I like the cover, and am entertained by the new title, TORTUR, the English translation of which is – I’m going out on a limb here- TORTURE.

I don’t think I quite appreciate how brutal my books are in the eyes of some readers. I’m fairly matter of fact about violence – I approach violent death with scientific detachment, a detachment essential for understanding the facts of a homicide without being distracted by my emotional reactions to its brutality. My life as a forensic pathologist involves extreme contrasts – torture, murder, Bach, lobster; in my writing, I try to present that collision of sudden, unspeakable violence with everyday life.

Anyway, welcome, TORTUR!

I just wonder what the hell they’ll call Jenner 4, now that they’ve already used TORTUR…

I told Goran it reminded me tonally/texturally of one of my favourite video game series, the survival horror franchise called Silent Hill. Since he’s not a gamer, I sent him a clip of the game. I’m just realizing he never replied – I hope he wasn’t offended by the comparison! I better check…

The delay is actually a bonus: I’m using the time to tighten and polish. There’s an old writing adage that “a novel is never finished, it’s abandoned” – it’s a real luxury to have the time to touch up an already “abandoned” project…

I really like both the new US hardcover jacket for A Hard Death (above) and the paperback cover for last year’s UK release. The two covers are carefully designed, reflecting local taste and the practicalities of marketing a book on a bookshelf – I suspect that the UK cover wouldn’t have played as well with US readers as it did with those in the UK.

The US cover for A Hard Deathis more literal, a watery swamp forest bathed in a golden red glow; that intense colour will make the book “pop” on the shelf. Unlike the clean, urbane font used for the US Precious Blood jacket, where the story was set largely in New York City, the designer has gone with a battered, almost Western/vintage-style font that, by coincidence or design, evokes the UK cover, particularly the font used for my name.

The UK cover is visually edgier, bristling with visceral style. It’s of a piece with the UK cover for Precious Blood, which reminded me of blood spatter on an abatoir floor. For the new book, the concrete has been swapped out for an impressionistic backdrop of light filtering into a clearing through rotted trees, perfect for the Florida Everglades setting of A Hard Death. Since it’s a paperback, and smaller than a hardcover, the title and author name are much larger, easily legible across the bookshop.

I have to admit that my initial reaction to the UK cover for Precious Blood was a little like one of those movie scenes where a character is sitting for hours, having her portrait painted. The bearded, beatnik artist paints furiously, eyes flicking repeatedly from subject to canvas as he captures her likeness in minute detail. Finally, he pronounces the work a finished masterpiece. The sitter approaches the canvas only to discover that it is an incomprehensible mess of drips and spatters. After my initial surprise, I quickly grew to like the cover – I think it’s very effective, the style working well at a gut level to convey the brutality and violence of serial murder. I did feel that, while the design captured the book’s urban mayhem, I peronally saw Precious Blood in very deep rich colours, full of expressive, nuanced visual detail; to me, the UK cover felt a little reductive, the story distilled to blood on concrete. I think I liked the UK cover for A Hard Death better both because it was more literal and more organic (yeah, the trees may be dead, but, still – trees!), and also because I had a clearer idea of what to expect.

I really loved the very direct cover for the German edition of Precious Blood. The Gothic text works really well, I think; indeed, I was a little surprised by how much I liked the simple, graphic style. Note that they decided to go with another title – Precious Blood has, I believe, richer connotations in English than in German.

The Dutch cover kind of baffled me – I won’t tell you what I thought it was the first time I saw it! But I do love the title in Dutch; my first unaccompanied trip as a kid was to the Netherlands, and I hold a special place for the country in my heart.

There were a couple more editions in German. This one was for the Austrian market – quite chaste in comparison with the second German edition that follows it! Note: the book is not this tiny in real life…

This is the cover of the most recent German edition. In her review of Precious Blood, USA Today critic Carol Memmott was kind enough to use the phrase “nail-biting masterpiece”, but they captioned the cover photo “like a literary equivalent of horror flick Saw“! Those of you who know me know I’m too much of a wuss to ever watch that film…

Anyway, yes, this cover looks like it would be perfect for the literary equivalent of horror flick Saw…

Finally, my friend Kevin Krooss had his own ideas about how the Precious Blood cover should look:

Of course, when Kevin learned there would be a Swedish edition, he couldn’t resist having a crack at that, too…

Because of the weather, I’ve been thinking of the music of the prodigiously talented Carter Burwell, whose scores you’ve doubtless heard many times.

