is unusual for San Quentin: modern prisons are fully computer-controlled, but almost all of SQ's many bars and locks are manually operated.

We walk through the walls and into a big, bright, open grassy plaza, with a memorial to COs killed in the line of duty, surrounded by buildings: the wall behind us, chapels (Catholic, Protestant, American Indian, Muslim, Jewish) to our right, a gazebo-like administration post and the hospital - an ancient brick building that looks like it belongs in the Old West, and indeed was built in 1885, and is scheduled for demolition and replacement later this year - dead ahead, and to our left, a low, squat building labelled "Adjustment Centre" in a kind of Olde English font. (Which is used pretty much everywhere.) The buildings and especially the wall are draped in copious amounts of razor and barbed wire.

The "Adjustment Centre" (or AC) is where they keep the worst of the worst; 68? 83? or something like that of the most hardened, violent, and evil of their 638 inmates who have been condemned to death. (16 of whom are women.) These are the men (and women?) who they believe would kill a CO if given even half a chance. The AC has its own exercise yards behind it, fully covered, referred to as "dog cages."

Behind us, and two stories above us, a razor-wired metal catwalk hangs from the inside of the wall. This is the "gun walk"; a series of walkways and catwalks runs through almost the entire prison, providing overhead, inaccessible-from-below vantage points manned by men with guns, although none are in sight right now. Above the battlements hang the bells that ring ceremonially at 1600 hours, the time when all the inmates - in California, not just San Quentin - are checked and counted. (There are other count times too.)

We can see our first inmates, hanging around near the chapel; these are "mainline" prisoners, here for awhile, as opposed to "reception" prisoners who have been taken to San Quentin from one of 17 county jails for sorting and processing. The mainliners wear blue jeans, light blue button-down shirts (short or long-sleeved), white or dark blue T-shirts, and a variety of different kinds of shoes. They don't pay much attention to us, which is not surprising; there is a constant stream of people in civilian clothes moving back and forth. San Quentin is blessed by virtue of its liberal Bay Area location with 6,000 civilian volunteers (many other prisons tend to have like 20 or 30) who help with a cornucopia of programs. There are also the "free staff," who commute to work in the prison but are not COs.

(In case you were curious, when you finally leave, you don't go out in prison garb; "breakout clothes" are either those you wore when arrested, which theoretically transfer with you as part of your property; clothes brought by family or friends; or clothes donated by the volunteer group Friends Outside.)

We turn left at the hospital and continue down a paved road. To our left is a wall covered by an enormous mural, two arms reaching out from a globe, holding all manner of people and symbols of civilization; to our right, through a fifteen-foot chainlink fence, we can see the prison stretched out below us on lower ground, housing units, prefab buildings used for education and medical care, and the "lower yard" - a baseball diamond (donated by the SF Giants), a tennis court, a basketball court, even an American Indian sweat lodge. Seagulls and pelicans wander the empty outfield. Sergeant Luna explains that there are two prison baseball teams, the Giants and Pirates; a prison tennis team, and a prison soccer team. They even compete in Marin County leagues, and do quite well. Of course, they have an unfair advantage in that all their games are home games.

Beyond the wall there is another wall; and between inner and outer wall we see the aluminum roofs of San Quentin Industries, where the prisoners work, building mattresses and pillows, furniture (which, coming as I do from a family tightly associated with a furniture factory, I find kind of disconcerting - how are we supposed to compete against prison labour?), dry cleaning ("I pay a dime to get my clothes dry cleaned. It's twelve bucks in town," Sergeant Luna remarks), serving as plumbers, electricians, working in a machine shop, etc. SQ Industries made a profit of $2.5 million dollars last year.

This is all part of the program. "Program" is a word used very often in prisons; it basically describes what prisoners do with their time, both short- and long-term. A prisoner's "program" can include yard time, education, shop work, canteen, counselling, etcetera. Modern prisons are run in large part on programs - and on the threat of having them taken away.

We keep going, into the "upper yard" aka the "shed"; a vast paved space, nothing green in sight, covered by a huge triangular hangar-like metal (aluminum?) roof. A gun-walk runs directly along the peak of the roof, which is riddled by dozens and dozens of holes and clusters of holes. Once upon a time, twenty or thirty years ago, this yard was a hyper-violent place, where COs were supposed to walk only in pairs; the holes are from the many rifle and shotgun warning shots fired by men on the gun-walk.

