the collaborator of bethlehem | the collaborator of bethlehem
Sep.22.2011
Whenever a novelist’s biography tells me that he’s “working on a screenplay,” my heart falls. I feel pity for the poor fellow who’s no doubt heading for disappointment (most scripts don’t get made) and for the novel, which exerts such a lesser lure than the glamour of the movies that a perfectly...
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Oct.13.2010
The crime novel tradition seems to have little connection to love. Maybe sometimes love in a perverse sense is the spur to the murder at the heart of most crime novels – the spurned husband killing his wife, for example. But usually the detective is a loveless loner, pining without much hope like...
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Feb.24.2010
The dead man's mother raged and cried as she told me how she’d discovered her son’s body, in the cabbage patch outside her home. She’d lowered herself onto her knees, she said, touched his blood and wiped her fingers on her face and called out that God is most great.
As the winter wind came cold...
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Feb.15.2010
On the My Book, The Movie blog, I was asked to muse about who I'd choose to play Omar Yussef in the movies. Well, musing I can do -- it's about as solid as the actual movie business itself, so why not. Here's what I wrote:
I didn’t need to think of an actor. Not until I’d finished my book. Then the...
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Feb.08.2010
The Campaign for the American Reader blog empire's flagship is the Page 69 Test. The premise is this: open any book to page 69; if it grabs you, that's a better indication of whether you'll enjoy the book than simply reading the opening page. Try it on a book you like (and one you don't), it...
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Dec.25.2009
I like to do my bit to help the effort to save our planet. Last week in Rome my wife and I confronted a brand new recycling program which, mainly, seemed to consist of workmen loading enormous amounts of bottles into their tiny dump truck outside our window at 5 a.m. We cheered them on and put our...
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Dec.20.2009
Scott Pack, controversial publishing guru and self-declared big mouth (I can tell you he's rather more charming in person than such a description would imply), recommends my debut novel THE BETHLEHEM MURDERS (US title THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM) for a Christmas gift on his blog Me and My Big...
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Nov.29.2009
Rain on the streets of Bethlehem can't cool simmering tension. By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost BETHLEHEM, West Bank — A writer seeks the surprise of a “man bites dog” story. The most violent times of the Second Intifada, which took place under the leaden winter skies of early 2002, gave me mine....
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Nov.26.2009
I went back to the spot where I killed my first man yesterday. I killed him four years ago. I return every few months. Each time I arrive, it’s so peaceful I can’t believe anyone really died. But, even though I’m a writer of crime fiction, someone really did. I walked across a dirt lot, puddled...
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Oct.27.2009
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?...
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