“You and I, we need to have a little talk about sex,” my editor said in a deep voice. I was in the midst of writing my first thriller about a geeky lawyer suspected of murder, and I was waiting for my editor’s verdict about what I had put to paper up to that point. As a full-time commercial lawyer, the idea that one day I would become an author of thrillers still seemed far-fetched.
Amnon, my editor, looks the way a thriller writer should: tall, muscular, thick voice, and a secret past in the Mossad. Basically he’s everything I’m not. I’m a bookish nerd.
“The key for creating good sex scenes,” he said, looking straight at me, “is while you’re writing them, get your mother out of your head.”
“My mother?” I didn’t understand.
“Don’t think about her,” he said and raised a finger in warning. “Don’t imagine what she’ll think when she reads it.”
Writing a love scene is embarrassing enough — surely people think it’s about my own intimate experiences — but it’s even worse when one is an Israeli writer who has to deal with the implications: Is this going to embarrass my mom when she’s at the grocery store? What will Aunt Leah say at the Passover seder?
And that’s the least of it. The truth is, it’s not easy to write suspense novels in Israel.
Israel is very small. An American writer can take his hero from New York 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 Eilat, the farthest place in Israel, so what? He’d still be discovered.
Israelis love to play a game where they ask one another “Where are you from?” and then 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 by sophisticated and seasoned police detectives, but by the third-floor neighbors.
Speaking of police, they’re nothing to write home about. There is no “CSI Israel,” because people would die laughing. An Israeli joke: “Why are policemen always in pairs? There needs to be one who can read and another who can write.”
And what about serial killers? Impossible! During the 65 years of Israel’s existence, we have yet to see one. Even more important, the Israeli public would never believe that a serial killer could emerge from within. “Moishele? Shoshana’s son? A serial killer? Oh, come on. His father served with my cousin in the army. What a bunch of nonsense!”
I am filled with envy when I read books in which the author doesn’t 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 details about all their relatives.
Recently I saw an Israeli film in which one of the characters tortures a guy. In the midst of it, the mother of the torturer calls — so he stops beating the guy up. She starts badgering him about why he isn’t married and how it can be that he doesn’t have children yet? The aggressor apologizes to his mother and says he “still hadn’t found the right one” before resuming his nefarious activities. I looked at the other viewers: This wasn’t an unreasonable scene to them.
Construction is also a problem — not of novels, but apartment buildings and city planning. In Israel, there are no basements or attics. And even if there were, I doubt a body could be placed there. Ten minutes later, the building committee would arrive to complain.
Despite everything, crime literature in Israel has been blooming. I think it provides escape for a tense people.
Besides, the more you write about what you know and understand, the more believable, accurate and interesting it becomes. That’s why I set my work locally and write about current topics.
And sometimes I still have to write sex scenes.
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 asked.
She replied, “What do think your father is for?”
Liad Shoham is a Tel Aviv–based writer. The English translation of his latest book, “Asylum City,” will be published in August. This essay originally appeared at jta.org.