A foreign correspondent builds memories out of blood and corpses. Often they turn to nightmares.

While working on my second Palestinian crime novel, A Grave in Gaza, I sometimes wept as I wrote. I used to think that meant I was a damned good writer. Now I know it was my trauma, collected over a decade of monthly visits to Gaza, seeping onto the page.

I hope that makes it a better novel. I know it saved me from the creeping depression and sudden fear that sometimes gripped me when my mind would return to memories of burned bodies, scattered body parts, angry people who wanted to hurt me, the sound of bullets nearby from an unseen gun. It helped me understand what kind of man I really was.

Journalism can’t do that. It plunges you into other people’s traumas and, through the constant repetition of 24-hour cable news, seems to make those horrors part of our own lives. It pushes us to blame someone, to rage against them. To lash out, like traumatized people. To feel depressed.

I know. I’ve been a journalist based in Jerusalem for 13 years.

As the latest violence unfolded in Gaza, I wondered what keeps me here. When I largely quit journalism to write my novels three years ago, I could’ve gone to Tuscany, as I had always thought I would to do. I no longer needed the journalist’s daily proximity to the conflict. Even though for a decade previously I’d been as committed as any other journalist to learning every nuance of the conflict, I’ve since been weeks at a time without turning on the local news.

That’s why I’m still here.

News blots out real life. It makes Israelis and Palestinians seem like incomprehensible, bloodthirsty lunatics, ripping each other apart without cease. Living amongst them makes it clear that it’s the news that’s unreal, fashioned to quicken the pulse and shoot you up with adrenaline. By staying here, living a happy life among normal Palestinians and Israelis, I’ve beaten the bad dreams and the sudden rages. They exist only in a decade of dog-eared notebooks on my bottom shelf.

I’ve developed relationships over the years with people who’ve opened up their cultures to me, shown me a perspective on Gaza that’s beyond what you’d ever see in the newspaper.

Take my friend Zakaria, who lives in the northern Gaza Strip village of Beit Hanoun, a major battleground in the current fighting. Zakaria was for decades Arafat’s top intelligence man. I’ve seen him during hard times when he expected his home to be stormed by rival Palestinian factions; when he sent armed men to bring me to meet him in secret; when Israeli tanks took up positions at the edge of his olive grove. Times worthy of headlines.

But my deepest impression of him came when he jovially served me giant scoops of hummus laced with ground meat and cubes of lamb fat at breakfast. As a foreign correspondent, I’ve downed some rough meals (Bedouins once milked a goat’s udder directly into a glass and handed me the warm fluid to drink), but try raw lamb fat at 9 a.m. and see how you like it.

For Zakaria, the dish was a tremendous delicacy and a demonstration of his hospitality. The writer in me found the mannerisms with which he served me and his insistence that I eat a second plate just as revealing as his tension during moments of conflict.

Fiction is able to put across the true characteristics of my Palestinian friends–like Zakaria’s courtly hospitality–in a way that’s largely beyond journalism, with its headline focus on the literally explosive. I’ve filled my novels with those characteristics, because they remind me that the times when I felt threatened by violence were unnatural. They belong only to nightmares and they aren’t real any more.

I want to give my readers the true emotional experience of being among people who live in extreme situations, with all its traumas, but mostly its pleasures. For entertainment–sure, these are novels, not non-fiction tomes to be crammed down like cod-liver oil because they’re good for you. But also because if there’s a point to knowing about the world beyond our borders, it’s to see into the minds of other men and thus to better understand ourselves. Sometimes it might even save us from ourselves.

Matt Beynon Rees is the author of a series of Palestinian crime novels. The latest novel, The Samaritan’s Secret, was published in February (Soho Press).

In the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz, Carol Novis reviews the third of my Palestinian crime novels THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET. I’m happy that she doesn’t view my novel as coming down on one side or the other in the conflict here. I think of my novels as humanist, filtering out the politics that makes people see the Palestinians as stereotypes (either of terrorists or victims), and I’m very happy that Israeli readers will find something in the portrayal of their neighbors that they didn’t know before.
“Rather than implicitly take sides in the seemingly intractable Israeli-Palestinian struggle, [Ha'aretz writes] Rees, a former Time magazine bureau chief in Jerusalem, has chosen to draw a vivid picture of Palestinian life that will enlighten many who know little of its culture, family structure and society… All in all, the Omar Yussef mystery series attempts to show that as long as there are good men − and Rees evidently believes that there are − there is hope.”

Soho Press has been awarded a grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts to bring Soho Crime author Garry Disher to the United States. In April, Soho Crime will release the fifth book in Garry Disher’s award-winning Inspector Hal Challis series, Blood Moon (Soho Crime; April 2009; $24.00).

Disher will embark on a multi-city tour in May 2009, culminating in an appearance at Book Expo America in New York. Tour cities include Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Houston, Scottsdale, Boston, and New York. Check back later for exact dates and times!

