1. Sora Margherita. Piazza delle Cinque Scole. Looks like a scene from Fellini’s Roma, with rough decor, unrestrained atmosphere, and a focus on good food rather than “fine dining.” Order anything, it’s great. And don’t leave food on your plate. The waitress will make you finish it.

2. San Crispino, Piazza della Maddalena and Via della Panneteria. Ice-cream is usually displayed in Rome in massive piles that are supposed to make it irresistible. At San Crispino, they keep the ice-cream under silver covers. But the taste truly is impossible to resist. The house flavor is honey, but the selection is always different. One day there’ll be whisky, the next you’ll find licorice. I’ve heard people complain that it’s expensive. But as Martin Cruz Smith once said, “You don’t sell a ride on a rocket shit for a dollar.”

3. Il Fornaio. Via dei Baullari. Near Campo de’Fiori, this bakery/deli has excellent pizza and savories. But if you’d like a sugar-high that won’t give you a gelato head-freeze, this is the place. The torta con ricotta e ciocollata is officially designated “the best thing in the world” by my five-year-old son.

4. Obika Mozzarella Bar. Campo de’Fiori, and Piazza Firenze. A chain that has expanded into the UK and USA. But there’s nowhere to enjoy it that’s better than Rome. A tasting menu of several different mozzarellas comes with a lesson from the staff about what makes a good mozzarella. (If you press it and thin white liquid comes out, it’s fresh; if not, blaaah.) Also a great place for morning espresso and pastry.

5. Osteria della Quercia. Piazza della Quercia. In a tiny piazza opposite the Renaissance palazzo where the Council of State sits, in the shade of the oak tree from which it takes its name. A great place for traditional Roman food like deep fried cod and artichokes.

Rees illuminates with sensitivity the hitherto dark portrait of one of the world’s most influential artists. –Daily Mail
A superb tale of intrigue and wrong doing in Renaissance Italy–It’s a Crime! blog
Matt Rees inhabits Caravaggio’s mind…bringing to life his conflicted world–The Bookbag

Read the first chapter.

1. Red Harvest. Dashiell Hammett.

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humor that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

We learn that the Continental Op’s been drinking in a bar in Butte, which implies that he likes rough places and cheap alcohol. He knows the jokes thieves make and we’re introduced to Personville, which is after all to be a central character, as it were, in the book. Most important, given that this was Hammett’s first full-length novel: We get the voice. The voice of Hammett and the Op. The worldly, experienced voice of a man who has mixed with criminals long enough to have heard repeated references to one small town over the course of years. A man who, in the course of the book, will do criminal things for decent ends.

2. The Little Sister. Raymond Chandler
In 1949, the grumpy god of the gumshoe genre wrote an opening paragraph that defines an entire genre:

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip
Marlowe…Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in –– there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

What makes it so compelling again is the voice of Marlowe with its sense of regret at having become involved in the story and its unspoken acknowledgement of the inevitability of a repeat performance. After all, if Marlowe truly learned the lessons he claims to have taken on board, he wouldn’t be who he is. He’d be corrupted or cynical. Of course he’s neither.

3. Maigret Goes Home(aka The St. Fiacre Affair). Georges Simenon.

Georges Simenon wrote “L’Affaire Saint Fiacre” (“Maigret Goes Home”) in 1932. It’s one of the first of 103 novels involving Inspector Jules Maigret. You can tell from books like this that the writer was a bastard. And we ought to be grateful for that. The opening of “Saint Fiacre” is laden with the strangeness of waking up in an unaccustomed place, and most of all the dismal return to a place whence one has fled. Here it is:

A timid scratching at the door; the sound of an object being put on the floor; a furtive voice: “It’s half past five. The first bell for Mass has just been rung…” Maigret raised himself on his elbows, making the mattress creak, and while he was looking in astonishment at the skylight cut in the sloping roof, the voice went on: “Are you taking communion?”

All this is a re-creation of the small village atmosphere Maigret believed he had left behind when he went to Paris as a young man to become a police officer. It’s a very meaningful atmosphere for me. For a couple of decades now, I’ve lived around the world as a journalist and writer. It’s been 22 years since I quit the place where I grew up. Whenever I go back for a visit, I become quiet, silenced by a bitter nostalgia and regret. Maybe that’s why I love this somber, atmospheric early episode featuring “le Commissaire” returning to his childhood village.

What’s your favorite first paragraph in classic crime fiction?

Follow me on Facebook or Twitter to keep up with my selection of the Best First Paragraphs in Contemporary Crime Fiction later this week.

1. Enigma. Robert Harris.
A thrilling dramatization of the British battle to break German codes during World War II. It’s tough to say whether this is better than Harris’s Archangel — in fact, I think it’s probably not — but this is set entirely in a historical period, whereas Archangel takes place in the present (with a couple of characters who might be said to be living in the past). So I’m including Enigma here.

2. The Coffee Trader. David Liss.
Liss is the premier writer of crime fiction set during the early modern period. Here he takes on the Inquisition and Jewish life in Holland, in a story that revolves around the newly introduced, mind-bending drug known as coffee.

