School's Out...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Running in a new car on the Dubai-Al Ain highway is not something I'd recommend, people. It's deadly boring. Nevertheless, this is what I done today as I made my way to Al Ain based Brighton College to appear as an author courtesy the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature.

I spoke to two classes, senior boys and girls respectively (the school's segregated) and the girls were generally more amused and proactive than the boys, who were a little reserved.

The staff members were understandably a little nervous, given the content of my books and my own inclination to go off on the deep end. They have to tread a fine line between tradition and the exploration of international literature, at the same time managing a number of bright, sparky and inquisitive minds. Needless to say, I had a blast. We talked about narrative and its importance, the characterisation of the Middle East by Hollywood and the impact of technology and the Internet on publishing, heralding the inevitable doom of the print run/sales team model of publishing.

After the classroom sessions with the seniors, we were joined by the 8-11 year-olds in the auditorium. This, I was not prepared for. They'd asked me to prepare some readings to give the kids and I gazed down at small, angelic girls with missing teeth beaming up at me and on the instant junked the lot. I couldn't really see my reading from A Decent Bomber helping the 8 year olds sleep that night...

The torture was methodical. Quinlan shrieked himself hoarse, flailing around tied to the kitchen chair until he hurled himself to the floor. They righted him and beat him as dispassionately as they’d pulled out his thumbnails.

And not one word. Not a question. It made it all worse, to think there was nothing they wanted he could give them to make it stop.

They started on his fingers. He called to God, he called to his dear, dead mother. He begged them. Dear Jesus, how he begged. They beat him again to shut him up. His mind slammed down to buy him respite.

A gentle tapping on his cheek. A wipe of wet cloth on his forehead. The awareness of light though his swollen lids. An insistent voice, deep, repeated his name. ‘Mister Quinlan, Mister Quinlan.’ Accented, the title sounded more like mist air.

He took a deep, juddering breath and tried to focus. His hands flared pain. He tasted blood, his mouth dry. Cool ceramic touched his lips and he leaned forwards to sip gratefully at the icy water. His shattered ribs grated and forced him to cry out, bubbling the water. He spilled a pink dribble down his sodden, spattered shirt.

And it went downhill from there fast when we started looking at readings from Birdkill and Shemlan...

So instead I showed them how to write a book using Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz as a template and then answered their questions. What a bright bunch they were, too!

Which book is your favourite? Why do you write books? How much money do you make? How do you build characters? Do you favour direct or indirect characterisation? You mentioned protagonists but what about antagonists? What are your books about (very carefully answered, given the question was from one of the 8 year-olds!)? What do you do about writer's block? What inspires you to create characters?

The questions came in rushes, arms across the auditorium waving in the air. And then I signed pages of A4 paper for the kids who were too young to be let buy my books. Thousands of them. The longest signing line of my life and nobody from the LitFest to see 'Mr Three Signers' doing a serious session. Emiratis, Brits, Pakistanis, Jordanians, South Africans, Indians. A real rainbow. My hand hurt by the time the last grin disappeared away off the stage.

I do love the dear old LitFest. Really.

Back to Skool - Let The LitFest Fun Commence

I love school visits. They're sort of part of being at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature. You don't have to do them but there's a lot of effort put into integrating the Festival with local schools and authors are asked if they will drop by a school or two and give a talk to students.

I always jump at the chance. I get to behave like I'm a real author and everything. The faculty usually gets a bit twitchy, because I don't do 'PC' so well, but it normally comes right in the end. I try and use the opportunities as something of a sales pitch to get students thinking about writing their own stories. It's not just about thinking you've got a book in you: narrative is a powerful tool in communications and story-telling permeates pretty much everything we get up to in the nasty, commercial world we're bringing up our kids to inhabit.

Which is sort of funny, given our mums always told us that telling stories was a bad thing to do.

Tomorrow I'm off to Al Ain, where two groups of students from Brighton College are going to spend an hour or two with a strange, shouty man bawling incoherently at them. Next week it's English College and Pristine Private School. I'll be testing the surfaces for dust at that last one.

