There are some excellent, well-written tales in bookshops this summer – take one to the beach and you won’t look up till sundown. The Saladin Murders by Matt Rees: Omar Yussef is one of crime fiction’s most original protagonists. A schoolteacher in Bethlehem, and a recovering alcoholic, he takes on the thugs and killers of Hamas and Fatah with nothing but courage and his wits. The Saladin Murders is set in Gaza where Yussef is sent to inspect a school. His fellow teacher is arrested by the Palestinian security forces but Yussef refuses to leave and instead starts asking increasingly dangerous questions. Gaza is violent, brutal and corrupt.

Matt Beynon Rees is the author of the acclaimed series of novels featuring Palestinian detective Omar Yussef: The Collaborator of Bethlehem, which won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award, A Grave in Gaza, The Samaritan’s Secret, and the newly released The Fourth Assassin.

He applied the Page 69 Test to the new novel and reported the following:

The first three novels in my Palestinian crime series take place in the West Bank and Gaza. All the characters are Palestinian, with the exception of a couple of foreign aid workers. But I want my series to show the full extent of Palestinian life, and half the people in the world who call themselves Palestinian don’t live in Palestine. So my hero Omar Yussef hits the road.

The Fourth Assassin, the new book in my series, takes place in the UN on the east side of Manhattan, and in the section of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, that’s becoming known as “Little Palestine,” as immigrants from the Jerusalem area make it their home.

Page 69 hits the two main topics that make the book compelling.

First, the alienation felt by a foreigner when confronted with the enormity and chaos of New York. I wanted to show how immigrants might turn inward, rejecting the society around them, becoming religious fundamentalists. Here’s the description of a subway ride from Omar’s point of view:

“The train rumbled at low speed onto the strangely terrifying superstructure of the Manhattan Bridge. Downriver, beyond the massive girders and the mesh of electric lines, the Brooklyn Bridge arched over the water. Its famous towers sprayed thick cables along its span. Omar Yussef felt as though he were flying out of control through the air, high above the river and the tangle of highway along the shoreline. An old Vietnamese man screamed into his cell phone over the noise of the train. The wheels rang like the slow beating of a giant steel kettledrum until the train slipped back under the earth, jumped to a different track, and picked up speed. ‘This is an unnatural way of traveling,’ Omar Yussef whispered.”

Second, Page 69 contains an important spark for the mystery at the heart of the book. Up to this point, no one but Omar Yussef acknowledges that things seem awry. But now his sidekick, Bethlehem Police Chief Khamis Zeydan, says to him:

“‘My brother, I have a bad feeling about this visit. Some danger that I can’t predict.’”

Now if that doesn’t hook you, nothing will. Read on to page 70, eh?

That’s a myth. The place is just like the Middle East… (Look, I write fiction, but I may be onto something. Read on.)

On my recent reading tour, I stopped in Basel as a guest of the superb Literaturhaus Basel. Everyone told me to go the city’s main art museum for an exhibition of Van Gogh landscapes. After a stroll over the Rhine and up into Basel’s beautiful Baroque district, I stumbled on a scene reminiscent of a UN food station in Gaza.

Ok, not quite. That’s the fiction writer meeting the sensationalist journalist, perhaps. But still it wasn’t Swiss.

There were two lines. One was vaguely marked as being for the Van Gogh exhibit. The other, for the rest of the collection. I decided the extreme length of the Van Gogh line was enough to put me off. I joined the other line, which turned out to move very slowly.

A pair of Italian-speaking Swiss ladies tried to jump under the rope to skip ahead in the van Gogh line. A guard told them this wasn’t fair and sent them back. But a few minutes later I saw they were back in position, keeping a low profile.

When I got to the front of my line, I discovered that I could buy a ticket for Van Gogh there too.

It left me wondering what’s happened to the Swiss (sort of.) If I hadn’t lived in the Middle East and encountered far more un-line-like lines, I might’ve really blown a fuse. Maybe I’ve just calmed down enough in my life that now I’m a little bit Swiss myself, trusting that if someone else pushes in it’s their problem and I oughtn’t to worry about it.

I roamed the wonderful museum and returned to my hotel the Krafft Basel. I settled into a chair overlooking the Rhine and asked for a coffee. It seemed I was too late for the lunchroom. I was directed to the smoking room at the front of the hotel.

Now I’d already ventured into that very attractive room. Only to be repelled by the stench of cigars. It smelled like my great-uncle’s dungarees after he’d drunk a bottle of Johnny Walker and peed himself. (Switzerland’s probably the only place in Western Europe these days where you can settle down to make a public area of a hotel smell like a nasty urinal. God bless the EU.)

With a Middle Eastern refusal to accept rules, I told the waitress she could serve me where I was and I’d leave before the remaining diners were done. She agreed. So maybe it’s my fault the Swiss allow rules to be bent.