3. The Alienist. Caleb Carr
When I first read The Alienist, I was living in Manhattan in my twenties. Naturally I was out on the town most of the time. So I only got to read late at night before bed. This was a very poor choice of book for those circumstances. I’m not ashamed to reveal that I used to put out the light and dive under the covers to hide, haunted by the tale of gruesome murders in 1896 New York. It might’ve been the drugs, but I think it was because of the book. Quite the scariest thing I’ve ever read, it also introduces early stages of forensic science to the plot.

4. Cain His Brother. Anne Perry
The best of Perry’s Monk series, set in Victorian London. A disturbing story of brothers engaged in dreadful deeds that reminds me of the Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde in its conjoining of tormented psychology with depraved city.

5. The Silence. J. Sydney Jones
In this marvelous novel the real mayor of Vienna at the onset of the twentieth century, Karl Lueger, is at the heart of a conspiracy to raise big money from the sale of the Vienna Woods and at the same time to gain political capital by blaming Jewish property developers for the destruction of the city’s beloved green belt. It’s a measure of Jones’s skill as a writer that, while his hero is a lawyer-turned-investigator of Jewish origin, the novel’s Jews are not really better or worse than the society around them. They aren’t portrayed as poor saintly victims. They’re simply part of Jones’s Vienna, as they were part of historical Vienna. There’s also a youthful role for little Ludwig Wittgenstein. For lovers of Sherlock Holmes, you can’t go wrong with Jones.

6. The Athenian Murders. Jose Carlos Somoza
A deeply engaging story told by the ancient Greek translator of a still more ancient Greek manuscript. The manuscript is a murder mystery. The translator becomes entangled in the mystery. Philosophy ensues… It won the CWA Gold dagger a dozen years ago.

7. Sandman. J. Robert Janes
Janes’s series set in World War II revolves around a French police detective and his colleague from the Gestapo. Like the other novels, this one is highly elliptical — a perfect reflection of the delicate line these two investigators must tread if they aren’t to fall foul of the Nazi rulers of Paris.

8. Morality Play. Barry Unsworth
Medieval actors create a play about a murder recently solved in the northern English town where they’re staying. As they perform the play, they realize the wrong person has been found guilty. One of the greatest books by Unsworth, who died last year and whose ability to capture a moment or a character in a phrase is unparalleled in recent literature.

9. The Bridge of Sighs. Olen Steinhauer
The first of Steinhauer’s terrific series chronicling the Communist decades of eastern Europe. The restraint with which he writes — and his characters behave — truly does make this a very Le Carre experience. (I know it’s pretty common to say that this or that writer is “the new Le Carre.” It seems to me that Le Carre himself stopped being “Le Carre” a few decades ago. Maybe he transmigrated into these early books by Steinhauer…)

10. Ragtime in Simla. Barbara Cleverley
Set in 1922 in Simla, the summer retreat of the British in India, Cleverley exposes the seamy underside of what was at the time the Jewel in the Crown.

I talk about the real events in Gaza that are the basis for my second Palestinian crime novel A GRAVE IN GAZA (UK title: THE SALADIN MURDERS.) Over a decade reporting on Gaza, I accumulated stories that few other reporters noticed. In this novel, Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef faces the corruption of senior Palestinian security officials, the kidnapping of colleagues, and the smuggling of missiles under the Egyptian border into Gaza. Each of the characters is based on a real Palestinian I’ve known. I also read from the opening chapter.

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I use yoga and meditation to prepare myself for the mental and physical challenge of writing. I introduce this podcast by talking about the importance of yoga and how it helps to open a writer’s creativity, and to prevent fatigue from sitting for long periods. I describe several stretching techniques you can do throughout your writing day. Then I talk you through a 20 minute yoga practice sequence for you to follow along with the exercises. The postures should leave you feeling energized and creative — ready to write!

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Un amore irrinunciabile. Un’opera blasfema. Quale segreto si nasconde dietro la morte di Caravaggio?

Un grande thriller storico di Matt Rees

Quale segreto si nasconde dietro la scomparsa di uno dei più grandi pittori di tutti i tempi?

Roma, 1605. Il giovane e ancora sconosciuto pittore Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio è arrivato nella città delle sfarzose cattedrali e dei favolosi palazzi nobiliari per cercare fortuna. Col cappello nero in testa, addosso abiti altrettanto cupi e spesso trasandati, la spada o il pugnale al fianco, l’inclinazione al turpiloquio e alla rissa, frequenta i bassifondi della città, le bettole più sudicie e le compagnie più violente, fino a quando gli viene commissionata una straordinaria opera: il ritratto del Papa. Il successo del quadro sarà determinante e Caravaggio sarà accolto nell’entourage dei Borgia diventando il più acclamato artista di Roma. Ma quando, innamoratosi della fruttivendola Lena, si troverà a usarla come modella per la figura della Madonna, l’alta società ne rimarrà fortemente indignata. Rifiutatosi caparbiamente di rinunciare al suo amore, Caravaggio sarà costretto a lasciare la città e a cercare rifugio a Malta. Ma proprio mentre si sta preparando a fare ritorno a Roma per sposare finalmente la sua amata, del grande pittore si perdono misteriosamente le tracce…

My award-winning first novel was THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM (UK title: THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS). Set against the backdrop of the Palestinian intifada, it tells the story of schoolteacher Omar Yussef, who is forced to take on the violence of his hometown to save a former pupil. In this podcast, I lay out how I came to write the book and read from the first chapter.

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