Every couple of days a little alert pops up in my email account letting me know that I can read my books for nothing in Norwegian. My Norwegian’s not so great and I can read my books for nothing any time. But that’s not the point.

Scandinavia is a major center of so-called Cyberpunks who have willfully misinterpreted an old hacker adage that “information wants to be free” to mean “go ahead and steal things from which someone else expects to earn his livelihood.” Such Cyber types have, among other things, loaded electronic versions of my novels in Norwegian onto the internet so that anyone can take them without paying. Read the rest of this entry »

A New York Times correspondent teams up with a Belfast professor to write the story of Islamism among the Palestinians.
JERUSALEM — Stephen Farrell was sipping coffee in the office of his money changer on Salah ud-Din Street, East Jerusalem’s main commercial strip, four years ago, when Beverley Milton-Edwards entered. From his rucksack, Farrell produced a copy of a book about Islamic militants written by the Queens University Belfast professor.

“Your book saved my life when I was kidnapped in Iraq,” he said, referring to a brief period of captivity by militants in Baghdad in 2004 when working for The Times of London. Read the rest of this entry »

Robert Harris has been one of my favorite authors since I first laid hands on “Fatherland,” his “what if the Nazis had won” thriller. “Enigma” and “Archangel” were even better. His first two Roman ventures “Pompei” and “Imperium” were by no means the worst books I read in the years of their publication.

Then came “The Ghost.” The story of a hack writer hired to ghost the memoirs of a former British Prime Minister — transparently Tony Blair — was diminished by two things. First, Harris clearly dislikes Blair’s political decisions so much he lost some of the power of empathy that had been important in his earlier books. Second, it was one of those times when the first person narrator simply didn’t work. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new member of the Soho Crime family. Check out our Soho Crime jacket designers’ newborn baby Zoe rocking a Soho Crime onesie. We like to get them while they’re young.

I can’t believe the extent of the corruption being uncovered in Israel’s government.

My predecessor as Prime Minister drifted home from vacation yesterday – without any envelopes stuffed with cash, as far as we know — and made a mopey statement about yet another investigation into bribery and fraud and breach of trust on his part. He’s alleged to have been in cahoots with a bunch of shady property developers, lawyers and municipal officials, so that a big, tacky building could be put up in southern Jerusalem to provide luxury dwellings for property developers and lawyers. Oh, and the former State Prosecutor, too – apparently she has an apartment there. I don’t draw any conclusions from that, though. I’m not an investigator. I just run the country. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one thing that authoring a series of novels will teach you, it’s that you can’t wait for inspiration. But you can prompt it, give it little electric shocks that’ll keep it bubbling within you. Here are a few methods I use to do that.

I go to the places I’m writing about. I talk to people who might be similar to (or even the basis for) my characters. I read about them and their world. I engage in the same activities in which they specialize. But I also read about entirely different subjects – so long as they’re extremely well-written. Read the rest of this entry »

In a small country you can find all the important decision-makers sweating in one gym.
JERUSALEM — The heads of all the crime families in New York used to get together every Wednesday night at the Ravenite Social Club on Mulberry Street in Little Italy. If you were looking for an Israeli parallel, you could do worse than the gym I work out at. Read the rest of this entry »

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?” I think it’s because of the way I lift my eyebrow in my official photograph. I thought it was sexy and devil-may-care, but apparently it makes me look hawkish and too clever for my own good. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted this on Global Post. JERUSALEM — There’s an old Arab aphorism: “A man with a plan takes action; a man with two plans gets confused.” Apply that to the Israelis and to the Palestinians, and the nonsensical sequence of recent events in the Middle East starts to fall into a comprehensible pattern.

It’s not a pleasant pattern, because it leads to war. Read the rest of this entry »

In this weekend’s Sunday Times of London my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef is described 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 relocates his Palestinian series hero Omar Yussef to a wintry New York, where a UN conference provides a pretext for visiting his son Ala; but when he reaches Ala’s Brooklyn apartment, he discovers the headless body of one of his roommates. Yussef teams up with a local cop to investigate, and confirms his status as one of the most beguiling of current sleuths as they try to establish whether the victim was killed by a drug dealer, a romantic rival or an Islamist cell intent on a high-profile assassination. Read the rest of this entry »