An Eye for an Eye?

Fantasy Land is my novel of revenge, or more precisely, of a revenge that is planned but not carried out. And this seems to be the chief objection of some of my readers, as expressed to me in person or by mail. They claim that they were not emotionally justified by the result. Reader I know that when someone slaps you in the face you want to slap them right back. But let me explain to you why this is not the wisest course to follow.

Revenge or retaliation is the infliction of deliberate harm on somebody in response to a harm they have done to you. Revenge is basically an emotional response to being hurt, and being an emotional response, it goes way back to primitive man. It was, and is, common to most societies emerging from savagery and tribalism toward some sort of civilization.

Two important documents of the ancient world (both about 700 BC) show us that retaliation was a justifiable as well as an advisable course of action back then. In the Hebrew Book of Exodus, (21:23-25) we read that “And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.” This line, often quoted, in essence justifies revenge.

Where do Fiction Authors Write?

I admire Hemingway's writing and his iceberg principle. I know he hung out in a bar in Havana and I would have loved to meet him for a quiet chat. I have heard that he wrote standing up. Now that's kind of weird, but whether you are standing up, sitting or lying down, writing is hardly exciting to watch. Reader I will readily agree with you: observing someone write is undeniably boring. What's important is the process in the author's head and what's even more important is his work. Where this process takes place is immaterial. Still, it is one of the questions that have plagued me since adolescence.

Why is it important to me? Do I want to have a mental picture? Do I desire to mimic? Or is it something beyond that? The bottom line is I don't care why it's important to me, so why would you? What's interesting is that this meaningless question, or its answer has been associated with most authors I know. I was on a bus tour of Edinburgh the other day and as I was staring out the window our tour guide pointed out a tea and coffee shop called The Elephant House. Now what exciting thing could have happened there, in the midst of historic Edinburgh? A meeting of great politicians or the planning of a revolution? “That's where J K Rawling wrote her first Harry Potter book,” said the mechanical voice. You see? My curiosity is hardly unique.

Eric Ambler: From Pulp to Literature

Eric Ambler (1909-1998) is not only “unquestionably our best thriller writer”, as Graham Greene said, but also the master of the modern thriller when it involves international intrigue and espionage. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene ran the course on the sidelines but Ambler ploughed head on. Within a few years he not only bridged the gap between serious literature and the pulp thrillers of John Buchan and Sapper but significantly overlapped it.

He was born in London, studied Engineering at London University but settled on a career as an advertising copywriter. He travelled extensively in Europe and became a full-time writer in 1937. Between 1936 and 1940 he wrote six critically acclaimed novels of intrigue which took the thriller from pulp to literature. He served in the British army (1940-46) as a film-maker with the likes of Peter Ustinov and John Huston. After the war he wrote screenplays for various films including The Passionate Friends, The Cruel Sea, A Night to Remember, The Wreck of the Mary Deare and Mutiny on the Bounty (uncredited). He married Joan Harrison, Alfred Hitchcock's screenwriter, and created an American TV show of his own: Checkmate. He also wrote twelve more highly acclaimed novels (most of which were filmed as movies or mini TV series) and five more in collaboration with Charles Rodda. He won countless literary awards including four Gold Daggers and an Edgar.

The Blueprints of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a great American short story writer and poet. Most people know him for his tales of mystery and the macabre but he was so much more than that. He was a master of innovation and most of his short stories became the prototypes for several genres or important classical works.

He was born Edgar Poe in Boston. His father abandoned his family a year later and his mother died when he was two. John Allan acted as a foster parent but he disowned him when Poe incurred large gambling debts after he registered at the University of Virginia to study languages. He enlisted in the American artillery to support himself and later as a cadet at West Point but resigned to follow a career in writing. He worked as a magazine editor, literary critic and publisher and was one of the first Americans who tried to make a living out of writing alone resulting in a financially difficult career. He secretly married his 13 year old cousin Virginia and because she suffered for many years from tuberculosis, Poe turned to drink. His poem The Raven became a popular sensation and made Poe a household name overnight. After Virginia's death his behaviour became erratic until his death in the streets of Baltimore under mysterious circumstances.

The Hook

The first few sentences of a novel must lure the reader away from the real world we all inhabit and into the imaginary world of the author. It is part of the author's art to make this transition as quick and as pleasant as possible. That is why a novel's beginning cannot just lure, it has to “hook”. 