First up, his wonderful “She Began to Lie”, from the otherwise forgettable John Travolta thriller THE GENERAL’S DAUGHTER . It’s an interesting song, most frequently covered as “Sea Lion Woman” (most recently by Feist), but probably most famous for Nina Simone’s racing, passionate cover, “See Line Woman”. The song’s meaning is somewhat obscure; Burwell is probably closest to the true title, the song lyric a litany of lies a woman tells – I think Simone’s version specifically has the woman as a prostitute (as did all Simone songs, haha, I joke). But I’ve also heard it’s a corruption of an underground railway route, “C-Line”, from the days of slavery. (The “Rock Island Line”, subject of a stomping, slapback rockabilly song by the great Johnny Cash, was also an underground railway line.)

Anyway, when Feist sings:

Sea lion woman, sea lion

She drink coffee, sea lion

She drink tea, sea lion

And rooster crows, sea lion

Sea lion woman

Dressed in red

Smile at the man

Stab him in his back

I’m thinking “Yeah, Feist, maybe… But wouldn’t it work better as ‘she lying woman’?” You can hear Christine and Katherine Shipp sing the original on the fantastic Rounder release A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings ; recorded in the late 1930′s, the song was already old, maybe a work song. It sounds like Burwell sampled that recording for the vocal here, and did the arrangement. But it’s a fantastic arrangement, the skipping beat, the way the banjo is processed (the ghostly backwards banjo at the beginning, the eerie reverb), and the mournful harmonica. Burwell also remixed the song, but the straight version is the one you want…

Sorry about the video, btw – it’s got some tiresome British vocal loop underneath it to convey some sort of political/artistic message.

Stop the presses! I just learned that it’s not Burwell who gets credit for the song, but Greg Hale Jones! My apologies to Mr. Jones – since I’ve already gassed on at length, I’m going to post it here anyway. I’m assuming Mr. Burwell had some say in what was included. The good news is that, while the song is album-only on the General’s Daughter soundtrack, you can buy a 2:39 minute version on Mr. Jones’s EP Now There is a Tree of Ghosts. (That title, by the way, probably refers to one of my favourite records of all time, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, which also builds arrangements around samples of traditional singers.) Buying the General’s Daughter soundtrack will get you the 5:20 minute original, plus the shorter, more electronic remix. And hopefully a chunk of change for Mr. Jones.

This next one definitely is a Carter Burwell song, “Bella’s Lullaby” from the Twilight films. I don’t think the films are wildly good, but I enjoy pop cultural phenomena – I saw the first one opening weekend, on a long distance date with a girl who watched it in a cinema in Colorado while I watched in Manhattan. I particularly like the intro to the theme; it reminds me a little of Philip Glass’s lovely score for The Secret Agent.

Finally, one of Burwell’s best-known compositions, his theme from Miller’s Crossing, here used as the score to a beautiful trailer for The Last Guardian by visionary game designer Fumito Ueda, whose Ico kept me sane in the difficult months after 9/11. I had the thrill of meeting Mr. Ueda in Tokyo a few years back, and got to play an early build of Shadow of the Colossus , a huge thing for me. Ueda’s games are characterized by lyrical emotionality; they are elegantly sensual games, shot through with an elegiac undercurrent – everything feels a little sad.

I think this was recorded live at the unveiling of Ueda’s latest project at the E3 games convention in the summer of 2009 – turn up the volume, as it’s quiet…

I’ll be making a couple of make-up posts in a little, but in the meantime, there’s a surprisingly direct and lengthy interview with me on Falcata Times. Brace yourself: you have been warned.

Sean Moncrieff: The work of a pathologist is often characterized as somewhat ‘glamorous’, yet this is a person who, on a daily basis, cuts up dead bodies – who would do such a thing? Well, Jonathan Hayes, for one. He’s a novelist and has worked as a forensic pathologist in the U.S. for over twenty years…

Moncrieff/Hayes

Alain, who bills himself as the last Master Barber in Paris, entertains me immensely – he has such a finely drawn sense of himself. The first time I went there, we talked about what I wanted, and then he did exactly what he thought best. When he’d finished, he stepped back, looked at me critically, then pronounced it “Nettement mieux!” – clearly better. And he was right.

