Archive for December 2011

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Extreme Paella Club - winner 2011

As president of the Extreme Paella Club, I'm delighted to announce that this year's winner is Steve Carter. Steve made a paella using the traditional ingredients (chicken, rabbit, green beans, etc.) in the Kalahari desert only last week, just in time to be considered for this year's award. His GPS coordinates were 21 degrees 32.500 S and 15 degrees 32.311 E. The committee was most impressed by Steve's insistence on using dried orange peel to light his fire with. Steve's prize as this year's winner will be announced in a later post.

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Kalila and Dimna

I've been reading the second instalment of Ramsay Wood's masterly retelling of the ancient Indian classic, Kalila and Dimna. This collection of stories and tales, many of which involve animals, has gone under several different names over the centuries (The Fables of Bidpai, or the Panchatantra), and is often cited as one of the most influential books in world literature. Aesop, Kipling and The Arabian Nights all owe something to its rich cornucopia of anecdotes. Here is one of my favourites: Once upon a time there was a madman who was convinced he was dead. Nothing his doctors said would convince him otherwise. He lay on his bed, stiff as a board, refusing to listen to them. 'Go away. I'm dead,' he'd tell them. One of the doctors had an idea. 'Do dead men bleed?' he asked the patient. 'No, of course not,' said the mad man. The doctor grabbed the man's arm and pricked it with a knife until blood started to flow. 'Look!' he said. 'Blood.' The man sat up, amazed. 'My God,' he said. 'Dead men DO bleed!' This is the second in what Wood promises to be a trilogy, telling the ancient stories for a modern audience. I can highly recommend it. The full title is Kalila and Dimna: Fables of Conflict and Intrigue

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German edition

The German edition of Or The Bull Kills You has just arrived in the mail. Title: La Muerte. Looks great. You can see it by clicking here.

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New book title

The second in the Max Camara series of detective novels will now be titled A DEATH IN VALENCIA in both the UK and the US. So please ignore any previous comments about a book called Some Other Body. That title came to me in a dream as I was writing the book, and it kept me going through some of the more obscure moments when I wasn't so sure which way the novel was going. But it has been decided that the new title will work better on both sides of the Atlantic. Eso es lo que hay as they say in Spain.

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Iain Ronayne

As I mentioned in a previous post, my new website has been designed by Iain Ronayne of Design309. I'm delighted to say that Iain has now done a new website for my friend the writer Tahir Shah. You can see it at tahirshah.com. Please take a look. I can highly recommend both Tahir's books and Iain's design work.

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Seeking Moscow researcher

I'm looking for a researcher in Moscow who can get access to old (30s & 40s) KGB files. If you think you can help, please email me using the 'contact' link. Any assistance is much appreciated.

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Speeding up

It's not just that we feel that life is getting faster. Biologically it IS getting faster. I've just found an extraordinary quote in an article in the London Review of Books on The Origin of Our Species, by Chris Stringer. Steven Mithen writes: "[Stringer] stresses that we are continuing to evolve... Indeed, changes in individual DNA sequences suggest that human evolution has accelerated over the past 10,000 years. We are evolving a hundred times faster than we were when we split from the lineage of the chimpanzees around six million years ago."