MattRees.net

About the time Caravaggio was painting his masterpieces in Italy, Miguel de Cervantes observed that “Good painters imitate nature. Bad ones spew it up.” Forging seems to me more accurate than imitation. As I researched my Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD, I realized I had to learn how to paint with oils if I [...]

I went all over Europe and North America, tracking Caravaggio’s works and the places that touched his life for my novel A Name in Blood. But in particular I spent a great deal of time in Rome, Naples and Malta.

Some of the Caravaggio paintings featured in my novel A Name in Blood:

My wonderful German publisher CH Beck Verlag has once again produced a sumptuous version of one of my novels. Published this week as “Mit Blut signiert,” it’s translated by the noted German novelist Klaus Modick. Read more about it on Beck’s site. Read a “Leseprobe“. If you prefer to listen to it in German, go [...]

Philip Farrugia Randon is a major authority on Caravaggio, particularly the Italian artist’s time in Malta. Philip is the author of — among other publications — Caravaggio Knight of Malta and Caravaggio in Malta. A prominent lawyer on Malta, Philip is also president of the Knights of Malta on the island. When I visited Malta [...]

As an introduction to my Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD, here’s a short story about an incident in the artist’s life that was very striking to me, but which didn’t fit with the narrative of the novel. In “Lazarus’s Brush” Caravaggio flees the men who seek to kill him and arrives in Sicily. He’s [...]

A great review by Kathy Stevenson in The Daily Mail of my new novel A NAME IN BLOOD: “The well-known image of Caravaggio is of a great artist but a deeply flawed man, a profligate and uncouth murderer. Matt Rees’s novel adds the light and shade that were so characteristic of his work to the [...]

For the Western Mail, the main newspaper in my native Wales, I wrote about the importance of recent discoveries of Caravaggio’s youthful sketches, as well as how I came to write my novel A NAME IN BLOOD. Meanwhile, Declan Burke, author of the Crime Always Pays blog and one of Ireland’s premier crime novelists, reviews [...]

I stopped in at Radio Wales to meet the delightful Roy Noble, who has had a show every afternoon for a couple of decades. We chatted about my new Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD, as well as MOZART’S LAST ARIA and my Palestinian crime series. Listen here — the interview starts 12 minutes into [...]

The Sunday Times reviews recent historical fiction (including the latest from Harry Sidebottom who, despite the ring of his name to the British ear, writes about the wars of ancient Rome, rather than Yorkshire cricket in the 1930s) and has great things to say about my new Caravaggio novel A NAME IN BLOOD. “A NAME [...]