Alexander

So my excuse is this…

I used to smoke for the British Olympic Team, 60 fags a day and I gave up overnight. I had to find something publicly acceptable to do with my hands and find an outlet for my wildest cravings, so I wrote a book.

I’d been a journalist, editor and publisher before getting involved in PR and communications, so I’d written millions of words: speeches, magazine articles, op-eds, press releases, white papers and pretty much every sort of flavour of document you could think of. So I thought why not? I had no idea of how much I didn’t know about writing books and, to be honest, if I had known I might well not have had the courage to start.

But start I did and soon found myself enjoying myself thoroughly writing a spoof of international spy thrillers. You know the sort of thing, man finds shadowy cabal that’s trying to rule the world and sets out to defeat them while seducing a very lovely girl and then getting her and saving the world just in time for tea.

I was reading a lot of that type of book at the time, ‘cos I was flying a lot - you know, The Gerontophile Progression and The Smittenmitten Succession. I bought one of them twice, which led to a relatively shit flight to Amman with no other entertainment on offer (this was before Kindles, natch).

I wrote a book that sort of clamped jump leads onto the nipples of that genre and plugged them into the mains. It was tremendous fun to write, although I’m not so sure it’s quite as much fun to read. It was called Space, by the way. I thought it was enormously funny and still do, but have to note the early Amazon review that graces its cover today is, “Despite the author's claims, it just isn't very funny.”

So I sent that first book off to agents in London and sat back leafing through luxury yacht catalogues to see which one I’d buy with the advance on my royalties and was devastated to get back a photocopied slip saying ‘No’ from the first of ‘em. I was aghast - I mean, what was wrong with these people?

I was to get about 100 more before I realized Space - my first, intended to be funny - book wasn’t going to make me the billions.

I mean, le drat.

One of the last agents to respond wrote an actual written note on their rejection slip, ‘Look, humour doesn’t sell, dear boy’ and that made me decide to write a serious book, so I wrote Olives – A Violent Romance, a thriller about a young British journalist who goes to live and work in Jordan. I got a load more rejections for that, then a request for a ‘full read’ which is sort of like kissing after a serious major date. Maybe even some up the jumper action. It’s agent speak for ‘you’re off the slush pile, my lad’, which is a really big deal.

I waited three months and they came back to me with ‘It’s a bit low-key’ and that sent me into a blind fury. I mean, blackmail, terrorism, betrayal, bombs, dead people and smashed dreams are all ‘low key’? I stormed off in a rage and wrote Beirut – An Explosive Thriller which is a testosterone-soaked international spy thriller. It’s completely mad - heroin, prostitutes, luxury yachts, nuclear warheads, psychotic world leaders, the lot.

That one landed me an agent, who shopped the book around London’s 14 top publishers. After seven months, they’d all said ‘No’ in various ways. I sent him Olives, to see if he could sell that and, three months later, he hadn’t bothered to read it. At that point, I jacked it in. If my own agent couldn’t be arsed to read my work, I’m done with conventional publishing. I took great personal pleasure in terminating our relationship. I’d like to say I never once again cared for them and their opinions, but abusive relationships don’t always make sense unless you’ve been there…

Self publishing

I self-published Olives - A Violent Romance, printing 2,000 copies conventionally in Dubai for retail sale and then putting it up for sale as a POD book and ebook on Amazon, Apple et al. It attracted a lot of critical acclaim in the Arab world, and then controversy (it was boycotted in Jordan, where the book was set. I even got a death threat, which was lovely) and then of course sales on the back of the whole ‘down with this sort of thing’ thing and the retail edition actually sold out in the UAE. Meanwhile, I went on to write Shemlan – A Deadly Tragedy, which was the third in what I call the ‘Levant Cycle’, a trilogy of sorts: they follow a roughly contiguous timeline and share many of the same characters.

Of the three, Shemlan is by far my personal favourite - for all that Beirut has been ‘bigger’, Shemlan is more nuanced and complex, but is still beneath it all a thriller. I barely bothered with agents, just published it right after I’d published Beirut – An Explosive Thriller.

I was advised by someone in conventional publishing who knows what they're talking about to 'get out of the Middle East', so I wrote a new thriller A Decent Bomber, set in Northern Ireland. It’s about an ex-IRA bomb maker who becomes a farmer but is then yanked back out of retirement when a bunch of Somali crooks-cum-terrorists blackmail him into making bombs for them. It was in part a reaction to being asked to take my shoes off at the airport in case there’s explosive in the heel, when the IRA’s last bomb on the British mainland weighed a metric tonne and blew the heart out of Manchester. I mean, have we gone mad?

