Beirut - A Deadly Thriller
I started writing Beirut in late 2009 (not for the last time, starting with a short story), just after a British literary agent rejected Olives - A Violent Romance after a ‘full read’ with the comment that it wasn’t dramatic enough. Right, I thought. If you want dramatic...
I finished in June 2010, but it wasn’t until spring 2011 the book was picked up by London-based literary agent Robin Wade, who signed me and shopped it to fourteen of London’s finest. Seven months later, to a man, they rejected it. The rejection that hurt most praised the book’s qualities but noted the editor in question ‘couldn’t see it selling in supermarkets’.
"There are lots of elements to it that I like – there’s an austere, almost Le Carre feel which I like and the author can clearly write. The dialogue and plotting stood out for me in particular. I’m afraid though that it is – for my purposes – a bit too low-key; the ‘commercial’ bit of my job title requires me to pick out titles which are going to appeal directly to supermarkets and the mass-market, and I feel that this would be too difficult a sell in that context."
It was that reaction pushed me over the edge into self-publishing. There was clearly a major change – and massive contraction – taking place in the world of ‘traditional’ publishing and it wasn’t favouring a new author writing hard-to-peg books about the Middle East. Some of the editorial feedback had mentioned the book as ‘Set in Beirut, that war-torn city’. This was infuriating, as Beirut – An Explosive Thriller is set in contemporary Beirut, well over 20 years after the civil war ended.
Beirut today is a complex city, sexy and shabby, filled with promise and hopeless, vibrant and drab, it rarely fails to entertain and challenge. Plagued by power cuts, creaking infrastructure and endemic corruption, Beirut is full of life, creativity and celebration – even if that celebration sometimes takes on a brittle, desperate air.
It has, sadly, been increasingly desperate since the city became the first in history to actually bomb itself, that huge and damaging explosion of fertiliser stored in Beirut port accompanied a run on the Lebanese Lire that wiped out fortunes and send thousands fleeing anywhere just to get away from the hopelessness and corruption.
And Beirut still bears the scars of the war – although they’re fading with the years, the deep-rooted problems of sectarianism and vested interest frequently combine to frustrate attempts to make the most of Lebanon’s rich natural and human resources. All too often, both are squandered.
Lebanon itself remains a country of three parts – to paint it with an impossibly broad brush, Muslim in the south, Druze in the mountains and Christian to the north. It constantly teeters on the edge of a precipice of its own making. Israel to its south and Syria bordering inland are rarely helpful influences.
It’s the perfect place for Gerald Lynch, wilfully unconventional and wild as he is.
In Olives - A Violent Romance, the reader only saw Lynch through Paul Stokes’ eyes and that certainly wasn’t a sympathetic viewpoint. In Beirut - An Explosive Thriller we get to see Lynch in the round, including his own circle of friends and colleagues, from tired-eyed policeman Tony Chalhoub through to smouldering beauty (and cathouse madam) Marcelle Aboud. And then there’s fat Palmer from the embassy and the wily Brian Channing, deputy director for security and public affairs. We also start to uncover some of Lynch’s backstory, the kid on the Falls Road they called Gerry.
Research
One thing that amazed me over the course of writing Beirut - A Violent Romance is that I wasn’t arrested. My Google life was extraordinary and mostly involved things like weapons, military assets, intelligence, police and other deeply dodgy stuff.
I can't imagine how writers did this stuff before Google - they must have spent months in the library, ordering books and poring through piles of obsessive esoterica. Actually, come to think of it, I have ordered books and stuff - some of which (I didn't realise until too late) had the potential to attract unwelcome attention down at Sharjah Post Office, too! Luckily the customs chaps there long had me down as a harmless eccentric, so they didn't look too closely at the books I brought in.
I've also depended on the expertise of a number of people as well as quite a lot of walking around that most glorious of cities in the company of various lovely colleagues or on my tod. There's nothing quite like just walking around a great city and Beirut certainly rewards the experience with an enduring intensity.
Put it all together and you have a demonstrable track record of a deeply unhealthy interest in a lot of things that go bang and otherwise kill people. That includes an awful lot of phone calls and emails with people centering on military helicopters, missile systems and toxic substances and a nasty obsession with the military and intelligence services of a number of countries. As well as mooching around certain cities day and night taking photographs and generally just acting strangely.
Nobody's batted an eyelid. I'm not sure whether I'm relieved or worried...
