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 Thomas. Diolch yn fawr, as we say in Wales when we mean to say “thanks very much.” My wife nearly choked on her bagel when I told her, but then she added: “Sure, you’re an icon.” New York sarcasm.

The listing is, of course, a great follow-up to my mother’s recent phone call in which she informed me that one of her friends in her pottery class found my name on Wikipedia’s notable people from Newport list, that being my home town in South Wales. I’m right there between Johnny Morris (who, for those reading in the US, hosted a British children’s show about animals) and Michael Sheen, the actor famous for playing Tony Blair and David Frost. (Further down the list: rappers Goldie Lookin’ Chain and King Arthur’s sixth-century pal St. Cadoc.)

Anyway, from Jerusalem (which is rather full of actual icons and much too “iconic” for its own good) I wish you a happy new year: Blwyddwyn Newydd Dda!

(In case you’re wondering why “Wales” isn’t Welsh for Wales. “Wales” is derived from the Old English, that is Saxon, word for foreigners. Because when the Saxons came over from Germany, the so-called foreigners were living in what’s now England. But that’s water under the bridge…Twll din pob Sais! I add that with a touch of my wife’s New York sarcasm and not to be taken seriously…)

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 bottles in the right bin. Unbeknownst to me, my Palestinian crime novels also played a part in the Copenhagen climate summit by providing solace and welcome distraction to Jim Prentice, the Canadian Environment Minister. In the National Post, Jim writes: “Ian Rankin is always reliable, and his latest book, Doors Open, is a good yarn. More recently, I have turned to new writers like Matt Beynon Rees, the former Jerusalem bureau chief for Time. He has introduced me to his series detective, Omar Yussef, and a new setting: the Middle East. My favourites, The Collaborator of Bethlehem and, currently, A Grave in Gaza, are hard to put down.” You see, even if you’re about to try to save the planet alongside the world’s other Environment honchos, it’s still hard to take a break from reading my books. As Canada’s environment is one of the loveliest in the world, I’m rather pleased about this. Thanks for reading, Jim.

Because I’m such a hip and happening author, I’m redoing my blog. Actually, I’m not redoing it. My friend Harry’s doing it. He’s hip and happening (check out his photo and wish for his cool, Daddy-O). The point of the blog is to make me LOOK that way.

Until now I’ve mused about the writing of my books, my book tours and research, about the world of publishing and otherwise, on Blogger. Which is simple and easy to use. However, I’m informed by friends who know about these things that Blogger looks dreadfully old-fashioned and that it’s not so easy to do anything but the simplest things on it.

So change I must. This is where Harry Rubenstein, who sings in Jerusalem’s most obscure band, in which I play bass, steps in. He also has a company which consults on company web sites and sets up professional blogs. Harry is doing my blog for nothing, because he’s a friend and because I’ve promised to base a character on him in a future novel who will either be killed or have fried artichoke thrown in his face.

[Note: This isn’t going to be one of those sad authorial blog posts which lament the fact that writers can no longer sit alone in their rooms for years thinking great thoughts before having to face the world. (If that’s how I viewed blogging, I wouldn’t write a blog post about it. Surprising how many writers don’t quite get that irony…)]

I’m quite happy to engage in blogging, social networking, making videos for Youtube, guest blogging and virtual book-touring. (Only “quite happy,” because after all I’m not a teenager.) I’ve put a lot of time into making www.mattbeynonrees.com a good central site for all interviews and articles and reviews… and photos and audio and video… and stuff in foreign languages… and links to my social networking profiles.

But the blog didn’t look so good. Time for a change.

As I’ve had professional help with this, I thought I’d lay out for any writer out there who’s getting more into the interweb thingy (pretty much everyone, if the people I meet at crime writing conferences are a representative sample) how to go about it.

First, the blog needs to be on WordPress. Word Press isn’t as simple to set up as Blogger. You may need a computer savvy type to help you create the blog.

Get your domain name (the www…etc.) and sign up for a server. A good server provider is BlueHost.com.

Set up a blog account at WordPress. But, you say, that gives you a page that looks very basic, too basic in fact. For the “theme” that makes it look like an actual blog, you go to a site like Woothemes or Themeforest. Pick one you like, then get your computer savvy friend to, as it were, superimpose the theme over the basic blog.