Now reader I know that you are not a fish. You might think that this is unnecessary. After all, millions of people have read and enjoyed Umberto Eco's Name Of The Rose and in doing so had to plough through the first ...hundred and eighty tedious pages before they were actually hooked. But if you are not a masochist, wouldn't you prefer to be hooked into a book quickly and consume it rather than labour through it? Say for example that you are standing in a bookstore or a library and you see an interesting title and like the cover. Now if you know nothing else about the book, if you haven't read any raving reviews or listened to admiring words of mouth, you would probably start to read it. How long would you give the author before you decide to take the book home or put it back on the shelf? A few pages? Most people would just read a few sentences. So those opening few lines have a commercial as well as a practical purpose. And that's why most authors take care on how they start. 

Characters in Fiction

A novel's primary purpose is to tell a story but people make the story happen. In real life, each of us is entirely unique; we are far too complex to understand or describe. In literature, characters are abbreviated to what is necessary for the story. E. M. Forster in his book Aspects of the Novel (1927) divides the characters we find in fiction into FLAT and ROUND.

FLAT characters (also called humours, types, or caricatures) in their purest form are constructed around a single idea or quality. If, for example, in all dialogue and narration of a novel, all we learn about George is that he hates his mother, then George is a flat character. He might never actually utter the words “I hate you” to his mother, but if in all his dialogue, action and thoughts he has no existence outside that phrase, no private life like the rest of us, no other pleasure other then hating his mother, then George is as flat a character as he can be. In fact he is not a character but an idea personified. Anything more we learn about George, his physical description, his hobbies, his relationship with other people, etc, work to make him more round.

Jane Austen: Emma

Jane Austen's Emma (1815) is not as accomplished as Pride and Prejudice but it is one of her better novels.

The twenty-one year old title character is described in the first sentence as handsome, clever and rich and a little later (on chapter 10) she confesses to a friend that she has “very little intention of ever marrying at all”. This appears to be terribly upsetting as we know Jane Austen's novels are virtually about women in quest of a marriage with financial security. Otherwise, we are in Austen's world. We get acquainted with a number of characters and join their dinners and dances, eavesdrop on their conversations and take walks or picnics in the country. We find out how they dress, what they eat, how they talk and think. Men “of advantage” occasionally disappear for business and their women have precious little to occupy themselves with. Servants are the silent majority. I don't remember a significant dialogue with any of them or a single name being given. I think that today's authors are far more generous with things because sometimes they do give the brand of a car or a vacuum cleaner.

The Fear Conspiracy

Have you ever wondered what makes a thriller work? I mean sure, the better it is, the more it thrills you, but what are its nuts and bolts? What is that basic emotion that the author must manipulate in order to succeed? It all comes down to one dirty four letter word: Fear.

Fear is what pushes us to survive and survival is the chief human instinct. So fear can be no less than the most basic human emotion. I know love is way more fun, but in the human condition our sexual instinct is a poor second. Fear comes first. It might not feel good to be scared, people (like the military) may have made us think that it is something we ought to be ashamed of, but the truth of the matter is that fear is good. Take fear away from humans and you wouldn't have a human race. Take fear away from a thriller and you wouldn't have a thriller.

So when I sit with my laptop in a seaside hotel and make-up a story to thrill you, do you think that it sort of happens that the story will scare you? Would I leave the most important ingredient of my story to chance? Reader, I have a confession to make. Getting you scared is no accident. I conspire against you. I sit for hours on end to answer a single question: How can I make you shit in your pants?

Why pay for an e-book? ---- Part IV: Will books survive?

In parts I and II we have discovered that because e-books are expensive, many people are trying to find ways to avoid paying for them. In part III it was shown that bookstores are already disappearing, and publishers will follow. So if there are no bookstores and no publishers will there still be books? Will we need authors to write them?

We can look at these questions in various ways. The most immediate one is to notice that it's not that books are not being read or not being written. The army of middlemen is disappearing. On an average $15 book, the author makes $1.50, the bookstore $5 and the publisher (who does the editing, the printing, transportation, storage and takes the risk) the remainder. But nowadays an author may write a book on his computer, transfer it to a server, sell it to a customer through his website who will then read the book on his e-reader.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part III: Bookstores and Publishers

In parts I & II we have discovered that some publishers of e-books charge more for an e-book than a paperback copy even though their e-book expenses are practically zero. This has resulted in people attempting to get the e-book for free in various ways. These include downloading the book from dubious sites or buying a single copy, breaking the protection and sharing. When an estimated 60-80% of the population is engaged in these activities I wonder if the word legal has any meaning. Sound familiar?

