The luxury of fiction

Stanley – Thursday

One of the wonderful attributes of writing fiction is that you can manipulate reality to suit the story. For example, in real life, DNA results can take months to come back. In our stories, the lucky detectives can have them expedited to be back in days – and with new technology, in hours. 

In our Kubu series, Kubu has the luxury of being able to put his feet up on his desk to snatch a quick power nap, partly because it invigorates him, partly because it is in those few minutes that his subconscious works overtime to produce flashed of insight into whatever case is perplexing him. In real life, detectives face such a mountain of cases that I suspect they have difficulty having a normal sleep at night let alone a midday power nap.

And of course, it is one of the pleasures of writing police procedurals that despite difficulties, immensely clever criminals, and a host of other obstacles, our protagonists usually succeed in bringing the baddies to justice. The pleasure is less in the writing of the story than in knowing that your readers love to see justice done. In real life, of course, justice is rarely done. Criminals are often never arrested and, if they are, frequently do not feel the harsh consequences of the law.

All this came in sharp focus for me this week when I visited the Sea Point police station in Cape Town to chat to a detective who is handling a case in which I am involved.

First some background. I am a pretty savvy computer and technology person and pay a lot of attention to the various nefarious schemes to deprive honest citizens like myself from their hard-earned money. A thousand times, I have ignored emails from Nigeria offering a slice of a fortune that has miraculously come my way. I can’t count the number of lotteries in obscure countries that I have won, with the money just awaiting my banking information. I am constantly surprised by the number of family members I have who have left money to me in their wills. 

The Nigerian scam

Some of the scams are so obvious that we can’t believe that anyone would take them seriously. However, the fact that they persist in such numbers may indicate that an occasional person falls for them. If one person in a thousand responds and has his or her bank account cleared out, sending out a million emails may be a very profitable enterprise.

Some of the scams are clever – particularly the ones purportedly from a broker or banker with the look and feel of the email identical to that of one from the bank. alerting the recipient to the fact that there has been a problem with their account, asking them to CLICK HERE to sign on and rectify the situation. I suspect most of the people who fall for this type of scam are elderly, and not particularly comfortable with computers and online financial transactions. I feel so sad when I hear of someone who has just had their life savings pilfered.

Last November I came across a scam that was ingenious in its concept and execution. And I was the victim.

Me when I found out - note the fine crop of hair and the tie, both of which I am without.

The scammer hacked into my nephew Ivor's email account without him knowing it. Rather than sending out weird emails to people under my nephew’s name, the scammer did nothing but monitor his emails. He or she was probably monitoring lots of people’s emails. 

I wanted to give my nephews, Ivor and Sean, and niece, Colleen, some money, so I used the typical bank transfer readily available in South Africa. Two of the three went through, but Sean’s bounced – the account had been closed. I emailed him for the correct information, but that too bounced, so I emailed Ivor to see if he had Sean’s current email address. He had it and I sent a new email asking Sean for his bank account number. He replied with it, and I sent him his money for which he thanked me.

To cut a long and sad story short, when I emailed Ivor for Sean’s email address, it was the scammer who replied, giving me a working but false address. When I emailed Sean, of course it went to the scammer, who supplied me with what I thought was Sean’s bank details. And it was into this account that my money went.

And disappeared.

As did the scammer.

So what has this got to do with my topic for the day – the luxury of fiction?

I reported the scam to the fraud department of the bank where the scammer had his or her account. I notified my bank of what had happened, and I filed a police report. All of these were done within a day of finding out what had happened – during the first week of November last year.

As of today, my bank kicked the case over to the bank where the scammer's account was. The scammer's bank has promised on numerous occasions that they are looking into the matter and will get back to me by the promised date. There has been no promised date.

I  have visited the police stationer six times so far, and only once did I speak to the detective assigned to the case. It was in process, he said, but would take a while because they were overloaded and short-staffed. Then he was taken ill and his cases reassigned. Or at least that was what I was told. I was even given the name of the new detective, but every time I went to see him, he was out detecting somewhere or other.

Earlier this week I returned with the hope of meeting the new detective on my case. No such luck, but I did wander into the head detective’s office. Small, badly needing paint, bits of paper stuck to the walls, piles of files on his desk. He was very helpful. We accessed his computer, brought up my case, only to find it hadn’t officially been reassigned. It was still assigned to the detective who was still out sick after three months. The head detective immediately officially reassigned it to the other detective I had still failed to meet.

Then the head detective explained the process that had to be followed to allow them to subpoena records from the bank. The case had to be written up and then presented to a magistrate in court. And the magistrate would decide whether to allow the case to go forward.

Yesterday I actually managed to make phone contact with the right detective. What a win! He said that a bunch of dockets had been sent to the magistrate to get permission to subpoena the appropriate records from the bank. (Note he didn't actually say mine was in the batch.) However the magistrate wasn't the normal one they use, and the new one sent the docks back. So, the detective told me, he has to resubmit all of the dockets, including mine.  