Still with your computer savvy friend, put in a few widgets. Most of these are invisible to the blog reader (spam filters, for example), but others can be seen. Like the Youtube widget which allows you to embed a Youtube video on your homepage.

Ok, so now you’ve got a blog. Which is where Blogger stops.

But WordPress has what’re called static pages. That’s more like a website. You have the blog page, probably as your Homepage. But then you have a tool bar along the top with other static pages. Let’s say those pages are: About (your bio,) Books (yours, of course), Contact.

To sign up for a good Contact form, rather than having people email you, go to http://kontactr.com/signup/.

Then you can quite easily load up the other pages with all the stuff that you might otherwise put onto a website. The WordPress blog can, essentially, be your website. The web designer who made my main website says she now designs all her sites on Word Press.

Once you’ve sat with your computer pal in front of your new WordPress dashboard for just a matter of minutes you’ll be able to post your blog musings with natty little photos beside them. You’ll post links to other people’s websites. They will in turn post links to yours and make you famous all over the internet.

Then, when your eyes are so blurry you can’t really see any more… Well, then it’s time for you to go and write your book. For the checklist on how to do that, you’ll have to wait for another week…

One of my biggest boosters has been Bill Ott, reviewer for the pre-publication review Booklist. Here’s his review of my forthcoming THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which is out in the US and the UK on Feb. 1:

“Road-trips in crime series have the built-in problem of removing their heroes from the landscapes that define them. Rees’ Bethlehem history teacher and occasional sleuth Omar Yussef is a strong enough character to survive a temporary transplant to New York, but that’s not to say we don’t miss the vividly evoked Palestine setting. Yussef has agreed to attend a UN conference in Manhattan because it will give him a chance to see his son Ala who is living in Brooklyn’s Little Palestine neighborhood. The reunion is spoiled, however, when Yussef finds one of Ala’s roommates dead, the victim of what appears to be a ritual killing. With Ala a suspect, Yussef attempts to find the killer. Could the history lessons that Yussef once taught Ala and his friends have been corrupted into a contemporary suicide-assassination plot? Although the setting and the high-concept thriller plot—the finale evokes The Manchurian Candidate—take us too far away from the small human dramas that usually drive this series, Yussef himself never loses sight of what he calls the life that remains when politics is sluiced away like the filth a stray dog leaves in the street.”

I like what Bill sees in the novel–and its predecessors–because I’ve tried to make Omar Yussef a detective who confronts small aspects of the violence around him, rather than writing the kind of thriller where one guy saves the world. That wouldn’t reflect the Palestinian reality.

I moved a little further from that smallness of conflict and locality with this new book. Here’s why: while a “road trip” can detract from some detectives, it’s in the nature of the Palestinian reality to be taken far from home. Most Palestinians, after all, live outside “Palestine.” Omar Yussef is lonely and alien in New York, outside his usual milieu. Encapsulating that diaspora is one of the things about which I’m most pleased when it comes to THE FOURTH ASSASSIN.

My latest dispatch on Global Post — a week or so after it posted, because I’ve been in Italy and, well, the Middle East wasn’t on my mind…I didn’t miss the taste of humus too much either, not with all that saltimboca and gelato…

Palestinians are divided; Israelis too. Not a good basis for negotiation.
By Matt Beynon Rees - GlobalPost
JERUSALEM — The traditional diplomatic formulation for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is the slogan “Two states for two peoples.”

Let’s revise that for the current political situation and posit a solution based on “Four states for two peoples.” Because it’s the only way just now of drawing lines on a map between the feuding parties.

Why not stick with two peoples? Well, the Palestinians are divided in almost every way possible — geographically, politically, financially and with hatred and violence — between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the parts of the West Bank under the sway of the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.

Israel is doing its best to emulate that self-destructive division. Late last month Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared a 10-month freeze on construction in the country’s settlements in the West Bank. With his customary ability to try placating everyone only to end up displeasing them all, Netanyahu pledged that the freeze wouldn’t apply to synagogues and schools in the settlements. Nor would it hold for Israeli neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, which are viewed by international diplomats as settlements.

The U.S. agreed to bite its tongue about this brush-off of President Barack Obama’s push for a total freeze on settlements. Israeli settlers, however, bit Netanyahu instead. They promise to block major road junctions inside Israel in the coming week and have already started to refuse entry to building inspectors come to determine if construction work is being carried out in their settlements.