It's hard to believe, but we're only two sleeps from the LitFest - that fine bonanza of all things narrative, bookish and even literary. 140 writers from 25 countries are set to workshop, panel session, chat, sign books and generally delight something like 37,000 visitors. This year's Festival theme is 'time' and there's a huge programme planned which will take place across two weeks, both over at Shindaga and at the Intercon Festival City where the main programme takes place.

The Festival has grown like a mad thing over the few years it's been running. It's created new writers and seen people getting publishing contracts, start writing for themselves and expand into writing for others.

People have been self-publishing books, forming writers' groups, book clubs and generally enjoying books all the more. The Festival has, in short, triggered all sorts of growth in the literary scene in the UAE and even beyond in the wider Arab world.

The increasing focus on the Arabic programme has created a new opportunity to expand readership and contemporary literature in a language that has seen all too little focus on literature in recent years.

We've seen UAE-based writers clinching publishing contracts, new writers emerging and a vibrancy in the literary scene here which simply didn't exist before the Festival started taking place.

And all because a lady with a bookshop in Dubai woke up one day and thought 'Wouldn't it be lovely to have a literature festival?'

It's staggering, really...

Birdkill And The Gifted Kids. So What's Your IQ?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

She tried her luck at testing Hamilton’s assertion there was absolutely no fraternisation between the research and teaching staffs. ‘Oh. Do the research staff not join us?’

Archer looked as if she had just enquired after the health of a dead relative. ‘We don’t really, well, talk to each other. It’s not encouraged, you see. They do their jobs, we do ours and the general consensus is we’re both better off not influencing the other.’

‘I see.’ Robyn made sure it was clear she didn't. ‘It seems odd to meet for drinks on a Thursday. Most schools I've been to; they wait until the end of the week.’

‘Oh. Right. I would have thought Lawrence would have explained that to you as well. We have a four-day week here. You get to spend Friday planning your lessons. We often have an informal staff meeting in the afternoon to share any issues or ensure we’re coordinating properly. That’s on top of the Monday co-ordination meeting, of course.’

‘Of course.’

He glanced up at her to see if she was laughing at him and smiled thinly. ‘It works well; you’re not going to be teaching a primary or even secondary curriculum. Most of the kids are at university level, some are capable of taking a decent Master’s. But their emotional development is very mixed indeed. You’ll be dealing with kids who have an adult’s learning with a child’s experience. Believe me, you’ll need the planning time.’

The kids in Birdkill are part of a program of research into battlefield augmentation, filing off to the Hamilton Institute's mysterious domes at night to have their brilliance harnessed and turned into weapons. Robyn, her mind already stretched by managing the trauma in her past that has triggered her selective amnesia, has to try and manage a class of these brilliant young things - particularly difficult with Martin leading the charge to oppose her. As she fights for stability, he tries to push her over the edge. She struggles with her guilt at fighting for shallow victories over a mere child, but he's beyond a child - and he's vicious.

These kids are more than extra-ordinary. They're savants. Off the scale intelligences whose minds are able to do things we can't quite grasp. But what IS intelligence?

I've long held that IQ tests measure our ability to do IQ tests. They don't measure creative intelligence at all and tend to favour logical thought. I've often confronted tests that have more than one possible answer, too, which is annoying.

I will never forget (or forgive) my primary teacher holding up a square piece of paper that had been torn in two diagonally and asking me which half was bigger. I looked carefully and the left hand one had been torn so the ragged edge had slightly more papery prominences than inlets. The left hand one, I told the teacher, who then gave me her scorn. Two halves are the same, numbwit. I burned with impotent rage. They're not. The left one was bigger. They're not.

When it comes to a measure of intelligence, there are better models than logic tests, specifically those based on Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences - that intelligence might be a number of capabilities or aptitudes and measurable only on multiple scales. For instance, Gardner's eight abilities: musical–rhythmic, visual–spatial, verbal–linguistic, logical–mathematical, bodily–kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. The last wasn't one of the original set, Gardner later added the intelligence of the naturalist, which is fascinating - an ability to manage the natural world with unusual 'intelligence'.