Of course, COs didn't always follow orders; Eric relates a game they used to play called "parting the Red Sea," where the goal was for the CO to walk from one end of the Shed to the other without once deviating from a straight line. It was a test of inmate respect, whether or not they would step out of your path.

Today, half the upper yard is devoted to dog cages, which will soon become medical buildings. The Investigative Services Unit - "the squad" - is in a prefab building in one corner. By all accounts, the upper yard is a much more peaceful place than it once was. So sayeth Eric, Sgt. Luna, and an inmate named Munch who stops to tell us his story.

He came to San Quentin 33 years ago, when he was eighteen. On his fifth day, he was in the upper yard when he saw one man sitting on another and stabbing him with a foot-long shiv, stabbing so hard that Munch could hear the blade hitting the concrete below, and the victim cried out, "Stop, you killed me already!" Shortly afterwards, some guy made a move on Munch in the shower; he stabbed him with a shiv, got 18 months in the hole. That guy's friends came after Munch when he was released; he stabbed another one, got another 11 months.

"The hardest thing I ever had to do was stab that guy," he says. "It sounds like it would be easy, but it isn't, not when it's against your nature. But the thing about prison is, it becomes your nature ... It's better now." Maybe not that much better; he points to the building behind him, the chow halls, and says "There are still fights there every week." He talks about Ronald Reagan giving the prisoners televisions, which apparently made a big difference.

Munch walks with a cane, with a little box full of papers, books and a poster tube under his arm. He has become a prisoner's advocate, the official voice of the prisoners who carries their grievances to the COs. His moustached face and body are soft and slack, but his eyes remain sharp and hard. After he leaves Eric tells us that Munch is up for parole and his hearing is tomorrow.

The Shed stretches from the original Death Row - 63 cells atop a five-story building - to the canteen building on the other end. "You can tell a lot from the canteen," Sergeant Luna confides. "The currency here is soups and stamps, now that they don't sell smokes any more. You see a guy saying, hey, give me some soups, you know he's got respect. You see a whole group buying everything they can, that tells you something bad, it means they're storing up for a lockdown."

Outside the canteen a hugely muscled CO describes what the dining halls are like. "I don't want to talk about them like they're animals," he begins, but the words "feeding" and "zoo" appear frequently in his following description. Breakfast is supposed to start at 6:15 and run until 9:00 but usually is more like 6:45-10:00 or even longer. If there is some kind of tension between groups, they'll feed one race at a time, eg white prisoners and then blacks.

Inmates get a bag lunch with their morning meal, then come back out for their PM meal. If they haven't had yard time this is their only other expedition of the day, so they tend to be pretty keyed up and aggressive. "Blind feeding" - giving everyone identical trays, rather than scooping out food for each person as they pass - has reduced aggression considerably, but fights still break out over food, especially on chicken day, hamburger day, hot links day.

There's also a kosher kitchen for the 31 Jewish inmates; apparently their breakfasts are good, but their dinners crappy. All the food is basically crappy - unsurprisingly, given its cost of $2.63 per prisoner per day - but the COs shrug, "They bellyache, but they eat it."

From the canteen we turn right, and cross through a kind of hallway which has the chow halls to the right, and half the prison to the left: infirmary, SNI (special needs inmates, such as gang desertees, rapists, child molesters, etc; the kind who must be escorted at all times because they will be murdered by other prisoners on sight, basically. San Quentin has some 800 SNIs), mentally ill patients (another 800 or so), etc. There is an orange plastic shell-thing hanging on the wall, presumably used as a stretcher to transport the sick or injured.

Onwards into West Block yard, perhaps the most famous stretch of pavement around: this is where Metallica had their San Quentin concert. It is an L-shaped expanse of concrete surrounded by high walls with barred or screened windows (come to think of it, I didn't notice any gun-walks here, but I expect they must exist.) There are a couple of water fountains and two steel tables set into the ground, stools connected to their trunks like stalks. Not much else.

And to my great surprise we are actually taken into a housing unit. Reception, to be precise; not the most secure unit, but perhaps the most volatile, it's where inmates go before they are classified as Level 1 (not dangerous) to 4 (very dangerous) and sent to their eventual destinations. This process can take up to eight months. The prisoners in Reception wear orange jumpsuits as opposed to blue denim.

