Anyhow, that’s enough digression, even for a blog post. So back to the point: All my previous video clips – which can be viewed on my website – have necessitated no more than a jaunt to Nablus, Gaza or Bethlehem, where I’ve been filmed chatting about the latest adventures of my Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef. This time, I have to recreate the world of Vienna, 1791, for my historical mystery.

For the novel, creating the atmosphere, the details and the locations of Vienna during Mozart’s time brought me to amass a few shelf-loads of research, to learn piano so I could play some Mozart, and to travel in Austria and Central Europe.

The video places a few more demands. This week I’ve been getting into costume.

I found a theatrical costume shop on a tiny alley in the oldest part of West Jerusalem just off Jaffa Road. Run by a delightful, bustling French lady named Francoise Coriat, the compact store is packed up and down (hanging from the ceiling too) with pirate suits, musketeer costumes, and every other period-wear you’d ever need. Mostly Francoise hires them out to theaters.

She kitted me out with two big flouncy dresses for the two female musicians who’ll feature in the video and three frock-coat suits for the men. And a Little Mozart costume for my three year old son.

Then it was time to figure out exactly how to film it. My videographer pal David Blumenfeld produces new equipment each year when it’s time for me to get a video done. This time he has a little slide to mount on top of his tripod; put the camera (these things are so small these days) on it and you can make a dolly shot that looks positively cinematic. His lighting is increasingly creative too. So I was sure it’d look great.

I worked up a script last week, aiming to make the video seem more like a movie trailer than the more documentary/journalistic style of most of my previous promos. Why? Well, first because MOZART’S LAST ARIA isn’t based on a topic you’re used to seeing featured in the news – whereas Palestinians, unfortunately for them, are very much in the news. Morever, it seems to me people are used to reading novels which are like movies – almost entirely visual, very little of the internal narrative of novels written a century ago – so perhaps book promotional videos ought to be that way too. This is how we think of stories these days.

True, said my friend Matthew Kalman, a journalist based here in Jerusalem who’s also a filmmaker. But beware, he said, that you don’t expect amateur actors to…act.

A good point, and one David and I bore in mind as we figured out just what we’d need to shoot. We didn’t want to put too much pressure on the musicians who’d be in the video by asking them to express emotion and to have it pass across their faces in the restrained manner of film acting.

The main thing, of course, is that I got to dress up in silk stockings and wear a wig. Just so I could look like Mozart, you understand.

Well, more on all this next week when you’ll hear how the actual shooting went.

After the city’s economy was devastated by the Palestinian intifada over the last decade, Bethlehem’s economic recovery has picked up pace in the last year with gross domestic product rising by 9 percent. This Christmas the city’s streets are packed with tourists and pilgrims, and if the holy family were to arrive today they would, once more, discover that there’s no room at the inn — Bethlehem’s hotels are filled to capacity.

Locals see this as an important marker on their road back to normality. “Tourists are coming. Things are all right in Bethlehem,” said Walid Zawahra, a taxi driver.

Zawahra stood beside his yellow Mercedes cab, watching tourists pour through the massive gate in Israel’s security wall around Bethlehem. The gate is opened only once a year, for Christmas, so that the Roman Catholic Patriarch can enter in procession with his entourage from Jerusalem. The rest of the year, visitors must pass through a smaller entrance at the nearby checkpoint.

Security remains a factor, however. The streets beyond the gate were closed to traffic. Palestinian security forces were out in force on the roads around Rachel’s Tomb, which Jews believe to be the site of the burial of the biblical matriarch and where Israeli soldiers still stand guard. The tomb, which has taken on the dimensions of a fortress in the last decade, is a frequent point of friction between the soldiers and Palestinian rioters, and the authorities don’t want Christmas marred by any violence.

The Church of the Nativity, which stands over the site of Jesus’s birth, opened Friday after a 24-hour security closure, as police swept it for bombs before the Patriarch’s arrival for Midnight Mass.

In Manger Square, outside the church, two new cafes have been doing a bumper business, hosting local families and tourists late into the night. A stage built against the buttresses of the Armenian monastery at the front of the church hosted live musical performances in the evening.