Within Israeli politics, the ire isn’t just a matter of geography. At least five ministers from Netanyahu’s Likud Party are opposed to the construction freeze. Three met with Netanyahu to complain that under his plan important sewerage projects wouldn’t be completed. Translation: We’ll have a lot of waste lying about and we’ll just have to throw it at you.

Some Israeli political observers believe that’s just what Netanyahu wants now. They contend that he realizes he can’t make a deal that’d please the settlers, the Palestinians and the U.S. — and certainly not one that’d get by his right-wing Likud activists.

In this reading, Netanyahu wants to push the most right-wing members of his party out, forging an alliance with political blocs tied more directly to the settlement movement. That would leave Netanyahu free to take the somewhat less right-wing elements of his party and to form either a new party or an alliance with the Labor Party. Historically the most powerful of Israel’s parties, Labor has gradually diminished and now is merely the fourth-biggest party.

Oh, and guess what: It’s divided. There are five, sometimes six, of the 13 Labor parliamentary members who oppose the government of which their party is a part.
That might change if a new Likud and Labor joined forces — particularly as some of those “Labor rebels” would be aware that in the next election their party’s showing is likely to be even worse, leaving them out of a job.

When Netanyahu isn’t figuring out how not to be held hostage to Israel’s extremist right, he’s focused on cutting a deal to free the Israeli held hostage by people even more extreme: Hamas. Though a deal to swap hundreds of Palestinian prisoners for the Israeli soldier held captive in Gaza was said to be imminent a week ago, it remains only imminent.

Hamas officials say they’ve narrowed the gap with Israel over the prisoner swap. Of the 450 prisoners Hamas wants released, Israel is believed to have agreed so far to all but 15. Those include some prisoners that most Israelis will find it hard to stomach releasing — several were behind lethal suicide bombings, and another was the woman whose email flirtation with an Israeli youth was designed to lure him to a sexy assignation at which he was murdered. There are a number of cabinet ministers who continue to oppose the deal.

Which is one point of agreement between those rightist Israeli ministers and a man they deride — Mahmoud Abbas. The Palestinian president maintains that a prisoner release like this would be a gift to Hamas, making the Islamist group more popular before elections scheduled for January.

Of course, Abbas doesn’t really intend to hold those elections. Still he has to show that he’s as tough on Israel as Hamas. That’s why he’s refusing to go back to peace talks, despite urging from his paymasters in Washington.

In the absence of four corners in which to send all these recalcitrant kids to stand with their faces to the walls, four states might be the only way to keep them from fighting in the playground.

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. Writes Scott, as he roasts his chestnuts over an open fire at his home office in Windsor, “If you like crime novels and are looking for something that is bloody good but a little bit different then see if you can sneak one of these into your stocking.” Seasons greetings to you, too, Scott, as I look over the dusty hillside toward Bethlehem from my office window — where the only thing roasting in the Middle East’s so-called winter is me…

Publishers Weekly, the pre-publication review, stars my new Palestinian crime novel THE FOURTH ASSASSIN, which will be published Feb. 1 in the US and the UK. Here’s the PW review: “The relentless cycle of violence and retribution follows Palestinian detective Omar Yussef to New York City, where he must deliver a speech at the U.N. on schooling in the Palestinian refugee camps, in Rees’s excellent fourth mystery (after 2009’s “The Samaritan’s Secret”). When Yussef’s son, Ala, is arrested after a decapitated body is found in Ala’s Brooklyn apartment, Yussef’s search for the real killer leads him from Atlantic Avenue to Coney Island and back to the U.N. Secretariat. In the process, he discovers that he’s not quite the cosmopolitan man he thought himself to be, a realization shared by many Arab immigrants in the story. In truth, the residents of Little Palestine are caught between its subterranean mosques and the lure of Manhattan, where forbidden pleasures are ready for the plucking. Yussef remains reliably human and compassionate toward human fallibility, while raging openly at the corruption of his own leaders.”

Maureen Corrigan hails Stuart Neville’s GHOST OF BELFAST and Martin Limon’s G.I. BONES as two of the most mesmerizing mysteries of the year. Check out the full story here.

Near Yangshuo, China…

Yuelong River

New Year's sausage

Checking in from Spain.

The first photo was taken at the Elkar bookstore in Bilbao, with my friend, the Basque cultural ministry representative, me, and my Spanish publisher’s publicist. You can see the new Spanish editions in the second photo.

-Cara