A bestselling author pal asked me where my next book was to be set. 'Northern Ireland' I replied. He plunged his head into his hands and moaned, 'Dear boy, next to the Middle East, that's the worst place in the world to set a book if you want to sell it to British agents and publishers. They hate Northern Ireland! Too gritty, too foreign! Set one in Tuscany. They holiday there and feel they understand it.'

Which, in its way, is both funny and profoundly depressing.

The original cover of the print edition of Olives - A Violent Romance, by talented Lebanese artist and graphic designer Naeema Zarif. I loved it, reviewers hated it…

Off to the UK and Ireland…

A Decent Bomber took a good two years to write and was hard - I had a lot of issues with it feeling like a cartoon, then I managed to talk to a real IRA man who’d gone down in Long Kesh for a long stretch - a contact I made thanks to my sister in law, bless her. And yes, he was quite scary thank you. It’s always nice to interview someone with a 50mm brass shell on the mantlepiece, knowing full well that he would have had history with the damn thing. But he gave me the lease of life I needed for the book, the insight that let me get inside my characters and, I hope, do the whole thing justice.

My next book was psychological thriller Birdkill. It was set in the UK, which was by no means intentional. So much so that I went to some lengths in the book to disguise its actual location. But the Middle East still wormed its way in… It does that, despite your intentions to the contrary.

Birdkill was fresh in my head after A Decent Bomber and it wouldn't go away, a sort of brain eating maggot of a thing which wrapped me up in a mad, obsessive dash to bring the book to life. So that was written in about six weeks from start to finish right after I’d dusted off A Decent Bomber. Like bang right after. Which was all a bit mad, to be honest.

And then The Dead Sea Hotel came knocking…

The Dead Sea Hotel

I wrote it in 2016 but it was to nigh-on ten years before I let it go into the wild. This is quite simply because it scared me. Reactions to the book from ‘beta readers’ were polarised, to say the least. My proof reader, a lovely lady called Katie who is a devout Christian, had to say novenas and stuff to cleanse herself after reading it. “When did you and Neil Gaiman get drunk together and dream up a book?” she wanted to know.

Neil who?

The Dead Sea Hotel is, to me at least, tremendous fun. It plays with all sorts of ideas, it spoofs things and sends things up and yet is sad and tender at the same time. It’s a rage-rant against the powers and their proxies in the Middle East and it’s a ghost story, it’s a love story and a Moritat - a murder-ballad. It’s easily my favourite thing I’ve ever written and that means people are going to hate it to death and, you know what? I’m good with that.

Which brings us, and don’t ask me how, to the history of the United Arab Emirates…

If you’ve made it all the way down here, I have to say that while I admire your sticking power, I do worry about your life choices…

Children of the Seven Sands

I’ve lived here since 1993. I’ve travelled around the Middle East since 1986. I’m clearly fond of the place and deeply fond of its inhabitants in all their colour and glory. But you’d be amazed at how many people think ‘here’ has no depth, no history, no culture. And the Emirates only has itself to blame, to be honest. There has been very little appetite indeed for exploring the history of this place - it’s always been ‘a young nation’, always future-focused. It’s been growing up and that’s meant thinking about where it’s going all the time. Now that the UAE is over 50, is perhaps a good time to reflect on the past.

And what a past!

Why me? Because I started asking people about archaeological digs back in the mid-1990s. Because I was always wondering about this fort or that wall, this wadi or that falaj. I spend much of my time driving around in the mountains or desert. And I have always had a schoolboy curiosity and the (irritating, I know) habit of always asking ‘why’?

The realisation that there were literally hundreds of papers published about UAE archaeology but that they were stashed away in foreign universities really bugged me. The digitalisation of resources like Lorimer’s Gazetteer and Charles Rathbone Low’s History of the Indian Navy as well as the Haklyut translations of the works of chaps like Masudi and Sirhan meant that I could start to compile the information I needed and piece together the story of this place. It’s been a mad journey - not my first rodeo in non-fiction - the other stuff’s been ‘ghosted’ for the day job, so I don’t really talk about it. But those were great experience in my journey to writing, finally, a book where I don’t make it all up. The wonderful thing about the UAE’s history is that it’s so completely mad, I don’t need to make it up!!!

Oh! I nearly forgot. Children of the Seven Sands is the first book wot I wrote to be conventionally published - it’s published by Dubai-based Motivate Media Group who publish Wilfred Thesiger, Frauke Heard-Bey, Ronald Codrai and others. Do I feel validated? Do I hell…