The Soviet Oka Missile
The two Soviet nuclear warheads at the heart of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller are worryingly, solidly researched. The Oka class missile (Designated by NATO as the SS-23 Spider) was developed in 1980 by the Soviets to carry both conventional and nuclear payloads and be launched from mobile launchers. The nuclear warhead was detachable.
A number of these missiles were covertly deployed in the late 1980s to Warsaw pact countries to get around the INF treaty (Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces) limitations and a round of Soviet obfuscation took part during the negotiation of the treaty that made it hard to trace quite what was deployed and stored quite where. Over 120 missiles were involved in the redeployment – possibly including nuclear warhead loading equipment.
Adding to the confusion, Czechoslovakia split into two nations. Stockpiles of the Oka were destroyed by both the Czech Republic and Slovakia – it is now obsolete and all remaining missiles have been destroyed.
Well, apart from two...
Beirut - The city
Back in 2012…
The Salim Slam tunnel is arguably the most polluted place on earth. Well, apart from the Aral Sea. It's a brilliantly designed long road tunnel that crests a hump and has no ventilation so the concentration of exhaust fumes literally forms into billowing, choking clouds of noxious grey gases. I'm stuck in the back of a hot taxi with cracked leather seats, no AC and the windows open as we hit the traffic jam. As usual, I held my breath as we entered the tunnel, a 47 year-old man playing an eight year old's game of holding my breath until we get to the other side. As we draw to a halt, I realise I'm about to fast track my way to a powerful hit of carboxyhaemoglobin. And I don't care. I'm back in Beirut.
Catching up with friends and generally mooching around the city, but I still have time to finish editing the last few pages of Beirut - An Explosive Thriller and send it off to its editor. I hadn't planned to finish Beirut in Beirut, but it's worked out that way and I am glad. I'd just like to say thanks to the Ministry of ICT for the awful Internet, which went down totally for a day and more. A nation offline, but a man with nothing to distract him from editing!
Sara, Eman and I went for lunch to one of my favourite places, the Cliffhouse restaurant in the tiny village of Shemlan up in the Chouf overlooking Beirut. The traffic in Hamra is broken and we spend an hour in hot, snarling lines of lane-swapping, jostling cars and vans. More mad traffic on the Saida road and then we're free, breaking upwards into the cool, clean mountain air. We're much later than we'd planned, but never mind. A seat by the open window and sunny warmth, beige stone walls and the sound of music, chattering and argileh soothe. A quick toast to absent Michelines and we start to tuck into the plates of food pouring out of the kitchen in a tide of riotous colours, the dark red muhammarah, the creamy houmous piled up around little pieces of grilled lamb, the fattoush. Ah, you know.
Then sitting back with chai nana (and an argileh nana for part time caterpillar Eman) and full stomachs, enjoying the breeze and the sight of Beirut turned golden by the waning afternoon sun. It really doesn't get much better.
GeekFest Beirut in the evening. I love The Angry Monkey, from its daft logo to its wireless internet. The Alleyway is literally that and the peeps at the Online Collaborative have set up a stage there. Something like four hundred people pitch up, a big cheery crowd of lively, chattering geeks spilled out onto the busy thoroughfare of Gemmayzeh, Rue Gouraud. The talks are talked, the fashion show is catwalked - both are enjoyed by the crowd, hands in the air clutching mobiles to snap the occasion. It's all impeccably done, if a tad hot out there. Four hundred beaming geeks is a lovely sight...
I take refuge in the air-conditioned Angry Monkey where later on the bands excel themselves, combining with pints of 961 to induce a warm, happy perma-grin.
This is actually the cover I always wanted for the book. Like most of my other instinctive publishing decisions, it’s probably madness. But I still like it…
GeekFest Beirut - a footnote
I briefly ran an event, well, a ‘non-event’ called GeekFest in Dubai back in 2009-2011, basically a social gathering for online/digital people. It sort of got out of hand, expanding across the Middle East entirely by mistake. This occured particuarly as I had to find a reason to go back to Beirut to research Beirut - An Explosive Thriller. The company I worked for had a thriving business in tech and telecoms in Jordan and the region as a whole, but try as we might, we couldn’t squeeze a penny out of the Lebanese IT industry. Which meant I had no excuse to actually visit Beirut.
So exporting GeekFest was - literally - my ticket to get over to Beirut, and what a ticket it turned out to be! By the time we were done, there were GeekFests taking place in Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Amman, Nablus, Alexandria, Jeddah, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. So I stopped doing it - one of the founding principles of the event was that it should never become important.
All very wilful and anarchic, a lot of fun and at least part of the reason that Beirut - An Explosive Thriller got writ at all!