And that is only the start of the process, he grumbled. Banks don't respond timorously to sub open requests, often stonewalling indefinitely.

Meanwhile the mountain of cases on the detective's desk continues to grow.

It was clear to me that there wasn’t going to be any speedy resolution to any part of this case. And it was this reality check that made me think of how lucky we writers are to be able to massage reality to suit our stories. If we wrote out stories to mimic reality, our readers would be fast asleep before anything happened, and likely dead before the case was resolved.

Here’s to fiction! Clink.

And this is what I dream about.

Truth or Lies. Fiction or Nonfiction.

Annamaria on Monday

There is a group of fiction writers in Philadelphia called The Liars Club.  There is a group in the United States government right now that are called the Administration that many feel should adopt that name.

Where has the truth gone?

It's what we all think we want.

But I wonder--did it ever exist?

As a historical novelist, I steep myself in a ton of research before I take on the task of bringing you back to the setting of my story.  Yet I have several times been vilified by card-carrying historians because I write historical fiction.  They think books like mine pollute the factual record.

I think books like theirs tell only one version of the truth--filtered as the facts are though the attitudes of the writer.  I have huge problem with their inability to admit this.

So what is the truth and what is a lie?  Where does fact end and fiction begin?

Mulling over these conundrums, while considering writing this blog, I realized that I had a date this past Saturday to have brunch with the perfect people to talk this over.  Here they are, Jeff and Carol Markowitz:

Jeff is a novelist of wonderful crime novels, my favorite of which is the hilarious Death and White Diamonds.  How did Jeff know that every corpse in the parade of murder victims in the story would make readers laugh?  How did he manage to pull it off?  You got me!

Carol is now completing a nonfiction story of two American soldiers in WWII.  Her sources are their letters to her mother during the war, and her own research into events happening in history while those GIs were writing to her mom of their personal experiences.  It's a book a am very much looking forward to reading.

So we three, over waffles and eggs benedict, took up the subject of what is truth?

We made short work of what happens at the extremes, where it is easy to tell the black and white difference.  This dichotomy is easily apparent if the question is a simple one and requires a simple answer.  If you ask me, for instance, if I have ever been to Copenhagen, "yes" would be an absolute lie, and "no" the absolute truth.  And we are all familiar with the need for white lies told because the truth would be hurtful and the lie does no damage.  How do I like the new decor of your house?  It's lovely, not matter what I actually think.

Little white lies, big white lies, little black lies... there are lots more than fifty shades of gray between truth and fiction.

This was where Jeff said that the real danger of lies is the Campaign of Lying--where many, many small lies are told in order to create a huge untruth.  This is the kind of thing we are seeing on the political and financial fronts, a purposeful maneuver to achieve a nefarious goal.  How much we have seen lately of manipulation of public opinion, resulting in disaster for just about everyone but purveyors of a tsunami of lies.

What more can we say about this?  We shuddered and moved on to things we know and do ourselves.  

Carol had just gotten back from a two and a half day conference in New Orleans of researchers into WWII.  She had had a marvelous time listening to the presentations and hanging out with like-minded researchers and writers.

She told about a speech at the conference by the historical novelist Jessica Shattuck, who began by telling the historians in the audience that she would be grateful if they did not pelt her with rotten tomatoes.   (Evidently Shattuck has run into some of the same sort of nay-sayers I have run into in libraries, who distain "fictionalizing the facts.")  She did not talk about her historical novel--which tells of the widows three real men who plotted the assassination of Hitler.

In her talk Shattuck concentrated instead on what she had learned as a result of her close relationship with her grandparents, who ran a Nazi youth camp in Germany in the thirties.

Here's the rub: The audience, whom she knew would disdain historical fiction, were hungry for the "true" stories of Shattuck's grandparents.  The historians questioned her at length about the details of what she knew to be "facts."  BUT... BUT... What about the fact that these stories happened eighty years and have been dragged through the memories of three generations.  AND that some of the re-tellers may have had emotional reasons to forget or purposely leave out important parts of the story.

In her work, Carol is struggling with similarly difficult choices.  Ernie, one of the GIs in Carol's book was captured by the Germans and sent many of his letters from a Stalag.  He never wrote about feeling guilty that he had survived while his buddies died in battle, or because others were going on dying in new battles, while he lived on in his prison.  When he came home, he was withdrawn and depressed.  Many men who showed up in Carol's research admitted in their writings that they were consumed with survivor guilt.  Was Ernie?  He didn't admit it.  But then what else could have caused Ernie's depression.  Carol wants to tell the truth.  But... But...

She wouldn't have this issue to worry over if she were turning the story into fiction.  Fiction does not have to stick to the facts.

Most historical novelists that I know do their best to respect the facts.