That's a long way from 'complete this number line' testing.

But when you have people of exceptional capability in an educational environment, wherever that capability may lie, you're failing them if you don't 'differentiate' - that's the technique teachers use to plan a lesson in multiple streams: these kids can do the simple task, these kids can be stretched further, these kids can be really pushed. It's an incredibly hard job, herding 25 cats into three or four groups all doing something different.

And then there's Johnny, who can do all this work with his eyes closed and who, despite being in the top set all the time, is bored and behaves badly because he is frustrated. He might not be a great mathematician, but he's a way better artist than the other kids. Or he may be on a spectrum, a numerical whizz who has absolutely no people skills or ability to interact or manage interaction but who can manipulate numbers in a way a talented adult would struggle to match.

We're too used to pigeon-holing people based on IQ. Have you taken an IQ test? What's yours? Do you care? Did you care enough to join an organisation like MENSA so you could celebrate your success at taking an intelligence test? Did it make you feel good? I'm honestly, genuinely interested...

If not, then here. Fill your IQ boots. You can leave your result in the comments!

Birdkill, Space And Starting Writing

'What started you writing?' It's a question I've come to dread. I want to print out the answer on a sheet of A4 and have it ready to hand it over to the journalist asking that most lazy of questions to put to a writer. It's like when you get married and want to punch the 50th person who asks you what married life's like. And then I feel guilty, because someone asking you questions is a good thing. The alternative, nobody asking you questions, isn't so good for book promotion, capisce?

I love the story of Prince Philip, returning from an overseas trip, who is accosted by a cub journalist who somehow has made his way to the front of the scrum and attracted his attention.
'Prince Philip sir! Prince Philip sir!' Our hero has a recorder held out.
The bushy-browed figure leans down towards his tormentor. 'Yes?'
Our man is rather like a dog chasing a car, in that now he has his prize, he doesn't quite know what to do with it. He gathers himself manfully. 'H-How was your flight, sir?'
Philip smiles. 'Have you ever flown yourself, young man?'
Our man is puzzled. 'Yes, sir. Many times.'
'Well, it was just like that.' Says Philip, turning on his heel and moving on.

I didn't have an idea what I was going to write, really, only that I had a vague notion of spoofing those international thrillers where our man is chased across Europe by a shadowy cabal of evil wrong-doers, saves humanity and gets the girl. The book would be amusing, only because I am easily bored and essentially shallow and so thought myself incapable of writing something literary and nuanced. According to my Amazon reviews for the resulting novel, Space, I'm also incapable of writing a funny book.

And yet it still makes me laugh when I read it today. It's often irredeemably silly, it makes a number of errors I have since learned to spot and remove from my writing and it makes the, in conventional publishing terms, fundamental error of not taking itself - or its reader - too seriously. And yet there's a sort of cry of 'Yahoooooo' about it, think small boy kicking autumn leaves and you're half-way there. The book has energy, ambition and a delightful way of killing off cherished characters that I must admit I have rather retained.

There are a number of high points that still tickle me pink. The police interview with a suburban housewife who has lost the ten inch 'thing' from her bedroom drawer, sold to her by the gorgeous and pneumatic sex worker Kylie - who is without a single brain cell to bother her - still cracks me up (remember I'm fundamentally weak-minded). There's the divorced copper with a perspiration problem and the poor middle-class doctor who is the unwilling victim of 99% of the book's set-ups. The angriest policeman in England is quite fun, counterpointed by Ivan Litvanoff, a particularly evil Russian spy. His encounter with Nigel, a camp MI5 safe-house housekeeper with a Prince Albert, ends with a most satisfying gag. A particular high for me was black leather cat-suited CIA operative Neon Womb, who has a 'moment' every time she kills. She was my female side coming out. Oh, and I'm forgetting the house-cleaning spy from Vientiane, the vengeful Véronique. Not to mention former French resistance fighter René the Horse, the character who featured in the short story that was my first attempt to write a book. He had to have a place in Space, and so he does. Oh! And grumpy handbag-wielding galleon Mrs Bartholdy...

