In 1999, King Hussein fell sick. I was a Middle East correspondent for a British newspaper. I poked through the used books at a store on a narrow lane in Jerusalem, wondering if I ought to head over to Jordan.

I picked up a 1958 edition of Mary Renault's The King Must Die, a novel based on the historical circumstances which may lie behind the myth of the Minotaur. The title decided me. I paid a few shekels for the book and went off across the Jordan Valley. From Renault, I learned the need for empathy in a novelist. Critics used to suggest "Mary Renault" was the pseudonym of a male homosexual, assuming that a woman couldn't write so vividly about men and sex. In Mozart's Last Aria I strove for that depth of empathy in writing about my female, eighteenth-century narrator, Nannerl Mozart.

Renault recast stories we all think we know - the Minotaur, the trial of Socrates, Alexander's conquests - and forced us to accept that the heroes of that period had views (in particular, about sexuality) starkly different from ours. Through fiction, she redirected us from myth to reality.

I've tried to do something similar in all my books - first, in my Omar Yussef mysteries, with the Palestinians, who're often depicted as stereotypical terrorists or victims, not as real people; and now with Mozart, who has come to be viewed in the popular imagination as a musically gifted buffoon, whereas he was actually an intellectual of enlightened beliefs.

A week after I arrived in Amman, King Hussein succumbed to lymphoma. As his funeral cortege passed through somber crowds in the wind and rain, I happened to laugh at a remark by another journalist. An old Bedouin turned tearful, red eyes on me. I was ashamed of my laughter. For him, this wasn't a news story or even history. It was the passing of someone he loved.

It's his emotion that I remember about that day, not its political implications, and emotion is the heart of a novel. Every time I write, I have that old Bedouin's face in mind. Throughout the funeral, The King Must Die was in my pocket.