The Mystery of Human Rights: Guest post by Eliot Pattison

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he received “the Art of Freedom” award along with Ira Glass, Patti Smith and Richard Gere for bringing his social and cultural concerns to his fiction, published on three continents. He is the author of thirteen mystery novels, including the internationally acclaimed Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, set in China and Tibet and the Bone Rattler Series, set in Colonial America. His books have been translated into over twenty languages. A former resident of Boston and Washington, Pattison resides on an 18th century farm in Pennsylvania with his wife, three children, and an ever-expanding menagerie of animals. Eliot Pattison’s new novel Skeleton God, ninth in his award-winning Inspector Shan series, has just been released. He was recently awarded the Art of Freedom prize by Tibet House to honor his support for the cause of Tibetan human rights. 

Eliot Pattison:
The Mystery of Human Rights 

Readers and critics sometimes have a difficult time categorizing my Inspector Shan novels. Some call them police procedurals, others Asian noir or literary thrillers, even political tragedies. A British editor once announced that with this series I had invented a new genre, that of ”campaign thriller.” I leave it to others to conjure up labels, but I do believe that what causes many to stumble in characterizing my novels is their unique undercurrent of human rights advocacy.

After extensive travels around the planet, and experiencing first hand the effects of political tyranny, I began to realize that many activists in the West have sucked the humanity out of the fight for human rights. For them it often seems a matter of ego rather than virtue. Instead of embracing human rights in their hearts they’d rather just wear the cause on their sleeve, and as their voices get louder their causes seem to get smaller. They focus too much on partisan politics and classes of people rather than people themselves. In doing so they avoid the hard and inconvenient questions arising out of modern geopolitics and ignore the truth of the most poignant human rights credo ever articulated: “When a good man is hurt,” the ancient Greek Euripedes observed, “all who would be good must suffer with him.” That credo doesn’t distinguish between suffering just down the road and suffering on the other side of the planet.

It was partly in reaction to this “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that I launched the Inspector Shan series. With these novels I always seek to provide not only an engaging read but also a more personal, visceral look at some of our planet’s most abject human rights abuses. It’s a fine line for a novelist to take. My readers don’t pick up my books to be lectured to, and I work hard not to get up on a soapbox. Some grim lessons about the human cost of modern geopolitics are offered in all my books but the only way to be successful at such messaging is not to force them on readers. I want them to keep turning the pages because of my storylines and characters, and just absorb those lessons along the way..

I admit, however, that I do make it difficult for my readers to engage with my plots without experiencing the painful realities of daily life under tyranny. When, for example, a murder is staged as just another self-immolation protest in the prior Shan book Soul of the Fire, disturbing moral questions are implicit in the incident. What misery are these simple, deeply spiritual people enduring that makes self-immolation a common event? As Shan proceeds with his unofficial, unauthorized investigation and effects his usual makeshift justice, the experience of the Tibetan people takes on much more texture. The unrelenting persecution of Tibetans in their own land is a backdrop to all my novels in the Shan series. An investigation inside a prison or internment camp gives the reader a chance to experience their physical and spiritual brutality through Shan’s eyes. When Shan visits an idyllic nomadic camp or a remote, timeless village, I try to make the reader invested enough in the serenity and natural pleasures of such places to share the gut-wrenching pain when government agents arrive to extinguish that way of life.

The stages I set in my books always have that shadow around their edges, that uncertainty about larger scale injustices lurking below the more focused thefts and murders at the center of my plots. Those stages may get dark at times but all of my books end not just with a triumph of the human spirit, but also with a small but meaningful victory over a system that has institutionalized human rights abuses, a system to which the West has long turned a blind eye. If I am successful I will have prompted my readers to confront questions they had forgotten to ask and ponder that much greater puzzle, the mystery of our modern morality.

Eliot Pattison: Mandarin Gate

Eliot Pattison has just published the 7th in his Inspector Shan series, and I'm so pleased that he agreed to write an essay for Mystery Fanfare. I really enjoy his writing, and I'm looking forward to this new Inspector Shan novel, Mandarin Gate.

Eliot Pattison’s award-winning Inspector Shan books have been praised not only for their poignant characters and unorthodox plots but also for their stark, heart-wrenching depiction of life in modern Tibet. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. Featuring an exiled and disgraced Chinese investigator who makes a new life among Tibetan lamas after being released from prison, the books cast a long overdue light on an important but oft-neglected part of the world. 

Described as "a writer of faraway mysteries," Eliot Pattison's travel and interests span a million miles of global trekking, visiting every continent but Antarctica. An international lawyer by training, he brings his social and cultural concerns to his fiction and has written several books and dozens of articles on legal and business topics, published on three continents. He is the author of the Edgar award-winning Inspector Shan Series, the Bone Rattler series, and Ashes of the Earth, the first novel in a new dystopian series. But his sentiments for Tibet and the Tibetan resistance run deep. His Inspector Shan books have been characterized as a new "campaign thriller" genre for the way they weave significant social and political themes into their plots. Translated into twenty languages, the books have been adapted to radio dramas and become popular on the black market in China. For more info visit: www.eliotpattison.com 

ELIOT PATTISON:

Years ago when I tested the waters at publishers with my manuscript for the first Shan novel, The Skull Mantra, the typical reaction was “why would you want to set a mystery in such an unfamiliar place as Tibet?” Many rejected the idea out of hand, saying no one would read possibly read such a novel, especially one with heavy doses of esoteric Buddhism woven into the text. Others suggested moving my characters to Brooklyn or the Chinatown of some major American city. I resisted all the armtwisting to shift away from my Tibetan venue and I would venture to say that after an Edgar and now seven books in international translation those early critics somewhat underestimated the audience.

Even today, though, the most frequent question I get from readers is “Why Tibet?” so let me anticipate the point and explain a little more deeply. Tibet was not some random venue chosen for its dramatic landscape and exotic culture. After a million miles of travel around the planet I had begun to feel that modern Tibet had a vital, important message that was largely overlooked in the West. I was interested in writing a mystery, but I was also deeply interested in conveying that message to a broader audience—eventually I realized that writing a mystery set in Tibet was the way to achieve both goals.

What is that vital message that underlies Mandarin Gate and the other Shan books? The juggernaut of the global economy has diminished cultural identities, religion, and human engagement for all of us. Our world steadily becomes less personal, less spiritual, less contemplative—and in Tibet these effects have been magnified a thousandfold. Many of my Western characters are fleeing in some fashion from that juggernaut, but none are prepared for what they encounter at the roof of the world. There is no better example on the planet of how global economics and geopolitics can crush a traditional non-industrial society, or how a faceless police state saps the humanity out of humans.

The totalitarian government in Beijing may be directly responsible for the day-to-day destruction of Tibet but we all have to answer for it, for it has happened on our watch. So many of us bemoan what happened in another century to the original populations of the Americas without ever considering how the same—and in many ways a worse—process is occurring today in Tibet. The Tibetan people have been punished solely because a more technically advanced people wanted their land, wanted their resources, wanted to increase their leverage on the global stage. We allowed that to happen. We empowered Beijing. We are the cause. We are the effect. As an ancient Greek once said, when a good man is hurt, all who would be good suffer with him. We are all Tibetans. The damage to the Tibetan world is an injury to our entire world.

That is the broad stage on which I chose to write, but of course underlying this theme are also counterpoints of compassion and cruelty, spirituality and material greed. Tibet would be worthy as a setting for its people alone. There is a great joy and harmony among Tibetans that has very little to do with what we in the West tend to link to happiness. They are technologically poor but spiritually rich, intellectually sophisticated but materially impoverished. Year after year they stand up to unthinkable acts of repression. The adversity they face, and the heroes and saints it generates, merit much more attention on the world stage.

These are the people I have chosen to inhabit my books. Mandarin Gate thrusts these characters into the gears of the Chinese machine that is crushing their country, which inevitably takes them into the network of prisons and internment camps that have become the Chinese gulag. There is great suffering in and around Tibetan prisons but there is also great nobility. The heart of traditional Tibet may have been in temples and shrines but the essence of modern Tibet lies in its gulag.