I set out that evening to corrupt more upstanding Swiss. I enjoyed my reading at the Literaturhaus, which was organized by Katrin Eckert there. (She took me over the Rhine in an old wooden ferry that’s powered by nothing more than the current of the river. One of the most peaceful experiences I think it’s possible to have in a big city.) She brought in Rafael Newman, a translator and all-around intelligent fellow, to interview me and translate.

I’m used to more or less the same kinds of questions at my readings (for which I bear no grudge, they being the most apposite things that come to mind on reading my books). But when Rafael asked me about my literary influences, he had something different in mind: “I’m thinking of the sandstorm in A GRAVE IN GAZA, which is really blinding, and Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, back through Milton and Samson Agnonistes, going right back to Greek tragedy, where one of the great tragedies ends with a storm.”

“I’m glad you asked me that,” I said, pondering how to adapt my usual answer about the influence of Raymond Chandler on my books. “Mainly I go back to the Bible…”

The ability to bullshit on my feet is one of the few things I gained from three years at Oxford University. Anyway, I told you I was corrupting the Swiss…

Next it was on to a family vacation with my wife, son, and babysitter on Lake Geneva. We stayed in a small village on the slopes of the Jura, smelling the cooking-pie scent of the ripe grapes on the vines. In Nyon, a stinking rich little place on the lake if ever I saw one, I was happily fellating a $5 single-scoop chocolate ice-cream when Graeme Le Saux, formerly an England soccer played, walked by with his black labrador.

During his career, Le Saux was sometimes taunted by other players for being less manly (read, less ill-educated) than they. One Liverpool player, Robbie Fowler, famously pointed his backside at Le Saux and made a comment about what he imagined Le Saux might like to do to it. Well, now who’s taunting who. Fowler presumably lives in crime-ridden Liverpool, waking every morning to wonder if his hubcaps are still on his car. Old Graeme lives on Lake Geneva.

I, too, sometimes wonder if I could’ve lived my life in a more pleasurable place than the Middle East, where I’ve been for 13 years now. But as I licked my Black Forest ice-cream, I looked out over the blue lake and thought that I wasn’t doing so badly as lifestyles go. And the hubcaps on my wife’s car were stolen long ago.

How long did it take you to get published?

My first books were academic literary criticism and thus do not really count. My first novella “Moos” (1984) was rejected by a couple of publishers, but after some months of straying and drifting over editors’ desks it was eventually accepted and became a so called critics’ success, i.e. praises but sales to cry for.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I don’t think the circulating How-to-write-books-books are helpful. There’s no advice to talent or inspiration. But I did enjoy Stephen King’s “On Writing”, because it is very honest and unpretentious. And I also enjoyed Thomas Mann’s “Novel of a Novel” about the making of his novel “Doktor Faustus”. You can learn from it that ingenuity cannot be learned.

What’s a typical writing day?

Get up at about 8 o’clock, jog through the park, have breakfast, sit on desk, wait for inspiration which is like a cat (doesn’t come when called but only if it wants to), start editing and re-writing yesterday’s shift and use that as a springboard for today’s. Sometimes it works. Have lunch. Have a nap. Afternoons are for research, for reading and correspondances, also for daydreaming about all the great works I haven’t started yet and perhaps never will.

Plug your latest book. What’s it about? Why’s it so great?

It’s a novel about a German-jewish historian who escapes from the Nazis in 1935, emigrates to the USA, struggles through the miseries of exile, makes finally a career at a New England college – but eventually falls victim to the McCarthy witchhunt in the early 50’s. It’s a book about America, seen through the eyes and experiences of a German there. It’s called “Die Schatten der Ideen” (The Shadows of Ideas). If at all and why it’s great should be decided by the reader – the least I can say about it it’s pretty voluminous.

How much of what you do is:
a) formula dictated by the genre within which you write?
Very little to nothing
b) formula you developed yourself and stuck with?
Pretty much all
c) as close to complete originality as it’s possible to get each time?
I’m trying hard …

What’s your favorite sentence in all literature, and why?

“This is my favorite book in all the world, though I have never read it.” It’s the first sentence of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride”. It is still my favorite book in all the world and I’m quite jealous about not having written it myself.

What’s the best descriptive image in all literature?

If one picks “the best” one wrongs at least one hundred others. One candidate among the hundreds could be the golden dollar nailed to the mast of the “Pequod” in Melville’s “Moby Dick”.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

Depends on the subject. For “Schatten der Ideen” it took me about a whole year to get my facts together in order to get the fiction. But I have also written books which needed nearly no research.

Where’d you get the idea for your main character?

I ask myself who I could be if I would not be the one I am.

Do you have a pain from childhood that compels you to write? If not, what does?

Not specifically. But I do think that everybody who writes misses something in life (same for readers). R. L. Stevenson once said that writing means to an adult what playing means to the child. That means that not only pain and suffering compel us to write but also pleasures and fun, not only the lack of something but also affluence. (W. Somerset Maugham thought so, too.)