Oh, gosh. There's quite a lot in there, really. It's amazing what you can do with 100,000 words when you put your mind to it...

Anyway, I'm rambling. Space is free on Amazon.com from noon today for the next five days. So if you want a free copy (saving you £0.99, cheapskate) or want to let a friend know they can get a copy, fill your boots. I'm not claiming the book's perfect or representative of my later, more serious work, right? But you can let me know how it went for you by leaving a review and I won't mind at all. Even if you don't think it's funny...

Birdkill And The Science Of Making Better People

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

"There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenics religion can save our civilisation from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilisations."

George Bernard Shaw

The idea that we can somehow shape the betterment of our species has long held scientists in thrall. And yet we are still chilled by the efforts of the Nazis and others who ventured into the territory of human enhancement through selective breeding. It's fine to breed and cross dogs or horses, to transplant trees and splice varieties to create disease resistant, hardier and larger fruit and vegetables. But when you start doing that with people, the overwhelming majority of us feel a line is being crossed.

Eugenics is, in short, a dirty word.

Although thinkers way back in human history toyed with the idea - the soldiers of Sparta were an early example of hardy stock applied to a task, as I suppose the Nepalese Gurkhas are today - it wasn't until the Victorians happened by that we started playing with the idea of improving the human gene pool by spaying the insane and sterilising the less than perfect humans out there. Armed with calipers to measure people's heads and various other dubious 'sciences' to categorise people in nice, easy boxes that conformed to Victorian ideals of human perfection, a number of organisations around the world sprang up around the world, all espousing the spurious ideals of eugenics.

We like to think of it as a uniquely German invention, but it wasn't. The Eugenics Education Society of London was formed in 1907; the American Eugenics Society in 1912 and the French Eugenics Society in the same year. They were joined by the Belfast based Irish Eugenics Society: British perceptions of the Irish as a nation of sub-human, troglodyte beings and Catholic notions of shame were to morph through the C20th into the vile social experiment we would come to know as the Magdalene Laundries. At their heart, the ideals of eugenics; cleansing humanity of those too weak or afflicted to defend themselves against the perfect puritans of Victorian society.

I propose to show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, notwithstanding those limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations.

Introduction to Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton (1869)

Galton's book would have graced the library in Lawrence Hamilton's cosy study at the Hamilton Institute, the setting of Birdkill. He would have taken it down and cupped its leather spine in his hand as he soaked up the great man's words, because Hamilton, too, believed in creating a highly gifted race. With a mixture of breeding, chemical augmentation, training and experimentation into the workings of the human mind, Hamilton's work is funded because he has said he can produce better, more effective soldiers.

He is Robyn's rather dubious host as she tries to embark on her new start in a life so recently torn apart by a nameless terror...

Birdkill launches at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on the 1st March 2016 where copies will be on sale. If you can't wait, it's available now in paperback here and as an ebook to pre-order here.

Birdkill And The Drugs Of War

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Birdkill is about a teacher, Robyn Shaw, who has lost a chunk of her past to amnesia after her mind has shut a recent trauma out. Fragile and perhaps slightly unbalanced, she starts work at an institute for exceptionally gifted children where she finds herself increasingly disturbed by events.

As Robyn struggles for sanity, her friend Mariam tries to get to the bottom of the secrets surrounding Robyn and the Hamilton Institute. Handed a US Army whistle-blower, Mariam starts to investigate a secret battlefield enhancement and drugs program called ODIN. The more she finds out, the more dangerous her life gets.

The worrying thing is not what a tall tale ODIN is, but how similar it is to efforts by various militaries to create 'supermen' using drugs and other enhancement techniques - some of which have gone horribly wrong. It's a little like finding my lost Oka nuclear missiles in researching Beirut - An Explosive Thriller - the facts you uncover researching books at times make the fiction seem, well, a little dull.