Like all the housing units, it is constructed as a building inside a building. The outer shell houses gun-walks, and here, for the first and only time, I do indeed see men with guns on duty. The inner building, with a good fifteen feet of empty space between it and the shell, is like a kind of beehive, five huge tiers of cells, each tier holding fifty cells facing north and fifty facing south, with stairs on either end. At the ground floor beneath the stares there are two big cages, one red, one black.

The place is regularly cleaned but smells of cramped humanity. And it is loud - some 900 people, few of whom are inclined to be quiet, in a closed, echoey space - though we are assured this is as nothing compared to when it really gets rocking. There is a little mini-truck thing parked on the ground beneath the shell and the tiers. The gun-walks are covered with wire fencing on either end of the building, but the long sides of its rectangles have only railing, and it looks like it would be at least theoretically feasible to jump from the railing outside the highest tier to the railing on a lower gun-walk, at least if you were Jackie Chan.

We were only allowed to go into the corner of the building, not to walk in front of the cells: there have been issues with inmates throwing things - and substances - at visitors. (In related news, they're only allowed to flush their toilets every half hour, to prevent them from working en masse to flood the plumbing.) It was hard to tell with the dizzying perspective but I guessed there were approximately 45 cells on either side of a tier, five tiers, two inmates to a cell. The first cell on the ground floor on each side was used by COs for storage. Each cell was about six feet wide and maybe eight feet long, fronted by big inch-thick metal bars, mostly vertical with a few horizontal cross-hatches, and massive door hinges. COs can lock or unlock all the doors in a given tier by pulling a lever on the end, or they can lock/unlock individual cell doors with a key. (Such keys are known as "spikes" and look a bit like a small pair of scissors with a spiky metallic growth in place of blades.)

After our brief visit we headed back out to the dining facilities. Each of the four "chow halls" contained something like ninety 4-person tables, like squares with the corners cut off, divided by a wide aisle into 2 groups, with queue space down one wall demarcated by a waist-high metal fence. But the most notable thing about the San Quentin chow halls, by far, are the truly amazing murals that hang above them, on both sides of each hall, eight canvases, each about 100 foot by 12, covered with magnificent grayscale characters and scenes that symbolize the history of California. All these were painted by a single prisoner, Alfredo Santos - see article - and feature hidden crimes and demonic faces along with the glorification of the Golden State. They're really kind of amazing.

Prisoners queue beneath this art, collect drinks and food trays, and go to their tables as directed by traffic-cop COS. In each dining hall during chow time there are 5 COs, with no guns (and no gun-walks above), just stab vests (not to be confused with bulletproof vests, which do not stop knives), pepper spray, batons and whistles ... and 370 inmates. You do the math.

A CO working there that night explained to us: you read the tension, the body language, the mood of the crowd, the way people are arranged - if it's all whites on one side, all blacks on the other, that's a bad sign. "It happens like this," the CO said, and dropped a pen. And it's noisy, rowdy, echo-y, easy to miss anything happening. Sometimes it's one group against another; he's also seen "shot callers" taken out by their own gang. "Kitchen is the second most dangerous job you can have as a CO, after the AC." (Adjustment Centre.) On our way out Eric shakes his head. "Man, I'd rather work AC than kitchen any day." Those in the AC, like all condemned, are cell-fed.

We pass three guys in white jumpsuits and handcuffs, each escorted by a CO, gang tattoos climbing up their necks and arms, on their way past us in the other direction. "Off to Ad Seg," Eric says casually - "Administrative Segregation," no contact with other prisoners. They've probably just been transferred from a county jail.

A little later he says to one of the students "They won't usually come after COs. They'll come after you if they're crazy. Or if they have some reason like you're giving special favours to black inmates. Or if you get in the way. That's the most common. They mean to go after another inmate, and you just get in the way."

Going outside the wall is pretty easy; back through the sallyport, show the UV-light PASS on your hand, sign out, and poof, you're gone. We stop near the Employee of the Month parking slot, at the plaque dedicated to COs killed in the line of duty. Eric looks at the last name on it, died 1985, and turns grim. "I investigated that death," he says softly. "Indicted three guys, two got life, one's on death row. I wanted to indict twelve, but they wouldn't let me. There were twelve involved. His body was there overnight, still there when I got there, the inmates were spitting on it, shouting epithets."

burmese days

2007-10-02T12:53:00.000-04:00

So my online poll regarding the setting of my next book was only supposed to run through September. And we do in fact have a clear winner, aided, no doubt, by its recent run of publicity: the troubled nation of Myanmar.

