PW: What led you first to begin writing mystery novels featuring Israeli Chief Inspector Michael Ohayon as your protagonist?
Batya Gur: Sheer desperation. I was 39, a mother of three, and allegedly totally fulfilled. I was a high school teacher in charge of the literature department in the best school. I was completing my master's thesis, I had been accepted into law school, but I was in the midst of a mid-life crisis. I was desperate, upset and depressed. I began to write just to console myself. I loved all the classic detective writers, especially Raymond Chandler, who's only now being translated into Hebrew, and Rex Stout. So, although the mystery genre wasn't really used by Israeli writers, I thought I would try something along those lines. My then-husband was a candidate at the Israeli Psychoanalytic Institute, and since I was totally familiar with the details of that facility, I decided to set the story there. At the time, I had no plans to have it published, but then a friend who was a literature professor read the manuscript and got me thinking about submitting it.
How was Ohayon created?
Well, he was intended to be an idealized version of me—the platonic ideal of me, because I have a short temper and am a difficult person, but I couldn't make him a woman. Saying that is absolutely politically incorrect, but... it's not that I don't respect women. I love women, some of my closest friends are women, but they're not the same as men. While I've seen with my own eyes policewomen who are fantastic, I just couldn't create one, so the detective originally was going to be a bourgeois, contented man, married, like me, with three kids, basically happy, who came home every night to his wife. That changed when I picked the Psychoanalytic Institute as my setting, and I wanted a contrast to the yekkes, the German Jews who founded it, and so I made Ohayon a Moroccan. He was created from the need to tell a believable story.
How did you develop the plot for your latest book, Bethlehem Road Murder?
I write what I know to maintain credibility, which I believe is the god of the narrative. I know Jerusalem, I know the neighborhood I write about in this book. In fact, the attic where the victim is found is the attic of my new house. My architect who was renovating the property saw the attic and told me that it would be a great setting for a murder thriller.
Your book is set in the present day. Why did you decide to put the current intifada in the background?
I live in my reality. Suicide bombers struck very near my house, my sons were in the army and my daughter is in the army now. I very often get in trouble with the current government because I am a strong critic, and give it a very hard time when I'm interviewed on political issues. There are serious social issues neglected by both the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership, who seem to use the conflict to avoid dealing with them, but talking directly about the situation is not my intent here. People can read the newspaper to learn about politics. I was trying to describe a crazy neighborhood, one of the most popular in Jerusalem, with the tensions between the forces of gentrification and the older residents.