Drugs have been a tool of war for hundreds of years. Our very own part of the world contributes its own tale of battlefield drugs, with the infamous Ismaili rebel Hassan Al Sabbah establishing his mountain fortress in Alamut Castle up in the craggy mountains of Northern Iran and sending his hashish-crazed warriors against the Seljuks. The soldiers, the hashishim, give us our word 'assassin' today.

Hitler was an enthusiastic convert to the use of drugs, despite Nazism's prudery in other aspects of bohemianism. The German rush to conquer Europe was fuelled on massive supplies of Pervitin, a synthetic methamphetamine. 35 million tablets shipped to German forces in 1940 alone, each packing a 3mg dose of good old fashioned speed.

By 1941, the German Supreme Command had realised that uppers came with downers and was restricting its enthusiastic use of Pervitin. But stories of remarkable achievements made by soldiers under the influence of the drug led to trials of other battlefield drugs, including one pill which packed a cocktail of 5mg of cocaine, 3mg of Pervitin and 5mg of painkiller Eukodal. Throughout the war, the Fuhrer himself was bouyed up by near-constant doses of Pervitin. Imagine Lemmy running Nazi Germany and you've got something like the idea of how much trouble everyone was in.

It wasn't just the Germans,  though. The British and Americans both used amphetamines for their bomber crews, including Benzedrine and Dexedrine. Even the Japanese got in on the act. Despite their usefulness as a stimulant for weary soldiers, the come-downs and addictiveness of amphetamines led to their being tightly controlled as a drug. And yet the Americans are still handing out Dexies to their pilots in 10mg doses today.

Other 'wonder drugs' routinely find their way into military use. Several have chequered histories, including Methylhexanamine (say that after a couple of stiff ones) or DMAA, which has been linked to a number of military and sporting deaths. The British army experimented widely with LSD in the 1950s, the Americans (aiming this time not at enhancing their own troops but at taking down the enemy) with LSD and other agents as weaponised aerosols in the 1960s.

Of the very many military enhancement programmes that have run since WWII, probably the most 'holistic' was DARPA's Peak Soldier Performance Programme, which ran in the early noughties. This looked at every aspect of performance enhancement, including genomic and biochemical approaches. A Presidential report at the time referred to the danger of 'potential development of drugs that could suppress the fear and inhibition of soldiers, effectively turning them into killing machines capable of acting without both scrutiny and impunity.'

The disastrous ODIN military trial in Birdkill is not only NOT far fetched, but scarily real and based on pretty solid precedent... Which is actually something of a worry...

Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The second panel session wot I am doing at the wonderful Emirates Airline Festival of Literature is titled Crime Across Continents: How to Catch A Killer.

Moderated with insight, wit and dexerity by savage old Irishman James Mullan, I'll be joined by Chris Carter and Sebastian Fitzek. The session takes place on Saturday 12 March, from 11.30-12.30 at the Al Ras 1 room at the InterContinental Festival City.

Our brief is to talk about how we create really bad baddies. And how we bring them to justice. I'm not entirely sure about the justice bit, but we'll try and muddle along.

Chris writes books about very nasty people. More about him here. His eight books based around psychologist turned detective Robert Hunter have propelled him to top the UK best-seller lists and have chilled hundreds of thousands of readers to the bone.

Sebastian is one of Germany's top crime writers, all seven of his novels have been German best-sellers and he is now crafting a fierce reputation in English markets as well - his novel about a ten year-old serial killer, The Child, was adapted for cinema and also released in the UK last year. More about him here.

And then there's me...

Beyond IQ: Birdkill And The 150 Problem

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My newest novel, Birdkill is set in the wooded grounds of The Hamilton Institute, an enterprise dedicated to the fostering of the talents of exceptionally gifted children.

It is here that damaged teacher Robyn Shaw is hoping to recuperate, an incident in her recent past triggering amnesia that cloaks the events and replaces them with the Void. She finds herself involved in a number of odd happenings seemingly triggered by one of the children, an unusually difficult and truculent child called Martin. She finds herself fighting against a child for her sanity as her friend Mariam rushes to find out what terrible event in Robyn's past could possibly trigger the unravelling of her mind.