The Bethlehem area also has something novel to entertain its young people — namely, something to do after dark. Until recently, youngsters in Bethlehem complained that their city shut down at twilight. Two night clubs opened in the last few months in the largely Christian district of Beit Jala. One of them is named Taboo, because it serves pork and, therefore, contravenes the proscriptions of Islam by which most West Bank restaurants operate.

The intifada, which began in 2000, devastated Bethlehem’s tourist-oriented economy. Almost 90 percent of the souvenir shops in the city closed. Many of the city’s residents emigrated to the United States or South America. Most of those who left were Christian Palestinians, making a shrinking minority feel even more threatened.

This year, the relative quiet has encouraged tourists to return. The Palestinian Tourism Ministry says a record 1.5 million people have visited Bethlehem this year, 60 percent more than last year.

The Bethlehem Chamber of Commerce says there are 31 hotels operating in the city, compared to only six in 1995. Three more hotels are under construction.

Officials at the Chamber of Commerce add that the biggest disco in the Middle East will begin construction in Bethlehem in March.

As always in the Middle East, there remain plenty of reasons to cry “Humbug” in the face of this Christmas spirit. Peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians are stymied, meaning that there’s always the chance violence could engulf Bethlehem once more. And local Christians point out that their numbers have dwindled to a mere 2 percent of the West Bank population, raising the possibility of future Christmases more or less without Christians.

But the city the Patriarch enters today is more attuned to the message of hope inherent in the Christmas holiday than it has been for years.

(I posted this first on Global Post.)

As far as the Palestinian Authority is concerned, the priests may as well have been speaking, well, Greek. Because the road was built by Israel over land the Palestinians consider their own, officials in Ramallah condemned the priests’ participation in the road’s inauguration ceremony.

Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad “expressed surprise” that the Orthodox priests joined the director-general of the Israeli Tourism Ministry Tuesday at the monastery, which clings to a cliff side over Wadi Qelt, a deep canyon running down to the Jordan Valley. Another Palestinian minister said the monks’ presence “gave a deceiving impression” about the status of the land around St. George’s.

Like other stretches on the rocky road that still clings to the misnomer “peace process,” the Palestinian protest will fade like a mirage in the desert surrounding St. George’s. More important in the end is the (literally) concrete path laid out for pilgrims to visit one of the most important and most beguilingly beautiful sacred sites in the Holy Land.

Archbishop Aristarchos, the secretary of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem and the leader of the brief prayer service, was diplomatic in his comments, when asked about Palestinian complaints over the road.

“This is a monastery of prayer for peace in our region, for peace in the Holy Land,” Aristarchos said. “The road brings full access for pilgrims who are messengers of peace to the Holy Land.”

The $500,000 road cuts over from the main Jerusalem-Jericho highway in front of the entrance to an Israeli settlement. It snakes around dusty dunes and dry wadis. To the east, the view is hazy down over the Jordan Valley to the mountains rising in the Hashemite Kingdom. After a 10-minute drive, visitors arrive at a parking lot.

The ride used to take over an hour in a four-by-four vehicle or considerably longer for hikers.

Tourism in Israel is at record levels, according to the Tourism Ministry, mainly fueled by pilgrimages. This year 3.1 million visitors came to Israel, which is higher than the bumper year of 2000, when the visit of Pope John Paul II brought a boost. After the papal visit, the violence of the intifada made for a six-year tourism nightmare in which most people were too scared to come to sites in Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem.

About two years ago, I noticed an increase in the number of tour buses pulling up at the tiny Greek Orthodox monastery on my street. Hunched Greek ladies wearing black shuffled toward it, cooing at my son as I took him to play in the park next door. Presumably these friendly old crones were in no physical condition to make it through the desert tracks to the monasteries in the Judean Desert.

That’s a shame, because the desert outposts are very important to the history of Christianity in the Holy Land and it’s why Archbishop Aristarchos will surely not sweat the Palestinian protests about the new road too much.

St. George’s stands on the place where Christians believe the Prophet Elijah secluded himself. A bird brought him food. It’s also where Joachim wept with joy when he heard the news that his wife would give birth to Mary, later to be the mother of Jesus.