His tiny barbershop/barbering museum on rue St. Claude, a narrow, gallery-filled side street in the Third Arrondissement, is worth a visit by anyone in need of a haircut or – his specialty – un rasage à l’ancienne – a traditional shave. You’ll need an appointment.

It’s noon on Saturday, grey skies, soft light, quiet, other than the distant toll of church bells. My apartment here is in the Marais, the part of medieval Paris left standing when Baron Haussman radically reconfigured the city in the 1800′s. It’s a lovely part of the city, narrow streets lined by beautiful old buildings – it’s particularly wonderful at night, when the tourist herds have thinned. The Marais is also the heart of Jewish Paris, with so many temples and delis and black-hatted Orthodox jews that if it weren’t for the macarons and Paris-Brests in neat rows in the patisserie windows, I’d think I was in Brooklyn.

An unexpected advantage of living in the Marais is that the place actually is quiet on the weekends – Jewish businesses here shut down by sunset on Fridays, and remain closed through Saturday. Even though this is also the heart of gay Paris, Friday and Saturday nights are blissfully tranquil. Of course, there’s a flip side to that: the shops are closed, which means a slightly longer trek when I’m feeling lazy and hungry…

And, speaking of lazy, I’m lazy today. I get the worst jetlag, and am doing the worst thing for it: it’s almost 1PM and I’m still in bed. I should be out, finding breakfast and taking photographs, but I’m happy to be warm and cozy, and to look at the grey world outside from the comfort of my bed.

To make up for that, I’m going to post a couple of photos I took on my last visit. Here’s the Place des Vosges, one of the most elegant squares in Paris, built as the Place Royale in 1605. The layout is precise and symmetric, with a bosquet of lindens framing neatly defined lawns that are punctuated with tonsured firs and fountains – Nature well and truly tamed, in the grand Enlightenment tradition. It’s very difficult to capture in a photo, since the square works best as a three-dimensional experience, the shifting perspectives as you walk past the straight lines of lindens articulating an elegant aesthetics of geometry.

Here, even the dullest streets are pretty.

Bed. Bed is good.

I have a long article about blood in the UK newspaper the Independent today. It’s a bit of a curious thing, hopscotching around the place, covering how I became a forensic pathologist, the Cuban white and black magic I saw in Miami, realism in crime fiction, the meaning of blood in different religions, blood spatter forensics and vampire movies.

Since I don’t know how they’ve illustrated it, I thought I’d add a few photos to support the story. I gathered these from around the internet when I first started working on them, and have lost the links – if they’re yours, please let me know so I can credit you.

I’ve tried to do it in sequence to correspond to the story. Obviously, if you’re squeamish, you probably shouldn’t look at this post. Although, really, if you’re squeamish, what are you doing on my blog?

In Israel, a ZAKA operative wipes blood after an attack:

A Durer portrait of Christ suffering:

A Cranach crucifixion – Christ’s blood anointing the faithful…

A devout Filipino being crucified on Good Friday:

Shi’a Muslims marking the Day of Ashura; others sacrifice by donating blood.

An nganga, a cauldron filled with mystically significant metal, wood and leather objects, and blood, and, here, a human skull. For practitioners of palo mayombe, the dark form of the syncretic Caribbean religion of santeria, the nganga is the ritual equivalent of an altar.

Technicians clean up an nganga discovered in New York City, ritual markings on the wall. In Miami, when we encountered santeria or brujeria (palo) artefacts, the cops would scoff at them, but most would refuse to touch them.

It was triggered by this rather perverse battle between a tiny robot and a big robot, or rather by how moved I was at the plight of this little manikin made of metal strips and cogs, continuing to fight the good fight while hopelessly outmatched. Click on the image for heart-breaking little-robot-on-big-robot action…

I felt similarly stricken at the loss of the Phoenix Rover, the space explorer probe, when it shut down last year with the approach of  Martian winter; after five months of glorious data collection, it would be encased in carbon dioxide ice for a year – pretty much certain death. The demise of the Rover was all the more painful because I’d been following its blogs on Gizmodo – thank God I’d not become addicted to its Twitter feed! Click on the photo below to link to its farewell message.

Finally, to bring it all home, Spike Jonze’s fantastic Ikea ad:

I’ll be using the word frequently in my internal narration of my day – “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully pouring milk on his Frosties”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully looking for his pants”, “Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully freeing the several feet of toilet paper trailing from his shoe”,  that sort of thing.

Here is Jonathan Hayes masterfully blogging despite being still 90% asleep…

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