The children in Birdkill are marginalised, Robyn is told. They haven't been able to find their place in society and are often difficult and wayward. They struggle with being an old head in a young body, intellectually capable of resolving complex problems but lacking the life experience to fundamentally understand the advanced ideas they can so brilliantly study conceptually.

The truth is we often struggle to manage exceptionally gifted children, for a number of relatively good reasons at that. Firstly we have the issue of benchmarking quite what a gifted child is. Every pushy mum thinks their little darling is gifted and I have seen (through having lived a lifetime with teachers as my parents and partner) numerous examples of children being 'hot-housed' by mums who are convinced their child has that extra something, quite often living vicariously through their child.

The great benchmark is the IQ test but I have always been convinced these tests merely measure one's ability to do IQ tests, not any exceptional giftedness or intellectual capacity. Whatever benchmark one applies, the next problem is that there is little resource dedicated to facilities for such children. A relatively small percentage of the whole, meeting their needs is frequently limited - where they're lucky - to being differentiated within their age group rather than being taken out of 'standard' education and offered programming suitable to their capability. Home schooling has been the recourse for many parents of such children.

It has been a fascinating area to research, I have to say. And there are a lot of kids out there who are being pretty badly let down. Sir Ken Robinson has wisdom on this, with his ideas about schools quashing creativity. Because a mathematical mind doesn't necessarily mean a gifted mind. And structured learning isn't necessarily the greatest gift we can give to such a mind.

So an institution dedicated to not only helping these children but extending their capabilities seems like perfect sense to Robyn, who is mildly irritated to find when she arrives at her new job that the Institute is not just a boarding school, but also a research institution. What does it research? Nobody will tell her. Fraternisation between the research staff and the faculty is not allowed. And then she watches one of the children seemingly calling sparrows to him out of the air and carelessly breaking their necks. Caught in his gaze, she knows she will be next.

Robyn starts to wonder quite what she's got herself into...

Birdkill is available from Amazon and will be on sale in print at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature in Dubai from March 1st 2016.

And Now the Hard Part: Getting Your Book Into Print And Onto Shelves

That's the title of the publishing type panel session I'm sitting on at the Emirates Airline Festival of Literature 2016. The other gig I'm doing is also about acts of murder: I'm talking crime fiction with fellow criminal minds Christ Carter and Sebastian Fitzek.

I swear they just put me on these panels to cause trouble, but it keeps going wrong. I got put on one a few years ago with Luigi Bonomi only to find my plan of whacking him over the back of a head with a tyre lever washing up against the uncomfortable fact that he's one of the most pleasant, smiley people in publishing.

Similarly, last year I shared a stage with Orion supremo Kate Mills who turned out to be rather a love and not the mean old harridan I had psyched myself up to confront. We got on rather well, as it turns out, and agreed about a great deal more than we disagreed about.

When I started this here publishing journey, I was full of wide-eyed surety. I have posted before about the Dunning-Kruger effect and my long, slow realisation that publishing didn't want me. It used to make me angry, certainly self-publishing Olives - A Violent Romance was an act of fury triggered when my own agent couldn't be bothered to look at - let alone shop - the book.

But I've had so much fun since then, I don't really have that anger any more. Mainstream publishing doesn't want me and that's just fine: we can co-exist, ploughing our respective furrows in the rich soil that is the reading public. I'm a tad weary of promotion these days and really could use some help with marketing and getting 'reach' into markets outside the UAE, but I didn't even wait for my small test sample of agents to reject Birdkill before deciding to self-publish the book. I'm sort of done with the old cycle of submission and rejection. I have a life to lead.