Built in the fifth century, St. George’s was destroyed by Persian invaders in the seventh century and not fully reconstructed until 1901. The monastery is made of the same khaki limestone as the cliffs on which it nestles. The only splash of color is the turquoise dome of its chapel.

St. George’s is home to some gory relics. In its chapel, visitors can view the bones and skulls of priests killed by the Persians, kept in silver boxes. In a side-chapel, a Romanian monk who died in 1960 has been preserved. His brown, mummified face leers with a full set of teeth through his glass casket.

After the prayer service, nuns brought out baklava, juice and fruit for the guests. Archbishop Aris Shirvanian, a senior official in the Armenian Patriarchate in Jerusalem, tucked into a sandwich on brown bread.

“It’s very important for pilgrims to come to make us local Christians feel supported,” he said. “We’re the living stones of the Church in the Holy Land.”

The people who travel the new road are more important than the authority that built it.

(I posted this first on Global Post.)

As I write more novels, I’ve noticed that love is at the heart of crime fiction. At least, mine, anyway.

Leonard Cohen sings that “love’s the only engine of survival.” It’s a good way to look at the crime novel. Rather than being a race to unravel the murder puzzle and nab the killer, I view the crime novel as the detective’s journey toward understanding about himself. And understanding, in my experience, comes only with the unfolding of love. You can finger the killer and take away the danger he poses, but unless your detective learns about love, emotionally he won’t survive the trauma of his closeness to death.

It may seem that I ought to have figured this out before now – I’m close to completion of the manuscript of my sixth novel, after all. But society hides the centrality of love behind strictures of finance and duty and work, and the format of the crime novel often plays the same role. So it’s only now, 400,000 words down the line, that it’s clear to me.

I started out thinking of crime novels as marked by plot – a murder, an investigation, a discovery of the bad guy – alongside a deeper emotional characterization of the hero and as many of the other characters as I could manage.

Then as my novels went on, I noticed the importance of relationships between the characters. I realized that it was these relationship which gave the novel structure and meaning, rather than the Three Act concept (dilemma, discovery, resolution) of most writing texts. The Three Acts were the superstructure, if you like, but no more.

More recently I’ve looked back and seen that each of my novels was founded around at least one relationship of love. Even in my first, “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” Omar Yussef investigates because of the love he feels for his ex-pupil, George Saba. By the time of my most recently published novel “The Fourth Assassin” the love was even more baldly stated, because Omar had to clear his son of an accusation of murder in Brooklyn, New York.

Now that I’m writing historical crime fiction, the love stories have become even more central. Not because of anything inherent in historical writing. Rather because I’ve accepted the unavoidable: if your aim isn’t to find the love in yourself, then it’s because you don’t know yourself; and if you don’t know yourself, then you won’t be a good detective. Love is so basic that it strips away all the posturing about ourselves which can obscure our thinking.

I suppose I knew this all along, subconsciously. That’s why I made Omar Yussef a family man, rather than a loner; a man of compassion rather than a self-hating cop driven by old resentments.

Most of all, without acknowledging the love you feel for the world around you, as a writer, you’ll produce emotionally empty novels. What better way to understand the centrality of love, than to place your characters in juxtaposition with the kind of action that erases love – murder. So, put more romance among the noir nastiness.

That’s what happened this week when I was invited to the Goethe-Institut in Jerusalem’s Talbiyeh neighborhood to talk about writing in the city with two other locally based writers.

I realized why I don’t write about Jerusalem. Even though I live there. Live here, I mean.

Ann-Kathrin Seidel, the German journalist who organized the evening, asked the other two participants why they write about Jerusalem, though they don’t live there. Both of them have lived long periods of time in Jerusalem, but now live in Tel Aviv. Both said that life in Jerusalem was so intense, they needed just a little space in order to have the energy to write about the place. (Tel Aviv is only one hour’s drive away, so it is, truly, just a little space.)

