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A lot of you have probably already seen the Salon piece about the author whose book was panned by the New York Times.

The part that most interested me was how, after the fact, an editor began an email correspondence, not with the writer, but with his character. Talk about meta-fiction!

I thought it might be fun to make a real email address for Ben, though, and to let readers email him, especially if they had questions about the puzzles in the book. Ben is a kind of wayfaring pothead version of Will Shortz, and likes to make up riddles and puzzles here and there. He sees life in terms of games. Most of the riddles and puzzles are answered within the book, and none are crucial for the story. Still, thinking it would be amusing – a meta-game for readers – I went to Gmail and made Ben’s address and posted it on my website. I invited people to write him if they had questions about anything in the book.

In the six months the address was up on my site, one person wrote to Ben. It was my friend Hannah.

But when I logged in to Ben’s account on that Monday after the Maslin review, badly hung over, I found a new email awaiting me.

It was not from Hannah. It was from an editor at the New York Times.

The subject line was “Did you get hit on the head?”

Here it is: (Our exchange is published with his permission)

Dear Mr. Hanson,

Given the vagaries of fictional life, I understand that you might not be able to answer this question, which has come up after one of our readers read the review of “This Bright River” that we published. But – in the prologue, are you the person who is hit on the head?

-Ed Marks, Culture Desk


Read more here.

A man who was a spy writes, “Operations people don’t just collect intelligence; they blackmail foreign officials, scientists and business people; bribe union leaders; break into embassies; assassinate people; overthrow governments; and sometimes, far worse (or better, depending on your perspective).”

Read about who makes the perfect spy here.

A story in the New York Times begins: “In the dark early hours of an October morning in 2009, acting on an anonymous tip, police officers in the French city of Mulhouse picked up an elderly German doctor who had been left — bound, beaten and bleeding — in a street near the municipal courthouse. The man, Dieter Krombach, had been kidnapped outside his home in Germany and secreted across the border into France, where there was a warrant for his arrest in connection with the death of a French girl nearly three decades ago.”


Truth is stranger than fiction. Read more here.

A New York prosecutor who blogs has an interesting post contrasting CSI (entertainment) with reality (not as entertaining, and often lacking an interesting story line.)

It reads, in part:

1) Pristine crime scenes don't exist. In the show, each crime scene is manicured awaiting C.S.I. detectives arrival. Think about a 911 call. Shots fired in a house. Officers respond to the house and enter. They search for injured parties, possible suspects, and are making sure no one takes a shot at them. Once the sweep is performed and the area is secure, officers then look for evidence of a crime. You can imagine the condition of a crime scene once people have fought, someone was hurt, shots were fired, and now officers have walked through it.

Read more here.

A teenager was recently kidnapped at knifepoint from a shopping mall - and then she managed to run from him. "I started to sprint. I wouldn't look back and I just ran. I kept falling, but I didn't stop. I just kept running."

Read more about her ordeal here
.

Kind of reminds me of Girl, Stolen, which was inspired by another true event.

And a bunch of former students are suing a defunct school for troubled teens called the Mt. Bachelor Academy. "Another student, who suffered from asthma, was forced to sleep outdoors in below-freezing temperatures. Staff members also denied him food, sleep and use of a restroom and withheld his asthma inhaler despite asthma attacks that were brought on by their tactics."

Read more about the school here
.

The overseas schools for troubled teens can be much worse, as I pointed out in Shock Point.

Two hundred cabs in Cairo, Egypt have joined the “Taxi of Knowledge” initiative launched by Alef Bookstores, as reported by almasryalyoum.com. The bookstore lends taxi drivers five books to place in their cabs. “They can exchange them with others from Alef’s collection at any time. The books are donated by friends, authors and volunteers of Alef. So far over 10,000 books have been collected for the project. The idea is to encourage both the taxi drivers as well as passengers to read. “So far it’s been a fantastic idea,” says Mohamed Saber, a taxi driver in the Dokki neighborhood. “It has allowed me to engage in discussions with my passengers that aren’t necessarily personal but carry meaning. At night I am also able to read the books myself and share them with my family.””

Read more here.

The second time I went to New York, I was naive and inexperienced (although not terribly young). The taxi I took to my hotel was one of the first I had ever taken. For some reason, I ended up getting in front with the driver. He asked me to run away with him that night and get married in Virginia.

It was long, strange trip.

I stole that experience from myself and put it in Circles of Confusion: A Claire Montrose Mystery.