For myself, I now believe that publishing doesn't want me because I don't sit comfortably topically. It's not about the quality of writing, characterisation and other technical stuff. It's because the things that interest me don't immediately scream 'mainstream appeal' - the Middle East, the grey areas of morality, bad guys you empathise with, good guys who are weak-minded, men dying of cancer and betrayal and retired IRA bombers don't top agents' lists of books just made to sell themselves. And yet I clearly have a readership - the sellout local book sales, rave reviews, feedback from book clubs and all the other good stuff that's been happening tell me that.

I think the million dollar question facing this panel is not really so much 'how do you get an agent and publisher', there have arguably been too many words thrown into the wind about those two topics for any of us to have anything more useful to say on the topic.

For me the question is more, 'What's the secret sauce? What makes book A a soaraway bestseller and book B a guaranteed dud?' Century and Arrow publisher Selina Walker, who gave us 50 Shades of Grey, and Jonathan Lloyd, who heads major agency Curtis Brown, should certainly have some answers. And our fellow panellist Sean Fay Wolf, whose Minecraft themed fan fiction got him picked up by Harper, has undoubtedly tasted of that elusive sauce.

The question is finding it and amplifying it. And that's where I think this panel will be so interesting. The publishers on the panel will either have cracked it or be foundering, as clueless as I as to how you do this thing in the atomised world of the Web and its Medusine long tails. Finding out which of the two states they inhabit are itself be a thing of great fascination.

I'm not setting out to misbehave this year. But I can promise you this panel will be nothing less than mesmerising and insightful. This based on the other panellists, clearly...

The panel is linked here if you want to buy tickets at Dhs70 each. If not...

Birdkill, Books And The Demon Drink

I suppose there is, one way and another, quite a bit of drinking in my books. Space, my silly first effort at writing, was originally packed with smoking scenes precisely because it was written in the throes of me chucking up my Olympian 60 a day smoking habit. I can't say the same for the other books. And while Space does feature the occasional drinkie, my personal favourite is the scene where daft sex-worker and Jessica Rabbit lookalike Kylie discovers the non-alcoholic French drink 'Montalow'...

Of course, thanks to hard-drinking anti-spy Gerald Lynch, there's a good deal of Scotch put away in Olives, Beirut and Shemlan. But it was Paul Stokes in Olives - A Violent Romance who started it:

I dutifully pretended it was, indeed, news to me and thanked him, hung up and poured more whisky into my glass, walking through the house into the garden, where I stood looking over the lights of the city. I went back and poured more until eventually, quite drunk, I held the heavy-based tumbler between my two fingers above the flagstone floor in the kitchen and let it fall, bright and scintillating in the halogen spots as it twisted through the air, shattering on the stone. A thousand reflective shards skittered across the floor. I went, unsteady on my feet, to bed where I lay in the darkness, trying to stop the room from spinning.

There was a hint of sulphur around the Jordanian family in Olives drinking, which provoked no small amount of sniffiness at the time. How could I possibly portray members of a Muslim family drinking alcohol? That never happens in Abdoun. Perish the thought.

I set myself the unenviable task of killing someone using a bottle of champagne in Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. Not battering them to death with it, but using the liquid. It's actually quite hard finding an untraceable poison that dissolves in liquid and I'm not quite sure why my Google life at the time didn't have the cops around with copies of the local pharmacy's poison book in hand. I eventually settled on a nice dose of potentiated chlorzoxazone...

Meier nodded graciously. He sipped his champagne, noticing how fine the flute was, holding the dry, complicated drink in his mouth and revelling in the fact that a lifetime’s work had culminated in this – a new identity, a new life of reward and luxury. The stress of the past few weeks was making itself felt now as he relaxed, a feeling of lassitude creeping over him. He placed the glass down on the coffee table, and Freij reached over to top it up.

‘It is a particularly fine champagne, no, Herr Meier?’

Meier nodded. ‘I have always preferred Sekt, of course, being German. But I have to confess, when the French get it right ...’

Freij sat back in his chair. ‘Lamiable is a small house, a grand cru, of course, from near Tours. Sixty percent Pinot Noir, forty percent Chardonnay. We can enjoy champagne because of the Levant, you know this, Herr Meier? The Chardonnay grape was taken back to France by the Crusaders. My ancestors.’