What’s the best idea for marketing a book you can do yourself?

Give it to a reader who will recommend it to another reader who will recommend it to the next and ever so on. Worldwide.

What’s your experience with being translated?

It’s flattering. And it’s interesting, because one realizes that the book one wrote is more than this one and very book. It has siblings now.

Do you live entirely off your writing? How many books did you write before could make a living at it?

I live entirely from writing, or to be more precise from the royalties. That includes not only my own books, but also translations and writing for the media. But my own books are the core of it all.

What’s the strangest thing that happened to you on a book tour?

Being introduced to the audience as someone else.

What’s your weirdest idea for a book you’ll never get to publish?

Writing the truth.

Referring to the latest of my Palestinian crime novels THE SAMARITAN’S SECRET, he continues: “The local color — the dank, ancient casbahs, the bad mountain roads, the smell of angry, sweaty peasants — is rendered effectively. So, too, is the mortal danger. Yussef, visiting Nablus for the wedding of a policeman friend, is quickly sidetracked into a murder case, the consequences of which may prove catastrophic for the Palestinian Authority.” Read the full article.

Australian blog Reactions to Reading has a new review of the audiobook of my second Palestinian novel THE SALADIN MURDERS (published in the US as A GRAVE IN GAZA). Blogger Bernadette writes of my detective Omar Yussef: “If bravery is defined as taking action in spite of the fear you feel then Omar Yussef must be the bravest hero of them all” while also being a “terrifically believable character.”

I’m also delighted that while she acknowledges the book has a political context, she doesn’t feel I was lecturing her.

You may wonder if people sitting in the ruins of Gaza would want to read crime stories about Palestinians. Actually I’ve received many emails from Palestinians and other Arabs thanking me for showing the reality of the situation in which they live. I hope the people of Gaza will read my books and feel happy to know that their plight is portrayed in as accurate a manner as possible for readers all around the world — rather than in the stereotyped terms often used in newspaper reports.

I hope you’ll consider participating in the donation scheme. Gaza was truly flattened in the war that took place there at the turn of the year. Whether you consider yourself “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israeli,” it’s clear that a better life for the people of Gaza will contribute to a better, more peaceful life for their neighbors. And despite all the other necessities lacking in Gaza, books are one thing no one should have to live without.

Let It Come Down – Paul Bowles

Writers look for resonance. You might say Bowles has us with his title alone, which resonates with doom even before he writes his first sentence. (It’s drawn from “MacBeth.” When the murderers come upon Banquo, he says that it looks like there’ll be rain. The murderer lifts his knife and says: “Let it come down.” Then he kills him.) But with this novel about Morocco, as in his more famous Algerian novel “The Sheltering Sky”, Bowles was even more resonant. When writing, he would often travel through North Africa. Each day, he would incorporate something into his writing that had actually happened during the previous day’s journey. Working in the Middle East, I often follow that technique, adding details from yesterday’s stroll through the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem or a refugee camp in Bethlehem.

The Long Goodbye – Raymond Chandler

This is the novel that Chandler labored over longest and thought his best. He was right. It exposes a deep emotional side to his great detective creation Philip Marlowe. Chandler was the greatest stylist of Twentieth Century American fiction. Try this image, when a beautiful woman has just walked into a bar full of men and everyone falls silent to look at her: “It was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised.” Chandler inspires me to make every image in my book as good as that.

The King Must Die – Mary Renault

I was heading for Jordan to cover the dieing days of King Hussein a decade ago. I happened to pick up a used copy of this book — the title seemed appropriate. But as I waited in a rainy Amman winter for the poor old monarch to die, I discovered that Renault had a capacity to describe the classical world as though she had lived through that era. Her novels are the best portrayal of homosexual love and of the great values of Greece in literature anywhere.

The Cold Six Thousand – James Ellroy

I love to see real characters from Hollywood and Washington turn up in Ellroy’s terse, hip, hardboiled poetic fiction. This story of CIA/FBI renegades in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination is perfect. I saw Ellroy read years ago in New York and he blew me away. If you can find a better opening paragraph to a chapter than this one, let me know: “Heat. Bugs. Bullshit.” Dig it.

The Power and the Glory – Graham Greene

Greene went to Mexico to research a travel book, but he showed that journalistic research can turn into literature of great spirituality with this story of a drunken priest on the run. I try to remember that as I flick through my old reporter’s notebooks for new ideas for my novels. Greene’s is such a powerful examination of the loss of belief that it captivates even a non-Catholic, non-believer like me. The scene where the priest steals a hunk of meat from a stray dog is astonishing. The priest starts to beat the dog: “She just had to endure, her eyes yellow and scared and malevolent shining back at him between the blows.” Like Mexico under dictatorship. Like the priest before a disapproving God.