Matt Rees
@mattrees
About
I’man award-winning British crime novelist. Major authors have compared my writingwith the work of Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Georges Simenon and HenningMankell. The French magazine L’Express called me “the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine.”
WHERE:I live in Jerusalem. I came here in 1996. For love. Then wedivorced. But the place took hold. Not for the violence and the excitement thatsometimes surrounds it, but because I saw people in extreme situations. Throughthe emotions they experienced, I came to understand myself.
BEFORETHE WRITING: There was never really a time before I wrote. I’ve been at itsince I was seven (a poem about a tree, on the classroom wall with a gold starbeside it.) But I arrived in the Middle East as a journalist with only acouple of published short stories to my name. First I wrote for The Scotsman,then Newsweek, and from 2000 until 2006 as Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief. I won someawards for covering the intifada. Yasser Arafat once tried to have me arrested,but I eluded him and decided to focus on fiction. I’d learned so much about thePalestinians – and about life – that didn’t fit into the limited world ofjournalism. So I wrote my Palestinian crime novels.
BEFOREJERUSALEM: I was born in Newport, Wales, in 1967. That’s mymother’s hometown; my father’s from Maesteg in the Llynfi valley. We movedaround, to Cardiff and Croydon, then I studiedEnglish at WadhamCollege, OxfordUniversity with Terry Eagleton as mytutor. Contemporaries may remember me as the fellow with bleached blonde hairat the bar of the King’s Arms in the company of the Irish porters from AllSoulsCollege. I did an MA at theUniversity of Maryland and lived in New York for five years before I hit theMiddle East.
WHERETHE BOOKS CAME FROM: I wrote a nonfiction account of Israeli and Palestiniansociety called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press). I’mproud of it, because it really gets to the heart of the conflict here – itisn’t one of those notebook-dump foreign correspondent books.
I was looking for my next project and cameup with the idea for Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, while chatting with mywife in our favorite hotel, the Ponte Sisto in the Campo de’Fiori in Rome. I realized I had becomefriends with many colorful Palestinians who’d given me insights into the darkside of their society. Like the former Mister Palestine (he dead-lifts 900 pounds),a one-time bodyguard to Yasser Arafat (skilled in torture), and a delightfulfellow who was a hitman for Arafat during the 1980s. To tell the true-lifestories I’d amassed over a decade, I decided to channel the reporting into a crimeseries. After all, Palestine’s reality is no romancenovel.
THENOVELS: The first novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The BethlehemMurders), was published in February 2007 by Soho Press. In the UK it won the prestigiousCrime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger in 2008, and was nominated in theUS for the Barry First NovelAward, the Macavity First Mystery Award, and the Quill Best Mystery Award. In France it’s been shortlisted forthe Prix des Lecteurs. New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it “anastonishing first novel.” It was named one of the Top 10 Mysteries of the Yearby Booklist and, in the UK Sir David Hare made it hisBook of the Year in The Guardian.
Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse novels,called Omar Yussef “a splendid creation.” Omar was called “Philip Marlowe fedon hummus” by one reviewer and “Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple” by another.
The second book in the series, A Gravein Gaza, appeared in February 2008 (and at the same time under the title TheSaladin Murders in the UK). The Bookseller calls it“a cracking, atmospheric read.” I put in elements of the plot relating toBritish military cemeteries in Gaza in homage to my two greatuncles, who rode through there with the Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. One ofthem, Uncle Dai Beynon, was still around when I was a boy, and I was namedafter him.
The third book in the series, The Samaritan’sSecret, was published in February 2009. The New York Times said it was“provocative” and it had great reviews in places I’d not have expected – TheSowetan, the newspaper of that S. African township, for example.
AROUNDTHE WORLD: My Omar Yussef Mystery series has been sold to leading publishers in22 countries: the U.S., France, Italy, Britain, Poland, Spain, Germany,Holland, Israel, Portugal, Brazil, Norway, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Romania,Sweden, Iceland, Chile, Venezuela, Japan, Indonesia and Greece.
OMAR’SNEXT TRAVELS: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN,the fourth novel in my series, will be published in February 2010. In it, Omarvisits the famous Palestinian town of Brooklyn, New York (there really is a growingcommunity there in Bay Ridge), and finds a dead body in his son’s bed…