The champagne I chose to use to kill a man in Beirut was a relatively esoteric single-grower extra brut called Lamiable, which is solely imported into the UK by the excellent Charles Meyrick of Balthazar Wines. Otherwise dependable as they come, Charles turned fink and shared the book with the family who make the wine. They were reportedly somewhat bemused to find their very fine beverage applied in such a casually murderous manner. Sometimes this writing lark is SO worth it all. I'm still laughing, to tell the truth...

Shemlan - A Deadly Tragedy had the occasional glass in it, too; Lamiable returned for a cameo role, but old Lynch was on the demon drink with a vengeance again... One of my favourite characters in the book was the tubercular old General in Aleppo, dying his death in a souq that, tragically, events have managed to ensure, at deaths door though he was, he probably outlasted.

The General sat in the middle of the room next to a pot-bellied stove, a dull metal table to his side carrying a bottle of whisky and an overflowing ashtray. There were two glasses, one half-empty. The table was scattered in coins as was, Lynch noticed, the windowsill. The General sat in a wheelchair, his twisted legs covered in a beige woolly blanket. He had withered, his great frame shrunken inside clothes that were too big for him.

The Sandhurst English voice was still strong. ‘Come in, damn you, you Irish bastard. There’s a chair over there.’

Lynch lifted the bottle out of the bag and onto the table. He pulled up the battered wooden schoolroom chair, its scrape echoing in the empty room. The General nodded appreciatively at the Green Label. He unpeeled the foil, pulled out the cork and poured Lynch a stiff drink. He fumbled for the pack of cigarettes and lit one, puffing smoke from grey-blue lips under his great yellowing white moustache. There was an unhealthy sheen on his forehead and he started to cough, a rumbling noise that ended in a great walrus bark.

A Decent Bomber, set in Ireland as it is, has the odd Guinness in it. Pat O'Carolan isn't much of a drinker, perhaps the occasional hot whiskey on a cold night up on the Cummermore Bog is pretty much the only glass he takes. The two Irish politicians, Driscoll and MacNamara, are quite fond of a pint, though...

He glanced at the door of the pub as it admitted sunshine and the clamour of the street. Brian MacNamara’s big frame blocked out the sunlight momentarily. The pub was empty save for the two of them and the young barman, who poured MacNamara’s pint unbidden.

‘Well, now Sean. How’s the man?’

‘I’m good, Brian. Looking forward to the win, you know yourself.’

MacNamara eyed the three-quarters full glass resting on the bar, the creamy froth billowing. The barman slid it back under the tap to finish it off. He laid the pint down with a diffident nod and took himself away to the other end of the bar.

‘Slàinte.’ Driscoll raised his glass and drank. ‘So what’s this great mystery that brings you galloping from campaign headquarters on a Sunday morning right before the election?’

MacNamara brooded over his pint, his keen eye on Driscoll. ‘Quinlan is dead.’

Birdkill has quite a few very intentional mentions of Ksara, that most excellent of wines from a monastically established Château just outside the town of Zahlé. This town, the capital of the Beqaa, nestles red-roofed and splendiferous in the foothills of Mount Sannine. It sits atop the Berdawni River, the banks of the torrent lined with restaurants and shisha joints. In the evening, it becomes magical in the way only the Middle East becomes magical at night. It is to Zahlé Robyn Shaw travelled to work as a teacher, and it was here something terrible happened to her and it was here, in her obliterated past, Robyn's appalling secret lies. And it is in the glasses of Ksara the dark, blood-red spirit of her past is echoed.

Warren delved into the drawer and pulled out a corkscrew. He stripped the lead from a bottle of red wine and pulled the cork. He twisted the label to face her. Ksara. Mariam stared at the cream label with its pencil drawing of the Château nestled in its vineyards, the letters picked out in gold. Her gaze flew to meet his brown eyes. He was smiling. ‘I make it my business to know stuff. It’s how you stay alive when you deal with bad people.’

Anyway, here's a glass to books... Slàinte!