When you live in a foreign place, it can become home. You forget how foreign it is.
Then you go to another foreign country, only to discover that it doesn’t seem so foreign. And you realize that the place you live actually IS extremely foreign.
That’s what happened to me during the last week, when I toured Germany to read from my third Palestinian rime novel
THE SAMARITAN’S…
Added by Matt Rees on March 26, 2010 at 12:34am —
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I was cramming down a a slice of qanafi at my favorite vendor in the Nablus casbah yesterday when a gang of Palestinian reporters and officials intruded on my guilty pleasure. This was at Aqsa Sweets, which readers of
THE SAMARITAN'S SECRET will know as the place favored by the hero of my Palestinian crime novels Omar Yussef because it has a perfect blend of the cheeses of different Syrian and Palestinian goats in…
Added by Matt Rees on March 17, 2010 at 3:54am —
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As I journey around the Middle East researching my Palestinian crime novels, I love to come upon a stinking squatting-toilet, its evacuation hole bubbling with dark, sinister turds and the air strong with the scent of barely digested, unhygienically prepared lamb kebab. I adore such a khazi on sight, because no one cleaned it up for me or tried to create an illusion that it was just like a toilet in Manhattan or Munich or my mother’s house.
That toilet is…
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Added by Matt Rees on March 12, 2010 at 12:16am —
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Kingsley Amis said that “a bad review may spoil your breakfast, but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.” That’s because Kingsley, bless his vindictive old heart, was probably too busy spoiling someone else’s. Believe me, a bad review leaves a bad taste all day long.
That’s not because of any insecurity about my writing. If a review is negative or even mildly snarky, I know the reviewer got it wrong. It’s the mere existence of negative thoughts about me…
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Added by Matt Rees on March 8, 2010 at 1:15am —
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A NPR foreign correspondent chum used to recount a list of seven ways for journalists to grow old with grace. His premise, which is self-evident to anyone who’s been a reporter, was that daily news was an undignified thing to be doing in your 40s. I can’t remember the whole of the list. It included writing op-eds for your newspaper (which seemed more or less like retirement), teaching journalism at a university (also retirement, but somewhat scorned by other hacks), and maybe the…
Added by Matt Rees on March 6, 2010 at 10:34pm —
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>I have a lot of good reasons for staying in the Middle East as long as I have. While the main thing keeping me here 14 years and counting may truly be inertia, I also enjoy being an outsider, researching my Palestinian crime novels on site, visiting the Palestinian towns whose atmosphere of violence, decay and liveliness makes me feel so creative.
But let’s get down to brass tacks: I’m here for the coffee.
There’s no…
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Added by Matt Rees on March 4, 2010 at 5:00pm —
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Top crime fiction blog Gumshoe Review rates my new Palestinian crime novel
THE FOURTH ASSASSIN very highly: "Rees does an excellent job of showing the pressures on the young Palestinians and describing the microcosm of one immigrant community within the U.S. The mystery also contains plenty of twist and turns." Read Mel Jacobs's
full review.
If you feel compelled to read any other…
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Added by Matt Rees on March 2, 2010 at 8:23pm —
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The first line of a top-notch novel usually has a lot of punch -- to "grab" you. My long-time favorite is "The Sun Also Rises," which manages to tell you a great deal about one of the main characters, but even more about the narrator: "Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn." <!--more-->This weekend The San Francisco Chronicle has…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 28, 2010 at 7:31pm —
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Added by Matt Rees on February 27, 2010 at 5:01pm —
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How the son of a Hamas founder ended up an Israeli agent, as told by the "Green Prince" himself. (I posted this on
GlobalPost)
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Parents often lament that their kids don’t follow them into their chosen professions. They ought to think themselves lucky. They…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 26, 2010 at 10:44pm —
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The dead man's mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d gone down on her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great.
As the wind came winter cold off the Judean Desert, I watched her weep and thought: “I have to write a novel about this.”
Forgive me if that sounds heartless, but I’m a…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 25, 2010 at 4:52pm —
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One of the great pleasures of life as a writer is being paired with interesting authors when you speak at book fairs. (It's also an occasional rough ride when you find yourself stuck with a bum who can't write, but I'm being nice here so I won't go into any of those.) The most delightful fellow I've ever met in this way is Duncan Campbell, with whom I was paired at the book fair in his native Edinburgh two years ago. He also happens to be the British crime writer with the best knowledge of…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 24, 2010 at 4:09am —
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The Independent has a regular feature in which it asks authors to write about a book which changed their lives somehow. Last week the London newspaper asked me to write the piece. Here it is:
In early 1999, King Hussein fell sick on his return from cancer treatment in the US. I was Middle East correspondent for The…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 22, 2010 at 5:07pm —
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Was Israeli intelligence really behind the video showing an Abbas aide soliciting sex? (I posted this on
Global Post.)
Fans of the Jamaican reggae singer Shaggy will already be familiar with the strategy of a Palestinian official caught with his pants down — actually, with his pants entirely off — in a sex scandal this week.
On his…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 21, 2010 at 5:28pm —
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You’d think there was something very wrong with spying.
People pay good money to watch Daniel Craig dispose of villains in the bloodiest fashion. They nod in approval when M pushes 007’s perfect false passport across the desk. Yet everyone’s peeved about what in all likelihood is a Mossad
hit against a Hamas operative in his Dubai hotel room on January…
Added by Matt Rees on February 19, 2010 at 4:48pm —
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Some authors exude the pleasure of reading and writing (and, surprisingly, when you meet them, many just don’t.)
J. Sydney Jones is such a man, with a breadth of writing experience in a range of genres that’s deeply impressive and carries with it an obvious love of his craft. His Viennese Mystery series is a fascinating way to delve into one of Europe’s loveliest, most cultured cities – and damned entertaining, too. He’s also the…
Added by Matt Rees on February 18, 2010 at 8:10pm —
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My new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is one of five
"This Week's Hot Reads" on The Daily Beast, which also happens to be the hot read of the web these days. The Beast writes of the book and its Brooklyn setting: "Rees paints a meticulous portrait of the post-9/11 community of Little Palestine and the tension of cultures trying to…
Added by Matt Rees on February 14, 2010 at 5:32pm —
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The Sheffield-born writer of a series of novels about a forensic anthropologist (hard to define, but it involves a lot of descriptions…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 14, 2010 at 4:04am —
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I’ve been called the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine, the John Le Carre of the Middle East, the James Ellroy of…Palestine, the Graham Greene of Jerusalem, and the Georges Simenon of the Palestinian refugee camps. Depends which review you happen to have read.
I’ve written three previous crime novels about Omar Yussef, my Palestinian schoolteacher/sleuth. Omar has been called the Philip Marlowe of the Arab street, the Hercules Poirot of the Near East, Sam Spade fed…
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Added by Matt Rees on February 12, 2010 at 5:50pm —
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Watch a whimsical
video explaining why the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo is a better place from which to take stock of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict -- better in fact than a Gaza refugee camp or an Israeli military base. Seriously. And yet not.
Added by Matt Rees on February 11, 2010 at 6:55pm —
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