It is Hard to Write Crime Fiction Set in Israel

After reading Lineup by Liad Shoham, a review of which is my last post, I looked for some information on the author and came across a fascinating article he wrote for The Times of Israel late last year titled “It’s not easy being a crime novelist in Israel”.

Let’s start with the fact that Israel is a very small place. An American writer can take his hero from New York and lead him all the way to California, where he can create a new identity for himself. Where can I take mine? To Afula? That’s less than 30 miles from Tel Aviv. And let’s say I take him to Eliat, the furthest place in Israel, so what? He’d still be discovered

In Saskatchewan the population is limited but we are so spread out and there are our neighbouring provinces and the United States so that characters can range far and wide.

He then says:

That’s because Israelis love to play a game where they ask one another “Where are you from?” and the start with the “do you know so and so?” My poor protagonist, who thought he would be incognito, would be exposed in five minutes – not be sophisticated and seasoned police detectives but by the third floor neighbours.

 

It is a universal game. All of us have had small world experiences where someone we meet knows someone we would never have anticipated. Still it sounds like Israelis take the game to a different level.

Shoham continues that Israeli readers would not believe in brilliant police officers citing a famous Israeli joke that police work in pairs as “there needs to be one who can read and another that can write”.

He says there has never been a real life serial killer since Israel came into existence in 1947.

Shoham states:

I am filled with envy every time I read books in which the author did not dedicate whole chapters to what the main characters’ families think. In Israel, the family has such an important role that it is difficult to see how credible characters can be created without getting into the details and about all their relatives.

He goes on that Israeli apartment buildings lack basements and attics in which to conceal evidence and bodies.

Lest you think Shoham's observations are unique to him I am writing another Israeli mystery, The Missing File by D.A. Mishani, where early in the book the sleuth, detective Avraham Avraham explains why "there are no detective novels in Hebrew" such as written by Agatha Christie or Stieg Larsson:

            Because we don't have crimes like that. We don't have serial
            killers; we don't have kidnappings; and there aren't many
            rapists out there attacking women on the streets. Here, when
            a crime is committed, it's usually the neighbour, the uncle,
            the grandfather, and there's no need for a complex
            investigation to find the criminal and clear up the mystery.
            There's simply no mystery here. The explanation is always
            the simplest. 
 

In spite of all the problems Shoham concludes that crime fiction is “blooming” in Israel because “it provides escapism for living in the region and an outlet for a tense people”.

He ends with a story that made me laugh out loud on sex scenes he has written:
 

            After writing my third book, I asked my mother how she  

            was dealing with the licentiousness.
 

            “I don’t read it and just skip forward,” she said.
 

            “How do you know how much to skip?” I pressed on,
 

            She replied, “What do you think you father is for?”
 

What more need be said.