MattRees.net

Everyone comes back to Jerusalem. I don’t know why, I really don’t. It’s too hot. The people can be offhandedly mean, and they drive as though they want to kill you. It isn’t a very pretty place once you look close. Oh and, yes, sometimes it gets violent. With shocking self-obsession, it thinks the eyes [...]

The best thing about moving from journalism to fiction writing is that people show you more respect. As a journalist covering a contentious issue like the Israel-Palestinian conflict, I was often subject to rather nasty verbal attacks during public speaking engagements. For a partisan of either side, I seemed a fine target for their generalized [...]

Not long ago a friend of mine commented that my travels to promote my books must be a great pleasure to me. “You just have to talk about yourself,” he sneered. “You must like that.” I ignored the implied insult (until now). But it struck me that people might think book tours are literally ego-trips. [...]

Novelists aren’t journalists. Research for a novel isn’t the same as researching a journalistic article. I’d have thought that was too obvious to need stating. But then I became a published novelist, and I realized that people thought the two things were rather the same. I was a journalist for almost 20 years before my [...]

I’m always looking for a good spot in which to kill someone. Still, as a crime writer, I rarely have to ask about potential locations for a good murder. People are keen to suggest that the blood be spilled on their doorstep. Most recently, it was a pastor and his wife. To be fair, they [...]

I’ll be talking about my Palestinian crime novels in Jerusalem on Monday, Nov. 16 at 10 a.m. The location is Beit Frankforter, 80 Bethlehem Road, in Baka. So call in sick (if you still have a job) and come along.

One of the advantages of being an author in an “exotic” locale is that people visit and want to hear from you as someone who knows the place well. It’s also one of the disadvantages. Last Friday night, I drove out to Ein Kerem to meet one such group of visitors from Reboot, a U.S. [...]

Writers live in their heads. What may be travel to you is location-scouting for me. In some ways, I’m never where I am. I’m imagining that place on the page in a future book. It won’t exist until I’ve written about it. I was standing on a deserted bridge across the Rhine in the Swiss [...]

You know the reputation. “Swiss” isn’t a nationality. It’s really an adjective meaning highly organized and perhaps even a little too punctilious. That’s a myth. The place is just like the Middle East… (Look, I write fiction, but I may be onto something. Read on.) On my recent reading tour, I stopped in Basel as [...]

Here’s my latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog: When authors travel to promote their books in the US and UK, they’ve given up on referring to their appearances as “readings.” Now they’re “events.” Because no one wants to hear an author read. It could be because authors aren’t such compelling readers [...]