Bad writers of historical fiction can and certainly do play fast and loose with the truth.  I have complained about them right here on MIE, when I pilloried the writers of the TV series Medici, Masters of Florence.  For lots reasons, a person might keep the facts but change the names of the real people involved.  The writers of the Medici series kept the names (and locations and time frame) but completely ignored the facts.  All may be fair in love and war.  But since when does that apply to cable TV?

Jeff and I (and our fellow novelist Richie Narvaez, in conversation later that same day) came  to a realization.  That fiction can and often is the best way to tell the truth.  Short stories and novels can portray with enormous realism what humans on this planet experience.  It is often the only way to find the truth: How people really are.  What life is--or was--really like.

To my way of thinking, for instance, Jane Austen's Persuasion can tell you more about what it meant to be the unmarried daughter of a baronet in the 1800s than can all the treatises written on the subject put together.

Booking India

Sujata Massey

Chiki Sarkar, co-founder of Juggernaut Publishing/photo by Vogue India

This post is a tribute to a young democracy that has brought the world great writers--and a fantastical amount of readers.

India's population of 1.2 billion boasts a literacy rate of 86% in cities and 71% in rural areas.
Inside India, twenty major languages are spoken and read, and a few hundred more languages are used in rural communities. About 125 million Indians speak and read English, making it the second largest English-speaking country in the world.

Indian kids selling pirated books to car passengers

Yet despite the vast numbers of Indians educated in  schools, book sales are paltry--out of proportion for a nation with the largest middle class in the world and a plethora of talented writers in those twenty-plus languages. Why is this?

Many urban people are exposed to pirated books every day. An estimated 25% of books sold in India are proferred by slum dwellers who work under the supervision of gang bosses who distribute reprinted versions of Indian bestsellers on paper thin as tissue. During recent travels in Kolkata and Mumbai, I kept running into kids selling pirated Slumdog Millionare books...such an irony! If you got stuck on a street for a half-hour every day, and the same friendly youth offered you a bestseller for less than half of its cover cost, why wouldn't you buy--especially if you thought it would help the child?

College Street bookseller/photo by Rishi Bandopadhyay

Another blow against literary commerce are  time-honored, used-book stalls in all cities. Used book shopping at book corners loaded with thousands of traded-in books is one of the joys of visiting Kolkata's College Street. However, these places don't earn a rupee for the author or publisher.

The efforts of India's biggest publishers tosell e-books haven't helped. I have a novel published in India, City of Palaces. The beautifully designed trade paperback has a list price of 499 rupees, but the reality is that the trade paperback is sold at Amazon for 310 rupees, while the ebook is 299. We are talking about $4.68 US versus $4.51. Many Indians buy e-reader devices are sucked into the free ebook and get so much content loaded up they have no interest in adding books that aren't free.

A young woman publisher, Chiki Sarkar, is trying to change that. (Full disclosure: Chiki bought and published my book, City of Palaces, during her time at Penguin). I was stunned that shortly after her promotion to becoming publisher for the newly joined PenguinIndia/Random House, she departed to create her own start-up venture. Juggernaut launched this month with an amazing author list.

In several articles I've read, Chiki has mentioned that publishers can't expect distributors to pay them on time, and there aren't a lot of great independent and chain bookstores in India investing in new authors. She joined hands with with Durga Raghunath, a tech entrepreneur. They are launching Juggernaut, a publishing house unlike anything India's ever experienced.

Jagannath celebration in Puri

 Juggernaut is a very old, yet modern-sounding word. British administrators during the colonial era were stunned by the energy of the Rath Yatra Hindu festival held in Puri, Orissa every year in honor of the god Jagganath. To them, the Jagannath gathering was a wild melee of people and massive, heavy carts--the 18th-century precursor of rush hour traffic. Frequently, religious pilgrims were crushed in the throngs of Jagannath--yet the carts and people pressed on. The British colonials began using the term "Juggernaut" to describe  a powerful force or institution that cannot be halted.

 Juggernaut Publishing's push is embracing the shift of reading on mobiles phone. The publisher plans to release more books as digital exclusives, although about 50  books per year will also be released in paper. The lynchpin of the publisher's debut will be the memoir of Rajat Gupta, a business scion who was convicted of insider trading and jailed. More details are here in some interviews Chiki Sarkar did at the recent  London Book Fair and with Vogue India.

Mobile users in India/photo by BBC

Many people worldwide read novels on our phones and tablets, using apps from Amazon and Apple. I do it to keep myself busy when I'm waiting somewhere. I own a Nook e-reader and a Kindle Fire, but I confess both need to be charged, because I use them only on the treadmill or when traveling.

Here's the other side of the story. Remember how I mentioned people speaking so many languages in India?

Penguin/Random House has decided to go big guns and  translate quality regional language fiction into English. One example of this new pubs is one of the most powerful thrillers I'd ever read, Hangwoman, by KR Meera and translated by J. Devika.

I would not have ever known about this haunting novel, originally written in Malayalam, if it hadn't been for this publishing risk taken. The past and the future, interwoven. That's why I love India.