“Matt Beynon Rees has taken a complex world of culture clash and suspicion and placed upon it humanity.” —David Baldacci, author of The Camel Club
“A beautifully written story. I have walked the streets of Bethlehem with Omar Yussef, smelled the dust and the fear, tasted his food, shared his anger and his hope. His decency is a light in the gloom. I shall not forget him.” —Anne Perry, author of Dark Assassin
“The Collaborator of Bethlehem is the best—and the rarest—sort of mystery: exciting and compelling, but it is also a deeply moving story that will, for many readers, shed much needed light on the conditions in the Palestinian territories. Matt Beynon Rees’s ability to blend the political and the emotional is reminiscent of Graham Greene.” —David Liss, author of The Ethical Assassin
“Omar Yussef has everything I admire in a detective: humility, humanity, a great faith in the power of knowledge and a few bad habits too!” —Barbara Nadel, author of The Ottoman Cage
For decades, Omar Yussef has been a teacher of history to the children of Bethlehem. When a favorite former pupil, George Saba, a member of the Palestinian Christian minority, is arrested for collaborating with the Israelis in the killing of a Palestinian guerrilla, Omar is sure he has been framed. If George is not cleared, he faces imminent execution.
Then the wife of the dead man, also one of Omar Yussef’s former pupils, is murdered, possibly raped. When he begins to suspect the head of the Bethlehem al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades is the true collaborator, Omar and his family are threatened. But as no one else is willing to stand up to the violent Martyrs Brigades men, who hold the real power in the town, it is up to him to investigate.
I'm an award-winning British crime novelist. Major authors have compared my writing with the work of Graham Greene, John Le Carre, Georges Simenon and Henning Mankell. 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 we divorced. But the place took hold. Not for the violence and the excitement that sometimes surrounds it, but because I saw people in extreme situations. Through the emotions they experienced, I came to understand myself.
BEFORE THE WRITING: There was never really a time before I wrote. I've been at it since I was seven (a poem about a tree, on the classroom wall with a gold star beside it.) But I arrived in the Middle East as a journalist with only a couple 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 some awards 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 the Palestinians - and about life - that didn't fit into the limited world of journalism. So I wrote my Palestinian crime novels.
BEFORE JERUSALEM: I was born in Newport, Wales, in 1967. That's my mother's hometown; my father's from Maesteg in the Llynfi valley. We moved around, to Cardiff and Croydon, then I studied English at Wadham College, Oxford University with Terry Eagleton as my tutor. Contemporaries may remember me as the fellow with bleached blonde hair at the bar of the King's Arms in the company of the Irish porters from All Souls College. I did an MA at the University of Maryland and lived in New York for five years before I hit the Middle East.
WHERE THE BOOKS CAME FROM: I wrote a nonfiction account of Israeli and Palestinian society called Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East in 2004 (Free Press). I'm proud of it, because it really gets to the heart of the conflict here - it isn't one of those notebook-dump foreign correspondent books.
I was looking for my next project and came up with the idea for Omar Yussef, my Palestinian sleuth, while chatting with my wife in our favorite hotel, the Ponte Sisto in the Campo de'Fiori in Rome. I realized I had become friends with many colorful Palestinians who'd given me insights into the dark side 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 delightful fellow who was a hitman for Arafat during the 1980s. To tell the true-life stories I'd amassed over a decade, I decided to channel the reporting into a crime series. After all, Palestine's reality is no romance novel.
THE NOVELS: The first novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (UK title The Bethlehem Murders), was published in February 2007 by Soho Press. In the UK it won the prestigious Crime Writers Association John Creasey Dagger in 2008, and was nominated in the US for the Barry First Novel Award, the Macavity First Mystery Award, and the Quill Best Mystery Award. In France it's been shortlisted for the Prix des Lecteurs. New York Times reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it "an astonishing first novel." It was named one of the Top 10 Mysteries of the Year by Booklist and, in the UK Sir David Hare made it his Book 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 fed on hummus" by one reviewer and "Yasser Arafat meets Miss Marple" by another.
The second book in the series, A Grave in Gaza, appeared in February 2008 (and at the same time under the title The Saladin Murders in the UK). The Bookseller calls it "a cracking, atmospheric read." I put in elements of the plot relating to British military cemeteries in Gaza in homage to my two great uncles, who rode through there with the Imperial Camel Corps in 1917. One of them, Uncle Dai Beynon, was still around when I was a boy, and I was named after him.
The third book in the series, The Samaritan's Secret, 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 - The Sowetan, the newspaper of that S. African township, for example.
AROUND THE WORLD: My Omar Yussef Mystery series has been sold to leading publishers in 23 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, Turkey and Greece.
OMAR'S NEXT TRAVELS: THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, the fourth novel in my series, will be published in February 2010. In it, Omar visits the famous Palestinian town of Brooklyn, New York (there really is a growing community there in Bay Ridge), and finds a dead body in his son's bed...