Disher is the author of over forty books for adults and children. The previous mystery in the Inspector Hal Challis series, Chain of Evidence, won the Ned Kelly Award for best Australian crime novel.

If you’ve enjoyed my books or would like to see some extra features and links about them, you can find me on several networking sites. Become my friend on Crime Space, Facebook, Goodreads, and I’ll be on Red Room soon enough. Of course you can also find most of this stuff on my personal website, too

If you are in the Philadelphia area on March 8th, stop by Robin’s Crime Fiction Book Club Brunch at Les Bon Temps Restaurant to meet Soho author Leighton Gage and fellow mystery author S.J. Rozan. If you can’t see Leighton while he’s in Philly, check him out at one of his other appearences. Find the complete tour schedule here.

The new U.S. website Global Post, which aims to provide Americans with the foreign news that they’re missing since their newspapers fired almost all their international correspondents, features a series of stories by me. They’re intended as introductions to my new Palestinian crime novel, THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, colorful features about life for the Palestinians who feature in the book. The first article is about why I love Nablus, the most violent town in the West Bank. The second article tells how I came to know the remnants of the ancient Samaritans, living on a hilltop overlooking Nablus. Both articles include photographs I took of Nablus and links to video about the novel.

I am excited to share the news that my debut novel will be released by Soho Press on April 6^th.

Set in 1960’sIndia, HAUNTING BOMBAY is the story of Pinky Mittal, a girl raised by her grandmother and extended family in Bombay’s old colonial enclave. Together, they partake in an ominous twilight ritual – the vigilant locking of a bathroom door every evening before sunset.

One stifling summer night, Pinky is driven to unbolt the door, accidentally unleashing the ghost of a girl child who had drowned there years earlier. As the monsoons erupt over Bombay and the ghost plunges the bungalow into chaos, the Mittal family struggles to come to terms with tangled memories of the child’s death. In the center of it all, Pinky must find the courage to uncover the drowning’s mysterious truth before the ghost enacts its revenge.

A richly evocative tale that unfurls from the luxurious heights of Malabar Hill to the squalid depths of the city’s underworld, HAUNTING BOMBAY illuminates a nation’s darkest fears and desires, and underscores the singular power of utterance.

I have always been intrigued by stories that have been passed down through generations and the idea of voice – who is empowered to speak and who is not – within in a family, a community, or a nation.  What would happen, I wondered, if the voices of the silenced were at long last heard, whispering their version of truth?

I have been thrilled at the response so far to the book and welcome you to visit my website and learn more about the novel: www.hauntingbombay.com.

kindly,
Shilpa

“stunning debut novel… like finely wrought mirror work, a glittering tapestry of vibrant contradictions, characters, and mysteries…”—Aimee Liu, Flash House

“With deft lyricism and authority, HAUNTING BOMBAY tells a big story in swift and bold strokes…”—Saher Alam, The Groom to Have Been

“A journey through the caverns of India’s passionate, complex heart… Savor it.”—Michael Bernard Beckwith, Spiritual Liberation

Today was a great day. I got my FIRST ever review copy request from a reviewer…for their Kindle. And I loved it! Within five minutes of receiving the email, our transaction was completed. No grabbing a press release, searching for a review copy, searching for the correct size jiffy, filling out a label, adding postage…you get the picture. All I had to do was hit reply, insert, and I was finished! And instead of having to wait a week (or more) for the postal system to media mail that package to Cali, the reviewer could start reading right away. It was a dream.

This might sound a bit lazy, but I HATE mailing out review copies. I know it’s necessary, and I am thrilled when it’s a big name reviewer who’s asking, but imagine having to go through that process 5 to 10 times a day. And then repeating it when the book never arrives…as happens more than it should. Not to mention all the trees (and money) this uses up.

So here’s what I’m hoping for: sometime in the near future, all reviewers are going to take this route. That instead of doing mailings, I’ll be able to e-blast out PDFs. Instead of printing countless packets of press materials, these will simply go as attachments. And reviewers, instead of sorting through piles of books, can just open their email, skim, and either download or delete. Think how much easier it would be for all of us!

So, please, reviewers. Buy an e-reader. Save the planet. Save both of us time. And may none of us ever have to deal with the pain of a jiffy papercut again.

The Mystery Books News blog has an advance notice of a great review of THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, today. It’ll be published in Mysterious Reviews and includes this:
“The intricate plot, memorable characters, expressive narrative, and relentless pacing will no doubt cause The Samaritan’s Secret to be remembered as one of the best mysteries of the year.”
Read a preview of the full review at http://www.mystery-books.com/

There’s a review of The Samaritan’s Secret, the third of my Palestinian crime novels, in The Sowetan, South Africa, today by Nthabisang Moreosele. I’m rather delighted with it.

“Omar Yussef is the most unlikely detective in modern whodunnits,” the review states. “He does not study fingerprints, collect physical evidence or check alibis…He believes that one must intervene in the present to shape history.”

Read the rest of the review at:
http://www.sowetan.co.za/GoodLife/Article.aspx?id=940705