If you already understand what I mean, great; otherwise give me a minute.

Tel Aviv represents a lot of different themes for a lot of different groups. If you are Israeli, it could mean something like “trendy and expensive high-tech liberal bubble”. If you are religious, it could mean irreligion. If you are a Zionist, it could mean “the original and unmistakably Jewish place carved out of a malarious swamp beach.” If you are a Jew practicing the political left, this could fulfill the promise of the “New Talmud”. If you are the architect type, this is the white city. If you are a citizen of the world, Tel Aviv could be a gastronomic, cosmopolitan, and gay-friendly oasis in the middle of one of the most conservative regions in the world. If you are an anti-Zionist (or, as one could quite summarize, an anti-Semite), this is the Iron Dome-protected city-state from which the Jewish lobby influences the world. You get it. We could go on.

This is exactly the point. Tel Aviv is always a symbol. In this way, it is like Israel: constantly a synecdoch, an emblem, a site-shibboleth. And in this way, Tel Aviv, like Israel, is different from most places on Earth. It’s impossible to imagine that Houston, Sydney, Accra, Buenos Aires or Moscow, to name a few, would evoke anywhere near the same cognitive meaning for so many people. Certainly, these are cities where you can find iconic landmarks and local foods, where some ways of life may be more famous than others, and where the weather is such and such and people are more generally that way or of that. Cities each have unique distinctions. But above all, they are real places where real people live.

Israeli police at the scene of a murder in Sderot (credit: ISRAEL POLICE)

A well-crafted murder mystery should tell you something about its setting. The story must reveal its place, the characters who live there and the living conditions that led to the crime. The best murder mysteries are those that couldn’t have happened elsewhere. They are necessarily linked to the scene of the crime.

For too long, the fiction set in Tel Aviv – I should say, more broadly, the fiction set in Israel – has crumbled into the understandable but unmistakable habit of evoking the enormous symbolisms of the place. If we look, for example, at the novels written by Americans that take place in Israel (avoiding, for the time being, and for your sanity and mine, wading in the thick waters of books written by Israelis), they can probably be divided into two large buckets.

First, there are the works of biblical fiction. You know what I’m talking about: A famous biblical figure, or his lesser-advertised wife / sister / third son, receives a fascinating new luster from a contemporary writer. Second, there is the fiction that takes place in what one might call the Heroic Age of modern Israel, from around 1948 to probably roughly the Yom Kippur War, when Israel was the underdog evident in all. its external conflicts, when the intrepid Israeli people were celebrated around the world for making deserts bloom into gardens, when, every day, the new and fragile Jewish state performed miracle after miracle impossible to fulfill the dreams of millennia. But at some point in the past 40 or 50 years, Israel has become more inevitable. (Without a doubt, one wonders how inevitable Israel actually is, in the scheme of all things, especially given the nuclear aspirations of some of the crazies in the neighborhood, but also without a doubt we can agree that Israel is much more of a fact than it was in 1951.)

Most importantly, Israel has become a real place. Young people have become more concerned with their future occupations than with an existential threat. Trade has come to replace irrigation as the main and lasting objective. Startups have taken their place in the popular imagination once held by the kibbutzim. Daily concerns like the price of milk and honey have overtaken concerns of how and where to restart milk and honey production. The cost of developing abandoned land in better areas of Tel Aviv has replaced the discussion of mosquito-borne diseases in the city. This is the road to progress, at least if your country does it well.

Little by little, then suddenly, Tel Aviv has become a real place. It continued to contain within itself all its history, its borders and its symbolisms. But today’s Tel Aviv is indeed a real place in which the grind of real life, everyday comedy and tragedy is – and should be – more pronounced than an abstract narrative. It is a failure of the imagination to continue to insist on imagining Tel Aviv primarily as an urban magical pixie whose main job is to carry the fairy dust of Bauhausism or Colonialism or Pioneer.

And what sort of real Square has Tel Aviv become? Over the past 20 years, as Israel has become a wealthy country, the distillation of that wealth has become more visible in Tel Aviv than anywhere else. Hi-tech, as that singular word smashup is pronounced in its streets, has created a huge crowd in the city. Shining towers of glass and steel now stand right next to not only rickety buildings from the previous century, but also open-air dumps where passers-by toss empty beer bottles and candy wrappers. Neighborhoods of wig shops and schmatta shops on others with shared software development workspaces and boutique hotels. The rich and the poor, the cool and the dilapidated, are closely and visibly linked.

Not only that, but the diaspora has flocked to neighborhoods near Tel Aviv, so you can hear music from Hebrew, English, French, Arabic, Russian, Persian, Italian and other languages ​​spoken by residents and visitors. There are also hints of cosmopolitan dress styles, although perhaps less than you might see in other cities around the world. The city is teeming with young, action-seeking young people walking past older couples, amused and annoyed by the traffic and housing prices their once quiet town now commands. The vibe of the city is locally political: not a soul is happy with the garbage collection or the damn rents; only who is to blame is disputed.

It’s a real city, a real place. He’s tailor-made for a mysterious murder.

THE BEST form of detective story, in my opinion, is noir. Noir is also, in my opinion, one of the three true American art forms (the others being jazz and its progeny and the western, and, yes, we can meet up for coffee and discuss it another time. ). Practitioners of the art form now come from all over the world, but the essentials have largely remained the same over the past 75 years. In almost all cases, the atmosphere of a city – of a true textured city – is indispensable.

A black’s basic promise – from Chandler, Cain, Hammett, and Macdonald – is that an incorruptible detective, a man apart, travels through the city’s visible and invisible miasma, from upstairs penthouses to heaps. from garbage downstairs, from the enlightened to the curled up, from the handsome to the abandoned, without being discouraged in a monomaniacal way in his mission to find the killer himself and anyone who could have put the killer to work. For this, the choice of the city is essential. You need a city big enough for the task. It must have a great disparity of wealth, cultural diversity and tension, political intrigue, either a core of virtuous ambition surrounded by an atmosphere of corruption or vice versa, and social mobility sufficiently enticing but difficult to make it possible. The effort – and the murder that ends it – is worth it. Perhaps more importantly, for the ingredients of the black murder mystery to be right, the city must go through a period of rapid and significant change. Social, political and economic upheavals must be upon him.

For these demands, I can’t think of any place on earth better than Tel Aviv. It is, after all, a real place on the move. Where you can easily imagine dreamers arriving from all corners of the country and the planet, in search of their fortunes and their future. And where one can easily imagine that, lurking in its recesses, is from time to time the infernal harbinger of the layman, who aims to suffocate everything.

The writer is the author of HIP SET (2021), a black murder mystery set in Tel Aviv.