This review is from: Collaborator of Bethlehem (Hardcover)
I've been waiting for years for the crime genre to enter the Arab world -- other than a handful by Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra, there's nothing out there (at least in English translation). So, it was with great anticipation I picked up Welsh journalist Rees' Bethlehem-set book starring middle-aged schoolteacher Omar Yussef. Fortunately, despite prose that gets a little too florid at times, and a rather clunky "mystery", the book largely succeeds in bringing the detective genre to a new setting. (A note of warning: those who do not want to face the reality of how the Israeli occupation of the West Bank negatively affects daily life will probably not want to read this. Similarly, those who do not want to face the reality of Palestinian factionalism, pervasive corruption, and intercinine bloodshed, will find this a trying read. All of these elements come to the fore and are critical to the plot, as Rees attempts to ground his story in the daily struggle of non-combatant Palestinians to live a normal life.)
The story begins with the betrayal of a Palestinian guerilla to an Israeli hit squad by an unseen Palestinian collaborator. At his funeral, his widow reveals a rather significant clue as to the identity of the titular collaborator to her former schoolteacher, Yussef. However, she soon turns up dead before her evidence can be reported to anyone. Meanwhile, another former student, a Christian who emigrated to Chile and recently returned, is accused of being the collaborator. Certain that his ex-student is innocent and being accused solely due to his religion, Yussef embarks on an amateur sleuthing quest to clear his name which puts him in direct conflict with the "Martyr's Brigade" militia which is the de facto power in town.
While on indefinite leave from his teaching position, the former alcoholic Yussef pokes and prods around Bethlehem and its Dehaisha refugee camp, piecing together little bits of information. The one major flaw in the plotting is that he makes a very major erroneous assumption about the clue the widow gives him, and anyone who's lived in the Arab world will spot it immediately. This wouldn't be that bad, except that Yussef spends a good portion of the book berating others for making assumptions... However, on the whole, he is an engaging character and the book does an excellent job of showing why those who wish peace and follow their conscience have a rough time of it in the Arab-Israeli conflict and how hysteria and mob rule generally carry the day. I'll definitely be reading the next in the series.
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This review is from: Collaborator of Bethlehem (Hardcover)
Though I'm not much for crime fiction, I'm a reader of books about the Middle East, and this mystery set in Bethlehem on the West Bank caught my eye. At first I didn't think I'd like it, but I was quickly drawn into the twists and turns of plot, a few of them shocking, and felt I'd been immersed in Arab-Israeli political tensions in a way I'd never been before. Welsh-born author Rees, a journalist with Time magazine in Jerusalem, chooses as his central character an Arab history teacher at a UN-run girls school for refugees. A man with a comb-over and a mid-life crisis - and unqualified as a detective - he attempts to uncover the identity of an informer responsible for the killing of a young resistance fighter, which has led to the false arrest of a close friend.
For me, the final solving of this mystery was not so interesting as the portrayal of daily life in a world where the rule of law has been subverted by armed insurgents and an embrace of martyrdom, all set against the presence of an occupying army with considerably superior fire power. Occasions to kill or be killed multiply in this environment, whether as the victim of revenge, dishonor, mob violence, suicide bombing, or cross-fire between combatants. Framing all this within the conventions of the detective story makes this novel something close to creative nonfiction. Meanwhile, as the sole voice of reason and decency crying in this wilderness, the detective Omar Yussef becomes someone you admire for his courage - though it may seem foolish at times. I hope Rees' book is the first of a series; I look forward to reading more.
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This review is from: Collaborator of Bethlehem (Hardcover)
"The Collaborator of Bethlehem" is an astounding book in many ways. Above all, it's an insightful look at what happens to a society that has lost control of its daily life--when violent force becomes stronger than reason and order. Most people in this kind of situation hunker down and try to make themselves invisible until things get better. A few see opportunities in crisis to gain at the expense of others. Only a few refuse to surrender their humanity and morals and shun collaboration with disorder. Matt Beynon Rees' protagonist, Omar Yussef, is one of the rare breed in the third category. He is the anti-collaborationist, who lives in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem, where collaboration is seen by the population as a means of survival. For some it's collaboration with the Israelis to control Palestinian militants, for most others it's a collaboration of silence that allows corruption and violence to flourish in the name of Palestinian autonomy.
Omar Yussef, a free-thinking Palestinian school teacher abhors all that has happened to his very oppressed people, but refuses to give up on hope for the future, and surprisingly, refuses to blame the Israelis for all Palestinian problems. Through his protagonist, the author also expounds convincingly on how the Israelis have condemned themselves to an unending conflict with their neighbors by continuously working to destabilize Palestinian community and family life which inevitably produces more violence directed against the Israelis themselves.
On top of everything else, "The Collaborator of Bethlehem" is a genuinely good police mystery that holds the reader's attention from page one. This is a very intelligent book, clearly demonstrating Rees' understanding of the Middle East and the complexities the Palestinian/Israeli relationship. You have to wonder whether it would be possible for an Arab or an Israeli to have written such an honest and insightful book. We should all be happy that this is published as the first in a series of mysteries. Bring on number two.
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