Gil Yaron, a doctor and a journalist who has authored an excellent book called “Jerusalem: a Political-Historical City Guide,” writes about Israel and the Palestinians from his home in Tel Aviv. Miriam Woelke writes from there no less then five blogs about life in the ultra-Orthodox community – she’s ultra-Orthodox herself though, unlike almost every other woman in that world, she wasn’t wearing a puffy shirt and voluminous skirt. She had on an orange t-shirt and baggy Capri pants. Both write in English and German, having grown up in Germany.

At first I thought Ann-Kathrin’s question didn’t apply to me. After all, I live in Jerusalem. I have long resisted the temptation to trundle down to the coast to where the restaurants are better and the people less aggressive. I’ve thought about living there, but I admit that as a native of a hilly country, I can’t live anywhere completely flat. I’m always lost in Tel Aviv, even though there’s barely a street there I haven’t been down over the years. No slopes from which to orient myself. (It could be that’s why I always know where I am in Dehaisha Refugee Camp, which is on a hill so steep that it almost seems upside down…Maybe there’s another reason why it seems upside down, but that’s for another blog post…)

I thought there were many reasons I haven’t written a novel about Jerusalem. That I see the place every day and it becomes harder truly to see it, for example. But Gil and Miriam made me see something deeper.

People often ask me if I live in a Palestinian neighborhood of Jerusalem, or one of the Palestinian towns where my books are set (Nablus, Bethlehem, Gaza). I tell them that I find it too exhausting to be in those places for very long, and so I don’t live there. Exhausting because my senses are so creatively active the whole time I’m there. The smell of spices and donkey crap, the light that reflects so brightly off the limestone, the dusty wind, the sense of history in the old casbah and the ancient churches.

When I return to the West Jerusalem neighborhood where I live, it’s as though I’ve visited another continent. I can allow my creativity to stabilize, let myself make some sense of what I’ve seen and felt. Only then can I write about it.

It may sound like going to a Metallica gig to get some peace and quiet, but it’s true: Jerusalem is my refuge.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who’s also the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) chief, has decided to stamp down on the man who’s actually made life bearable in the West Bank, Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad, and his plan to declare a unilateral Palestinian state in 2011.

At a meeting of the Fatah Revolutionary Council, effectively the PLO’s ruling body, Abbas said last week that only the PLO was allowed to make decisions on behalf of the Palestinian people.

“It’s not the factions or the governments that take ownership of decisions,” Abbas said.

Abbas wants to continue on the path that has led the Palestinians and the Israelis nowhere. So-called “proximity talks,” in which they talk via U.S. mediators, are supposed to start again soon. They’re unlikely to change anything.

Fayyad, who’s a political independent appointed to his post by Abbas mainly because the Americans insisted on it, announced his plan last year for the declaration of a state. The idea: truly to ready Palestinian institutions for independence and to dare Israel — and the U.S. — to oppose it.

Fayyad’s ability to clean up the economy and reform the security forces has made him popular among Palestinians. He’s also seen as untainted by the violence and corruption of the two main political parties, Abbas’s Fatah and the Hamas rulers of Gaza.

That makes him a potential rival to Fatah. PLO chiefs fear that if Fayyad declares a Palestinian state and the U.S. cheers, maybe its bankrollers in Washington and Oslo and Brussels will cut the PLO out of the power and money loop. That, after all, is what the PLO is all about. “organization” is the operative word in the name of the PLO, rather than “liberation.”

A visit to Bethlehem this week delineates the precise choice on offer between Abbas and Fayyad.

In the Dehaisha Refugee Camp, less than a square mile that’s home to more than 16,000 poor Palestinians, there are bulletholes in the walls of the U.N. girls’ school, left over from the second intifada. A reminder of the final bankruptcy of the PLO and its failure to convert itself from an outlaw band into a true government after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993.

The casualties of that long descent into destruction are painted all over the walls. On the pedestrian bridge the girls cross to reach their school, there’s a 10-foot graffito of Sa’id Eid, masked and firing a mortar. He was killed by an Israeli Apache helicopter in 2003. As the girls come down on the other side, they pass another big stencil in black paint. This time it’s Ayat Akhras, at 16 the youngest female suicide bomber, who left her home in Dehaisha in 2002 to kill herself, a 17-year-old Israeli girl and an aging supermarket guard. She raises a pistol like a naif Bond girl.

