All Blog Posts Tagged 'Middle' (131)

Bibi’s Bedtime Book: The Secret Diary of Prime Minister Netanyahu #2

I can’t believe the extent of the corruption being uncovered in Israel’s government.

My predecessor as Prime Minister moped home from vacation yesterday – without any envelopes stuffed with cash, as far as we know -- and made a weepy statement about yet another police probe into bribery and fraud and breach of trust on his part. He’s alleged to have been in cahoots with a bunch of shady property developers, lawyers and municipal officials, so that a big, tacky…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 17, 2010 at 12:14am — No Comments

Stealing the novel

If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do just that.

I travel to the places I’m writing about. I talk to people who might be similar to (or even provide the basis for) my characters. I read about them and their world. I engage in the same activities in which they…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 15, 2010 at 6:13pm — 2 Comments

A who's who of Israeli corruption

JERUSALEM — The heads of all the crime families in New York used to get together every Wednesday night at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. If you were looking for an Israeli parallel, you could do worse than the gym I work out at.

The Cybex Club at the David’s Citadel Hotel has a nice view of the Ottoman walls of Jerusalem’s Old City. It’s also where the legal, political and business elite come to sweat (actually, being Israelis, they…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 11, 2010 at 11:20pm — No Comments

The war Israelis and Palestinians plan

JERUSALEM — There’s an old Arab aphorism: “A man with a plan takes action; a man with two plans gets confused.” Apply that to the Israelis and to the Palestinians, and the nonsensical sequence of recent events in the Middle East starts to fall into a comprehensible pattern.

It’s not a pleasant pattern, because it leads to war.

First, before we get to the fireworks, let’s recap all the nonsense.

The…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 6, 2010 at 8:01pm — No Comments

An Islamic Romeo and Juliet

Since 9/11, writers have tried to understand the extremists committed to the destruction of the West and, often, that of their own societies in the Middle East. Most have attempted to do this by “going inside” the world of those extremists, giving us the inner life of suicide bombers or of the “American Taliban.”

It’s a worthwhile premise, because it’s aimed at comprehending people who are frequently written off as bestial, bloodthirsty psychopaths, as though…

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Added by Matt Rees on April 2, 2010 at 8:05pm — No Comments

Back to Israel: Recall what's foreign

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…

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Added by Matt Rees on March 26, 2010 at 12:34am — 1 Comment

Why I love clogged Arab toilets better than Amazon Kindles

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 — 3 Comments

Coffee cultures of Israelis, Palestinians...and Hawaiians

>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 — No Comments

New York Times Book Review: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN 'engrossing,' 'New Yorkers will be startled'

New Yorkers tend to have a "seen it all" outlook on life. Unsurprisingly, given the madhouse that is the Big Apple. But I've now officially done something that'll shock them. In The New York Times Book Review's crime fiction roundup by Marilyn Stasio, my new novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN is called "engrossing." It's also described as a novel that…

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Added by Matt Rees on February 27, 2010 at 5:01pm — 3 Comments

Born Hamas, turned Shin Bet

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 — No Comments

Inventing the Palestinian detective

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 — 1 Comment

Book of A Lifetime: The King Must Die

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 — 2 Comments

Palestinian sex-for-favors scandal

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 — No Comments

Espionage is a dirty business

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…

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Added by Matt Rees on February 19, 2010 at 4:48pm — 3 Comments

Why's a Palestinian sleuth in Brooklyn?

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 — No Comments

Jerusalem Zoo: Penguins before pols

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 — No Comments

Wall St Journal on 'The Fourth Assassin'

During my trip to New York this last couple of weeks, I stopped into the space-age headquarters of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp on Sixth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. Once my eyes had adjusted to the superbright white light everywhere, I settled into a studio for… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on February 9, 2010 at 11:24pm — 2 Comments

Palestine Scene of the Crime

Crime writer J. Sydney Jones has a new blog called Scene of the Crime. He aims to interview writers about the impact on their writing of the location and sense of place in their novels -- usually from far-flung countries. This week he features me on my Palestinian crime novels. Read on, for the full interview.

A Different View of Palestine

Matt Beynon Rees has… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on February 3, 2010 at 1:08am — No Comments

Bringing the Mideast to America

Often a novelist can humanize foreign affairs in ways a journalist can't.

To mark publication today of my new Palestinian crime novel The Fourth Assassin, I posted this for my regular column on GlobalPost.

Though it's convenient to do so, we ignore overseas events at our peril. We… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on February 2, 2010 at 12:17am — 1 Comment

Back to diplomacy school for Israel

JERUSALEM, Israel — The American humorist Caskie Stinnett once wrote that “a diplomat is a person who can tell you to go to hell in such a way that you actually look forward to the trip.” In other words, someone who doesn’t make his meaning so clear that one is both afraid of the trip to hell and angry about being sent there.

Which makes Israel’s two top “diplomats” rather less than diplomatic.

Deputy Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon caused major turmoil in… Continue

Added by Matt Rees on January 22, 2010 at 5:42pm — No Comments