MattRees.net

I’m taking my revenge on the deployers of banal Facebook updates. I’m writing a blog post about my new couches. Old couches recovered, actually. But I’ll get to that soon enough. I had first thought to be avenged on the lame updaters by putting up a false Facebook status update of my own each day, [...]

No Palestinian state this week. Don’t really know why not. At this point I’d be happy to sign off on anything at all, just to get it off my hands. I’ve told the Americans that, but they seem convinced I’m some kind of hardliner—they think I’m bluffing when I say “Barry, where do I sign?” [...]

In this weekend’s Sunday Times reviewer John Dugdale describes my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef as “one of the most beguiling of current sleuths.” You can read the roundup in full at Times Online, but here’s the bit about my newest novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN: Set in a pulsating, multicultural city, Matt Rees’s The Fourth Assassin [...]

Welsh Icons (“an Encyclopedia and Gazetteer of Wales and all Things Welsh – A Cymrupedia if you like.”…uh, “Cymru” being the Welsh word for Wales.) lists me among the “iconic” writers on its site. That puts me in the company of thriller king Ken Follett, sinister Willy Wonka-man Roald Dahl, and upright role model Dylan [...]

I started to feel recently that my bio on www.mattbeynonrees.com was a bit over-serious. First of all, it was in the third person. I honestly never refer to myself in the third person (except when I’m shopping and I ask my wife “Would Matt Beynon Rees wear a shirt in this shade of pink?”) Then [...]

It’s always a thrill for me to receive the covers of my forthcoming novels from my UK publisher Atlantic Books. They have a series feel in that there’s a continuity to the design. Each one seems to get better. Here’s the cover of THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published next February. I received it [...]

A new review in the Ann Arbor Chronicle suggests healthy grassroots popularity for my Palestinian crime novels. The review of my first Palestinian crime novel “The Collaborator of Bethlehem” (UK Title: The Bethlehem Murders) is written by Robin Agnew, owner of Aunt Agatha’s Mystery Bookstore in Ann Arbor. She writes: “When enough customers ask you [...]

Guest blogging on A Book Blogger’s Diary, I write about why my publishers like to have a new title for the same book in almost every country…Choosing one is almost as hard as writing the book itself… Almost.

People who don’t know any better sometimes tell me that I’m a good writer and they’d like to see me write a “real novel,” instead of my Palestinian crime novels. Usually I tell them Raymond Chandler once wrote that there are just as many bad “real” literary novels written as bad mysteries — but the [...]