However - it is - um - well - let's just say, in light of recent and current events, it's an open question whether travel to Myanmar will be wise or even possible anytime soon, so I'm going to monitor developments and in the meantime, I'll keep the poll open to collect votes for a backup destination.

In other news, Beasts of New York is a mere 20 days away from completion, and I'm soon going to to post a fan's German translation of the first part. And speaking of Deutschland, I seem to have sold the German audio rights to my first two books. Ah, sweet, sweet euros.

Deutschland strikes back

2007-09-24T20:24:00.000-04:00

My favourite Google-translated bits from a bunch of German reviews of Blood Price. There are clearly still a few bugs in the system:

--

A Menschenschmuggler is found fast, but that does not want money, but Pauls of programming skills. Paul is carried forward to Albania and programs him a Website [...]

The Cover is black-red. On the title page above titles and name of the author stand in large type characters. Among them are the picture of an enormous building and the outlines of humans, who burn both.

This thriller from the view of the unemployed person of programmer and inspired of baking packman Paul is written. Its unemployment rests heavily on it and its relationship with the Bosnierin Talena into a deep crisis led. When the two decide to help Talenas sister it must pull itself on its own tuft from the sump and take responsibility. It goes through scarcely 500 sides an unbelievable development within that. It remains reliable nevertheless and a outstanding identity figure. The circumstances always drive it further and the Coach Potato must position take.

Before the background of the postwar country and the large problems of the war criminals and Menschenschmuggler Evans develops a brutal history, which binds and goes under the skin. Its characters are driven shapes, which act nevertheless humanly and nevertheless time for their completely own problems have.

A genuinly (sic?) ingenious book, dramatic high voltage of the finest.

http://www.x-zine.de/xzine_rezi.id_10706.htm

--

This novel fulfills expectations to a small to develop hard thrillers without ambitions greatly literary thereby.

Here Jon Evans catches much atmosphere. The fact that the storyteller draws however constantly penetrante comparisons to American films unfortunately nervt something. Plates are avoided also sometimes rather served as, but since atmosphere and speed outweigh, is easy from the reader to hurt.

A completely important action thread tells the difficult relationship between Paul and its friend Talena, those is strained by Pauls unemployment - it is appropriate for it on the bag -, the American everyday life and by Talenas origin. A hidden topic in the novel is their divided homelessness. [ed. note: my God, someone finally picked up on the theme of the book!]

The adventurous events in Bosnia are nearly a therapy of their relationship, [...]

The novel is quick and maintenance SAM written, 8 of 10 points is secured and it applies to pay attention to future novels of the author.

http://edithnebel.wordpress.com/2007/09/04/jon-evans-blutpreis-thriller/

--

Only Paul notices much too late, for whom he actually works - and that it is quasi thereby, the ebay Imperium of the slave trade to create. The background investigated well, the sympathetic figures and not least succeeded the descriptions of cities and landscapes make Evans book an outstanding crime film.

http://www.kulturnews.de/knde/index.php?id=2745&topic=buecher

--

Who reads, buys. Which for an enormous tension elbow, which expectation attitude in the first paragraph! Thus: continue to read! [...]

People smuggling on olympic gold medal level

Sinisa avowedly as its actual mission to channel humans from poor countries into rich. Illegaly, but not immorally. It feels itself in comparable position like „physicians without borders “, „Amnesty international “or UNICEF: Humans of danger, hunger, to bring fear, to release despair and inconceivable poverty it into countries where they receive a chance on a better life. [...]

Noteworthy this thriller is to be represented above all, because it creates it, with the ease Eric of a Ambler the verworrenen Bosnian war understandably and much, very oppressively. Here unbelievable Gräueltaten happened, and many of the war criminals at that time tried on illegal way into the anonymity of the Karibik to be channeled. That makes furious and thoughtful. [...]