Of course it does: The music industry. In fact the music industry faced the same problems the book industry is facing today. They too had exorbitant prices (like $20 for 12 songs.) They too paid little to the creator (10-15%). The customer's money funded a feast for an army of middle men. Then the average Joe, armed with a computer and a CD drive made copies of his CDs for his friends and before you know it no one was buying CDs from record stores. It might have been wise for these guys to lower their prices, to make it a burden to copy a cheap CD when you can have the original with the jacket notes.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part II: Everything for Nothing

In my previous article I couldn't explain why an e-book is more expensive than a paperback when it costs next to nothing to make it available. In my attempt to find the same book cheaper I found that most torrent copies available for free are usually full of mistakes and not really worth bothering with. So what happens now? Are you going to pay $11.59 for a 72 page e-book written 60 years ago (Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea), when you suspect that someone is taking more than his fair cut?

Of course not! There's that great institution called the public library. Nowadays you don't even have to go there. Just find one you can borrow from, fill-in a couple of forms and the book is yours for free for a week or two.

But let's say you want to own the book for free. Well, that's not so difficult either. Although most torrent copies circulating on the net are OCR copies of the books that haven't been proofread (in other words worthless), lo and behold there are some websites that have good copies of the actual book.

Why Pay for an e-book? ---- Part I: Something Worth Nothing

You have just bought an e-book reader or a tablet device and enjoy the reading experience. You appreciate that it can actually fit thousands of books which you can now take with you anywhere from your night table to Timbuktu. Now you want to get books to put in it. You've discovered that you can download most books published before 1922 for free from places like Gutenberg. Great, but you can't spend the rest of your life reading Pride and Prejudice or Great Expectations. You want to get on to people like Faulkner, Orwell, Hemingway. Let's say you want to read Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. You look it up in Amazon and you discover that something is wrong with the prices. They are selling a 72 page paperback for $8.50 and the e-book for $11.59.

It doesn't make sense, does it? An e-book does not need paper or printing, it doesn't require a warehouse, and it has no transportation costs. It doesn't need a physical store to be sold in or staff to sell it to you. It's sold directly to the customer through an e-store. Hemingway's share couldn't be more than 10-15%, yet the publisher finds it necessary to boost his price a further 36%. What are his extra expenses?

A Book and a Child

"Every book is like a child" a phrase goes and I seem to be hearing a lot of it. It must have been started by people who have raised a child or written a book. But anyone who has done both knows that although books and children are creations, there the similarity ends.

A book is a creation of the author's imagination. The input depends on the author's genetic make-up, his character and his experiences. He has ideas and thoughts, he chooses words and the end result is exactly what he has compiled. A child on the other hand is God's (or nature's if you prefer) creation. The input here is the child's make-up (its DNA), the child's experiences and the parent's guidance. A parent may have ideas and thoughts, he can devise a plan or execute a method and put in his best effort. The end result might be close to what he wants, it might be approximate to what he wants but it may well be the exact opposite.

Roger Ebert: Life Itself

Roger Ebert, America's best known film critic, looks hard in the mirror and at his own life as if it were a movie.

He was the late child of a German electrician and an Irish catholic in Urbana, Illinois. “I turned to books as soon as I could read,” he says. “There was a persistent need not only to write, but to publish”. He started out in public school by writing and publishing the Washington Street News and delivering it to his neighbours. In college he was a sportswriter for The News Gazette and editor for the Daily Illini. He studied English literature at the University of Illinois and went to the University of Cape Town, South Africa for his post graduate studies. He gave up his Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago to work for the Chicago Sun-Times. He envisaged himself as a column writer but one day someone retired and he was named the paper's film critic. “It was not my career goal” he says, and yet even with this random assignment his hard work earned him the Pulitzer price for his film writings. Furthermore his movie reviews with Gene Siskel were televised across America for twenty years. His sheer enthusiasm and intelligence make many of his reviews far more interesting and fun to read than the good movies they criticize.

Michael Caine: The Elephant to Hollywood

Michael Caine's second autobiography (the first being 1992's What's It All About) is like certain Western movie sets: a highly entertaining facade with nothing behind it.

Maurice Micklewhite started life in the London slums (Elephant & Castle) from working class parents and barely made a living in the theatre. Later in life he changed his name first to Michael Scott then to Michael Caine, became a movie star and moved to Hollywood. Mr Caine attributes it all to good luck and then goes on to recite countless stories or anecdotes of his experiences with his famous and very good friends. His language is straight forward and the book is highly entertaining. There is a laugh to be had at the end of every paragraph. The feeling you get is that you are having a quiet chat with him in a coffee shop. And after talking to you for an hour or two, I am sure he will call you his friend, and even give you the recipe of his delicious baked potatoes, which he does, near the end of the book. What a nice man!

If you want a coffee shop chat with Michael Caine, and haven't read What's It All About, I would highly recommend it. It's a longer and perhaps more interesting book. Not much has happened to him in the last eighteen years, and three quarters of this one is more or less an abbreviated repetition of his first one. But if you want to know something about the real Michael Caine, you are not in luck.

