Alwayswriteagain: Murder, Mayhem

Fans of Israeli detective novelist, Sivan Kish call her ‘the Israeli Agatha Christie’.

But it may be an even greater compliment to dub her ‘the Israeli Josephine Bell’ as the latter was not only a British ‘queen of crime’ and a co-founder of the Crime Writers' Association but also because Kish, like Bell, is a doctor.

However, unlike Bell, Kish reveals that despite ten years in Italy during which she graduated with a medical degree from the University of Rome, she has never practised as a doctor.

Instead, she explains: “I decided to return home to Israel where my life took another direction from that I had originally planned as I got married and had a baby.

“You could say that I am the doctor who ‘never put her hands on a patient’ because I ended up doing other things, one of them being homeopathic medicine, which I studied for four more years here in Israel.

“Today when I look back on my life, I realise it was all meant to be like this; to bring me to my real destination in life – not to practise medicine, but to be a writer”.

Now living in Ramat Gan, Tel Aviv, Kish is the youngest child of mixed Polish and Libyan parentage.

She says: “I have a brother who lives in New York, USA and a sister in Giv’atayim, Israel. I am the youngest in the family by many years, so I kind of grew up alone with my imagination and creating stories to keep me company.

“Since I had almost no friends until I was aged eleven, I used to sit alone in the school garden at break time and again, made up stories. The heroes were my imaginary friends and companions and when I returned home from school I wrote everything down”.

Kish adds: “As a child, I read all the time - everything that was in the local library - and there came a point when there were no books left in the children’s section for me.

“My favorite poet was and still is Rachel. Even now I read a lot and gain inspiration from writers including Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Robert Ladlum and Dan Brown”.

But despite her great empathy with English language writers, Kish reflects: “I write in my books about Italy, and the stories all take place there, in a police station in Rome. So I believe that if I hadn’t gone there to study medicine, I wouldn’t have become an author and wouldn’t write these books”.

She adds: ”Writing now is like going back to Italy in my imagination. I always knew that I wanted to write a detective novel and since everyone told me I had a talent for writing poems, I thought I must also be able to write novels.

“So I wrote one page and when everyone in my family thought I had copied it from somewhere, I understood its worth and since then I haven’t stopped writing. When I work, I often feel that it’s not me writing but that the stories’ characters write themselves. They live in my head and I can see them and hear them very clearly in my imagination. They are like my second family”.

Does Kish, as an Israeli whose son has completed IDF service, ever tackle Jewish or Israel-related themes?

She says: “In my second book I include characters from the Jewish community in Rome while in my third the heroes visit Israel to resolve an important archaeological murder mystery in Jerusalem that is based on a real-life discovery”.

And future plans? Does Dr Sivan Kish see a change of professional direction? Would she consider writing in a different genre; use her medical knowhow or publish in English?

She says: “I have a hard time seeing myself writing anything different from a detective novel. But you never know and can never say ‘never’ in life. A couple of months ago, for example, I started to write my fourth book – about a murder in high society …”

Meanwhile, there are outline plans for her first book, ‘Despicable Fields’ to appear in English translation in the United States – but not in the immediate future.

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Book purchase and delivery details are available on Sivan Kish’s website: https://www.sivankish.com/