And like Jon Evans these glitzernde headlight ELT with its peculiar works of art describes works so unbelievably authentically that we can be safe: It already explored this probably skurrilste happening on our planet as a backpack tourist years ago (guaranteed) genüsslich.

http://www.krimi-couch.de/krimis/jon-evans-blutpreis.html

--

Its history linked apparently detached topics, like e.g. Albanian smugglers, Drogendealer, Guerillas etc. also - world-politically regarded - lapidary problems of a wife, who would like to leave their brutal man, this however only by an illegal departure to create can.

[...]

Only the inevitable Showdown is somewhat too long guessed the events and during the Burning one - festivals seem to be very exaggerated and work thus for the reader more and more improbably. Perhaps I give also injustice to the author - I know this festival non however one must naturally for all readers reliable remain and I can simply not believe that it gives a festival also excluding to “through-slammed” participants and visitors. Here somewhat for more would have less surely provided. [eta: heh. I should have put in in afterword: "No, honest, Burning Man is real and unexaggerated!"]

All in all remains however an extremely exciting and interesting novel with well drawn figures, whose benefit binds to the book and reader lets which dive in problem-free for some hours.

http://www.hysterika.de/html/db_evans__jon_0.html

--

Over night and fog flee Paul and Talena with the heavily fastened Saskia after Sarajewo. There the passionierte Traveller Paul lets contacts play via email its: Buddy Halam does not re-activate a friend and a major in NATO headquarters, Banker Lawrence offers safe, financial support and friend Steve its muscle power which can be underestimated.

[...]

Result: Perfectly authentic postwar Balkans scenario. An absolutely recommendable Realthriller, dragging along tells!

http://www.berlinkriminell.de/1/buecher_196.htm

who guards the guardian?

2007-08-31T12:11:00.000-04:00

The Guardian's Books Blog today published a brief essay of mine about free online publishing. Sweet. They've long been my favourite UK newspaper. And they're even paying me, to my surprise, which makes this an official byline.

Will That Be Bolivia, Dear Reader, or Myanmar?

2007-08-28T18:19:00.000-04:00

Guess what? It's time for a contest. And a vote. Yes, we're gettin' all celebratory and democratic around here.

But first - you'll hopefully be pleased to learn that my fourth thriller, Night of Knives (aka "the Africa book") has been completed and copyedited, and is now officially in the Publishing Pipeline, set for official UK hardcover release on December 13th, just in time for Christmas. (If you're feeling very precocious indeed you can even advance-order a copy from Amazon.co.uk)

Now that Book Four is in the can, the inevitable question is, of course: what and where next? Good question. And guess what? It's up to you to answer it.

You see, starting today, and continuing through the end of September, I'm holding an online vote/contest to determine the country in which my next novel will be set, and by extension, where I'll be travelling (and travel-blogging) next. What's more, five lucky winners will receive signed copies of Invisible Armies. Click, read, marvel and vote:

Will That Be Bolivia, Dear Reader, or Myanmar?

Vote early, vote ~~often~~ once!

I suppose I should catch you up on other stuff too. The mass-market paperback of Invisible Armies is now officially on sale in the United Kingdom, and for a very, very reasonable promotional price, too; shop early, shop often.

In the USA, Invisible Armies is available in hardcover, and HarperCollins, in ther inimitable wisdom, have just released The Blood Price as an e-book. Very timely of them, as I have that article on electronic publishing - and its apocalyptic future - in this month's issue of Canada's acclaimed international newsmagazine The Walrus.

Meanwhile, my free online serialization of "the squirrel book," aka Beasts of New York, continues apace - we've reached Chapter 40, and are nearing the halfway mark.

magazining

2007-08-20T20:07:00.001-04:00

I have an article in this month's CrimeSpree magazine. The article isn't online, but I'm sure the good folks of CrimeSpree are OK with me posting it here:

Everything Is Extraordinary

a brief history of the travel thriller

It's a big scary world out there.

Just imagine. Imagine yourself walking off a 747 and emerging from an airport into one of the developing world's megalopolises, Mumbai or Cairo or Sao Paulo, each bigger by far than New York. Imagine a seething maelstrom of chaos, noise, smoke and smog; potholed streets clogged by teeming crowds, the ragged masses of poor people living on rooftops, in cemeteries, in alleys in the shadow of five-star hotels. Imagine the nonstop assault on all of your senses, including your senses of decorum, personal space, disgust, and wonder; the mixed smells of diesel and open fires and rotting filth and street-corner spice markets; the splashes of bright colour – gleaming motorcycles, women's dresses, a pyramid of some mysterious local fruit perched on a street hawker's rickety stall - amid the sea of rotting concrete.