Change any book to an e-book

Not everyone relishes walking around with a suitcase of books in their vacation. The latest batch of e-readers have deprived us of the weight, dust and fire hazard of paper. A modern e-book reader can easily fit 3.000 books and needs charging only once a month. Hopefully I have already convinced you that it beats paperbacks hands down. But what if your favourite book is not available as an e-book? No problem. You can easily change any book to an e-book. Here's how:

Step 1: Scan the book (about 1 hr on a flatbed vs 15' on a batch)

The first step is to have a corresponding jpeg or pdf file for every page of the book. If it's a heavy book, it will be easier to photograph each page with a digital camera. If the book is manageable, you can use a flatbed scanner. It takes roughly an hour for your average 200 page paperback. If you don't mind destroying the book, then you can remove the bind with a cutter and feed the individual pages in a batch to a scanner such as the Canon P-150. It will only take 15 minutes in total. When you are done, make sure that you have all the pages and in consecutive order.

'Double Indemnity' doesn't work

In 1944 it was nominated for 7 Oscars. The screenplay was written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler. It is the first real Film Noir and it has an atmosphere thick enough to cut with a knife. And it ranks #29 on the American Film Institute's best American films of all time.

Still, it doesn't work on a character level.

Walter Neff (the story's narrator played by Fred MacMurray) confesses: “I killed him for money, and for a woman.” He sees the woman (Barbara Stanwyck) twice. He likes her a lot. The third time he sees her he agrees to plan and kill her husband so that she can get the insurance money. Perhaps after this they make love, we are not shown (we wouldn't be in 1944). Then he tells her that they must never meet again in private to avoid suspicion. He doesn't seem to want the woman. At no point does he ask for a cut, so he doesn't seem to want the money. Half an hour into the movie we know that he doesn't want the woman or the money. He is not shown to be a man of violent nature, more of a cold and calculating persona than anything else. Why then does he commit murder?

A Fake Archaeologist

From the Spring 2011 issue of the CIG Bulletin

Some of us are not just perplexed or confused but all muddled-up. At least it seems that way.

Take me for instance.

I was born in Greece, raised and educated in Canada and now live in Greece. What am I, Canadian or Greek? Let's look at my professional life. I am a practising electrical engineer who writes mystery thrillers. Am I a realist or a dreamer? And what am I doing here, rubbing shoulders with the archaeologists on the adjacent columns of the bulletin? It doesn't make sense, does it?

Most of life's mysteries don't make sense. But as soon as we learn a thing or two, lo and behold, the oddest item suddenly becomes the most natural. I mean heavier than air flying machines didn't make any kind of sense two hundred years ago, but when we discovered the venturi principle and jet propulsion, they became flying buses.

The Kindle vs The Paperbacks

I love books. To read them I've missed most of my lunches in high school and left many a party early. 'He eats books', my classmates used to say when they didn't see me in the lunch-room. So reading is something I know something about. When I bought a Kindle to see how my new novel would look on it, I haven't put it down since. In my book, the Kindle beats paperbacks hands down.

But let's be critical. In a direct comparison, what can the paperbacks do that the Kindle can't?

For one, the Kindle doesn't have a distinct smell. Smell any book and it reminds you of a place or an object--the bookstore you bought it from, your local library, a second hand stall. Wonderful isn't it? All the books inside your Kindle smell the same. How boring. Point two, when you stop reading a book, glance at its cover by your couch or coffee table, and it takes you back to the story and its characters. Stop reading a Kindle and all you see are people like Agatha Christie and John Steinbeck in black & white. Yuck! Point three... well I can't think of a point three. They tell us that books don't need batteries. I charge my Kindle once a month. What's the big deal? Books don't have wires inside. What do I care if the Kindle does?

The Auction of a Fake Athenian Decadrachm

I suppose it comes with the territory. I just love to leave the well-lit avenues of a town that serve as its window dressing and venture down its back alleys where its authentic pulse beats. And by the same token, whenever I meet a well-to-do educated lady of fine manners, I want to peel back the well-perfumed façade and peer into the darkness.

But sometimes I don't have to.

The Athenian Decadrachm is a silver coin minted by the city-state of Athens in c. 466 BC. There are only forty such coins in existence and the last one was auctioned for well over half a million dollars.

The quote above is from my new novel Bird of Prey. In it, the auction of a fake Athenian Decadrachm becomes a struggle without rules. The photograph above announced the auction of an Athenian Decadrachm. The coin was estimated to sell at $875.000 USD. Now who would spend that kind of money for a coin? Why? But wait! Just before the auction, the following announcement was published: