Why Solomon, why now?

Three thousand years ago, a king in Jerusalem is said to have asked for a listening heart. Not wealth, not victory in battle, not long life. A heart able to discern. The story can seem remote, decorative, fit for a school anthology and nothing more. Looked at closely, it is the most exact description we have of the task facing anyone who must decide under pressure today.

We live in a world saturated with data and poor in judgment. We have never produced so many dashboards, scores, metrics, alerts. Our decisions have never been worse. The cause is not a shortage of information: it is an excess of noise. The stream smooths us out, flattens us, teaches us to mistake a correlation across a thousand points for understanding. Solomon, in an age with neither spreadsheets nor sensors, already knew that knowledge is no substitute for discernment. The two mothers before the court, the living child, the raised sword — what resolves the scene is not one more piece of data. It is an act of truth. A stratagem of the real that no cold analysis would have produced.

It will be objected that technology has changed the very nature of the problems. That is partly true. We face systems no single person grasps entirely: interconnected markets, global supply chains, artificial intelligences that learn from their own outputs. The scale has mutated. But what happens at the precise moment a woman says Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it has not changed. That moment — when someone prefers truth to victory, another’s good to their own claim — remains the strangest and most decisive point in human affairs. The machines have not abolished it. They have made it rarer, more valuable, harder to produce.

This is why the ancient narratives are not relics. They are diagnostic instruments. Proverbs describes flattery, pride, deceit and anger with a precision that contemporary psychology, for all its experimental apparatus, still struggles to match. Ecclesiastes anticipates the exhaustion of the over-stimulated modern subject: there is no new thing under the sun, and that alone disarms the tyranny of novelty. The Song of Songs sets the warmth of a bond that cannot be bought against the coldness of transaction. Each of these books reads the present better than the present reads itself — provided we treat them not as relics but as mirrors.

The thrillers I write begin from that intuition. A discreet consultant, working the border between systems and families, between advanced technology and ancient tragedy. He is not a prophet; he is not a detective either. He is something contemporary language barely has a word for: one who discerns. The one who sees where others calculate, who listens where others speak, who decides when every model converges on the same dead end. Fiction is where that function can still be shown without absurdity, because it takes on a body, a city, a web of concrete pressures.

Why Solomon, then, why now? Because we are short of images for thinking about decision. The ones we have are mostly technical: the trolley problem, the decision tree, the cost-benefit matrix. They are useful and insufficient. Solomon supplies the missing image: a listening heart, one that knows silence is sometimes more informative than speech, that justice is not the mechanical application of a rule, that the most stubborn adversary is oneself. Three thousand years on, that image has not lost an ounce of its force. It has simply been buried under the noise.

The first gesture of this site, like that of the first novel, is to clear a little of that noise. So that for a moment we might hear again what ancient wisdom had to say to what modern innovation is doing to us.