Imagine that everything is new, a revelation, extraordinary: every sight, every cup or morsel, every vehicle, every building, every human being, even the stars in the sky. Imagine the stares, the sidelong looks, the press of beggars and hustlers and would-be guides all around you as you try to feign casual confidence, even though you know the authorities here are understaffed and incompetent and corrupt all at once, you know that life is cheap here, you can smell it, you know if you do get into trouble - and trouble here is like desperation, everywhere if you look for it - there's no one you can count on but yourself.

And if you're at all like me, you immediately think to yourself: there's a story here.

The international thriller has a long and proud history, and with good reason. First among them is the fabulous exoticism of so much of the world. Why limit yourself to Kansas and Alberta when Zanzibar and Kathmandu are out there? My first novel, Dark Places, is set in Nepal, Indonesia, and Morocco (among other places.) Sure, it could have been Alaska, Hawaii, and Nevada, without much being changed, but the book's so much richer when not just the story but the place in which is set is mysterious and fascinating – and when the characters have to make their way through a rich and alien world.

But it's not just local colour that makes international settings so appealing. The West, today, is, by and large, a placid and civilized place, plastic and air-conditioned. Great for soccer moms; not so good for thriller writers. But the developing world – Africa, Brazil, India – is still a place of genuine danger and human drama, where most people are poor and struggling, many have to fight desperately every day to get by, because they know there's no net to catch them if they fall.

This means authors can write, with few contrivances, about ordinary protagonists and original antagonists, and escape the rut that so many thrillers fall into. Don't get me wrong. I like private investigators, cops, intelligence agents, ex-cons, serial killers, and evil government/corporate conspiracies as much as the next guy. But let's face it, when you read book after book that collectively do nothing but remix these elements over and over again, they do all get a little ... passé. It's hard to write a thriller with an everyman protagonist in the West; sooner or later, they'd just go to the police. It can be done, but writers have to twist their plots into ever more pretzel shapes to prevent this from happening.

Not so when you go afield into the world's farflung corners, where the hand of the authorities is heavy, inept and corrupt. There you can write about ordinary people – whether they be local, or (as in my books) Western travellers and expats – sucked up into peril with no recourse but their own wits. And the possible stories and antagonists are both more diverse – war criminals, fanatical political parties, tribal warriors angling for power, mining companies, ruthless scientists performing human experiments, military machinations – and more plausible. Because in the developing world, terrible things happen all the time. Read the International Herald Tribune for a week, and I promise you you'll see within all the thriller plots you'll need for years.

I try to keep my books always in motion, not just in action but in geography as well, the plot is propelled from place to even more exotic place; my second novel, The Blood Price, moves from the Balkans to Central America, through Mexico, to Nevada's infamous Burning Man festival. This "travel thriller" subsubgenre gives me a wider canvas on which to paint, and helps keep the action going. It also makes the research awesomely fun. My friends have observed, with some justification, that they can tell where my books will be set by tracking where I travelled the year before.

But I don't want to overblow my own horn here. I'm still new to the international-thriller biz, a long way from being particularly prominent, and an even longer way from being first. People have been telling crazy stories about faraway lands since long before Marco Polo. But when we look to the birth of the modern international thriller, I think we go back only 110 years, to a man who annoys modern writers because he became one of the greatest stylists in the history of the English language – even though he didn't speak a word of it until he was in his twenties.

I refer of course to Joseph Conrad, poet laureate of the colonial era. He's most famous for Heart of Darkness, but virtually everything he wrote is worth reading. Anyone who thinks of terrorism as a recent development – or, for that matter, the political abuse of the fear of terrorism – should rush out and read his century-old novel The Secret Agent, which has lost none of its power or relevance.

A good followup would be The Confidential Agent, penned by Conrad's heir Graham Greene. Like Conrad, Greene, a sometime MI6 agent, was a product of the colonial era and travelled all around the world, notably to West Africa, Mexico, and Haiti. His novels veered from emotionally wrenching work such as The Quiet American – a novel about America's initial involvement in Vietnam – to outright subversive farce, as with Our Man in Havana, about a vacuum cleaner salesmen whose daughter's greed for expensive dresses leads him to convince British Intelligence that he has inside knowledge of a nonexistent Cuban rocket program.

Our Man in Havana was in turn a direct inspiration for John le Carré's similar novel The Tailor of Panama, which was made into a movie with Pierce Brosnan, onetime James Bond. How appropriate. For of course no mention of international thrillers would be complete without a mention of Ian Fleming's famous creation. What those who have only seen the movies might not appreciate is that the Bond books are much less cartoony, and are often surprisingly bleak and gritty, and definitely worth writing. (John F. Kennedy, famously, once cited From Russia With Love as one of his ten favourite books.)

The man behind the pseudonym "John le Carré" is David Cornwell, a former spy, like Fleming and Greene. When his career was destroyed by the Russian double agent Kim Philby, Cornwell took up the pen, invented his pen name – and became history's most acclaimed and successful writer of international thrillers. At one point his name was synonymous with spy fiction, which was an endlessly rich vein of stories in the Cold War, as Russia and America turned the Third World into a chessboard and, in the name of greater influence, competed in shadowy, amoral, and often bloody machinations. Perhaps surprisingly, Le Carré thrived after the fall of the Cold War, turning his attention to chaos in the former Soviet Union (in Single and Single) and more recently to the tragedies of Africa (in The Constant Gardener and The Mission Song).

Meanwhile, back when the Soviet Union still existed, Martin Cruz Smith went even further into the Russian psyche and created the character of Arkady Renko: phlegmatic, incorruptible, a man of honor in a land without, Raymond Chandler would have recognized this Moscow cop in a wink. This dour but unforgettable figure has been wandering the former Communist empire ever since, from a fishing boat in the Bering Sea (Polar Star) to Castro's Cuba (Havana Bay) and most recently, and most powerfully, the radioactive wastelands of Chernobyl – if I had to nominate the thriller of the decade so far, Wolves Eat Dogs would be it.

But Russia is not the draw it was when Moscow was the enemy. Today's antagonists, in this increasingly interconnected and globalized world, are far more complex; and the action is increasingly moving to Africa, still referred to as "the dark continent" a century after Heart of Darkness, and to Asia, where more than half the world's population lives, and where Dubai, Mumbai and Shanghai are increasingly the new contenders for the title "crossroads of the world." New York, London and Tokyo are so twentieth century.

Alex Garland's The Beach and The Tesseract are both gripping thrillers and brilliant deconstructions of the culture of Westerners who go to Asia to seek diversion or success; the latter, especially, is the only book I've ever put down and immediately thought, "damn, I wish I'd written that." John Burdett is the probably most successful thriller author to hunt in modern Asia, with his Bangkok trilogy – Bangkok 8, Bangkok Tattoo, Bangkok Haunts. And I like to think my own books are carving out a niche of their own as well. My latest, Invisible Armies, a novel about a rootless American woman drawn into a shadowy group of high-tech antiglobalization protestors, begins in India, and then moves to Paris, London, and Los Angeles.

That arc helps illustrate something wholly new about this globalized era, compared to colonial-era or Cold War thrillers. Back then, the rest of the world was faraway, detached, didn't impinge on us back home. Today is different. Now the whole world is tightly connected by Airbuses and the Internet, and every country on the planet has expats working in New York and London; today, international thrillers may begin in a distant land, but their stories can also quickly, easily, and sometimes brutally come home to roost, as they do in all of my books to date.

Look around anywhere, with the right kind of eyes, and everywhere, in your local drugstores and supermarkets and coffee shops, you'll see the fingerprints of places that were once so faraway and fabulously exotic that Western mapmakers once wrote HERE BE DRAGONS behind their coastlines. These places are still fascinating – and sometimes there are still dragons there – but they're also part of our everyday world now. And that's why I think international thrillers are the most relevant, and most important, subgenre of crime fiction. The Chicago Tribune once called my books "politically motivated," but they aren't, really; it's just that books about things that matter can't help but have political overtones.

Today's international thrillers, at least on some level, are stories about the most real and most important changes happening today, about the people and decisions that will determine what kind of world we live in tomorrow. They're entertaining as hell, but I warn you, they'll make you think, too; and they just might make you want to go out and see for yourself a bit of the fantastic world they depict. So be careful. It's dangerous. Read too much of this stuff and someday soon you just might find yourself in Kathmandu or Zanzibar, eyes wide, a little frightened and a lot exhilirated, drunk on the sights and sounds and smells of the whole new world around you, and you might catch yourself thinking to yourself: hey, you know, I bet there's a story here.

-- 30 --

[author's note/postmortem: in retrospect, I'm not sure how I wrote exactly I wrote a brief history of the international thriller without once mentioning Rudyard Kipling, GK Chesterton, or John Buchan. But hey, now I have.]

Meanwhile, my Walrus article on the apocalyptic future of publishing is now online.

great white north

2007-07-25T13:19:00.000-04:00

Hey, whaddaya know - I'm on the front page of cbc.ca with my 10 Tips for Travel to Exotic Countries. Even got a nice email from Medecins sans Frontieres thanking me for the plug.

Meanwhile, Beasts of New York got Whatevered.

I may be going to San Diego's in/famous ComicCon this weekend. Then again I may not be. Oh, the suspense.

shout-outs galore

2007-07-24T03:13:00.000-04:00

But this blog isn't all about me. No, really, it isn't. Take this post, for instance. I have a few friends with books coming out in the next few months, and I want to tell you all about them:

Cathy Wong, who is a naturopathic doctor, nutritionist, and About.com's Alternative Medicine guide, just published her first book, The Inside-Out Diet. If you're like me, you're suspicious of all diet/health-food books, but I can assure you from personal experience, Cathy's terrific, knowledgeable and thoughtful, she champions health and loves food at the same time. Go buy it.
Jo Walton's Farthing comes out in paperback, in August, and its sequel Ha'Penny in early October. These books should really need no introduction - I've lost count of how many awards Farthing has been nominated for. And rightfully so. It's brilliant. And terrifying. And oh so relevant despite being sit in an alternate-history 1949. Go buy them.
Speaking of sequels, Sarah Langan's The Missing, the follow-up to The Keeper, comes out on October 1st. I was lucky enough to read an early draft. Do yourself a favour and buy one for yourself.

comedy in translation

2007-07-19T04:24:00.000-04:00

This - according to Google Translator - is a review of The Blood Price, which was just published in Germany (and in German):

Well investigated travel thriller with Action

Jon Evans second book with his hero Paul Wood is exactly the same dragging along like its Erstling “deadly path”. Paul was there still as a baking packman in Nepal on the way, he describes this time the Bosnia drawn by the civil war, drives with us to Albania, into the Karibik and to COUNT down on the famous artist celebration “Burning one” into Arizona. Evans urgently describes the situation in ex Yugoslavia and the tensions, which are still present under the ethnical groups there. Even if sometimes the action hooks somewhat, one marks to it that he argues much with his topics (usually even locally) and authentically reported on it.

Naturally there is also this book a actionreichen Showdown to hope in which Paul and its friends the thing into the hand rather takes, instead of for the police. Who does not know thus its books yet and on travel thrillers with Action, investigated well, stands, that should change immediately. Immediately!

**** out of 5
Silke Schroeder, themenguide.de, 17.07.2007

I do love that exhortation at the end.

squirrely

2007-07-18T15:50:00.000-04:00

OK - I have gone ahead and launched the online serialization of my "children's book for adults" Beasts of New York. I'll be posting a chapter a day for the next 2-3 months, until the whole book is online.

It's a fun read, I promise.

That sense of satisfaction from a job well done.

2007-07-11T18:25:00.000-04:00

My fine UK publishers, Hodder & Stoughton, have given the official thumbs-up to my fourth novel, The Night of Knives, aka "the Africa book." And there was much rejoicing. What's more, I just handed in a draft of my graphic novel The Executor to my editor at Vertigo Comics.

And now that I'm done writin' I can start readin' again. (Curiously, I don't read much while I'm writing.) Just finished Kirino's Out, which is brilliant but bleak. Yesterday I purchased from Amazon, in no particular order: A Few Short Notes About Tropical Butterflies by John Murray, The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross, Air by Geoff Ryman, Carnival by Elizabeth Bear, The Devil of Nanking by Mo Hayder, House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski, and Links by Nuruddin Farah. And I want to finally read I Am Legend by Richard Matheson before the movie comes out, but Amazon had no cheap paperback version available, so I'll check local bookstores.

Oh, and I have an initial design up for Beasts Of New York. Take a gander, lemme know whatcha think.