At the corner, a falafel restaurant is decorated with murals of all the martyrs of the Palestinians, from Ghassan Kanafani, writer and Popular Front activist killed by the Israelis in Lebanon in 1972, to a collection of the intifada’s most famous victims, and above them Khalil Wazir, the Arafat lieutenant assassinated by Israel in 1988.

A continuation of that fatal litany is, frankly, what’s offered by the “proximity” talks. Because they’ll lead only to frustration, a sense that nothing can be achieved by negotiation, and a resultant impetus toward violence.

What’s the alternative?

Mike Canawati, one of Bethlehem’s leading businessmen, describes trade in his tourist shop on the road to the Church of the Nativity, the site of Jesus’s birth, as “excellent, really excellent.” That’s the result of Fayyad’s ability to convince the Israeli army that checkpoints can be lifted and his commitment to a higher level of training among Palestinian security forces, so that tourists don’t fear to enter Bethlehem as they did for much of the last decade.

It isn’t a total shift. The dangers are simply less immediately apparent. Canawati still sits at his desk flanked by a screen with 16 different closed-circuit images of the store, the alley behind it, his black Hummer parked at the side of the building.

Only the night before we met, he had welcomed 700 Italian diners in his banquet hall near the church. “We should be thankful to these people for coming to our town,” Canawati said. During the dinner, a group of Fatah people entered and unfurled banners protesting that the Italians would later hold a meeting with Israelis in Jerusalem. “I had a big argument with them,” he said, “and I threw them out.”

Back in Dehaisha, I took my son to a birthday party at a friend’s home. My friend spent nine years in an Israeli jail without charge. He was, in fact, in jail seven years ago when the birthday boy was born. Now he’s studying for a Master’s degree in law.

A clown blew long balloons and tied them into the shape of swords. I found myself strangely relieved that they weren’t bent into Kalashnikovs.

When the birthday cake came out, the clown’s assistant emerged dressed as SpongeBob SquarePants. She sang “Happy Birthday” in Arabic with the aid of ear-splitting amplification and did some unexpected SpongeBob belly dancing moves.

Whatever Abbas and his PLO cronies say, that’s the kind of reality we should be wishing on the people of Dehaisha.

(I posted this today on Global Post.)

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.

Some of that might sound obvious. I’ve written a series of Palestinian crime novels, so it stands to reason that I’ve spent the last decade and a half in Gaza, Bethlehem, Nablus, Jerusalem, tasting and smelling and talking and looking. I even force myself to read the drivel that gets written about this place in journalism and nonfiction—occasionally I come across something good, but mainly it just gets me down. How many times can you listen to a mediocre pop song? Well, that’s how most Middle East journalism sounds in my ear.

For a novel I have coming out next year about Mozart, I learned to play the piano. I learned that I wasn’t much good at it, but I also saw inside the music in a way I couldn’t have done merely by listening.

Not so obvious, however, might be the wide reading. A number of writers I’ve met or read about say they don’t have time to read anything that isn’t directly related to their research. In other words, if I’m writing about Berlin, it’s goodbye to Raymond Chandler for the next 12 months.

Well, T.S. Eliot wrote that “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” I can look back at my literary efforts as an undergraduate and see what imitation there was throughout all of it. Now I’m mature (I try to fight it; I work out; but I concede, I’m maturing…) and I’ve figured out how to steal.

What Eliot meant was that it takes a while, as a writer, to realize how to make things your own. That means going beyond the plagiaristic imitation of youth, which is humble and filled with homage, to the confident sense that whatever you see another writer do, you can do it better. Then when you read something good, it doesn’t appear in your work as the same thing—it spurs you to develop your own spin on the thought that’s provoked in you by what you’ve read.

Let me give you an example. I challenge any one of you to show me a contemporary writer who can build a character in a fuller, more convincing manner than Hilary Mantel, who won the Booker Prize last year for her masterful “Wolf Hall.” If anything, her 1992 classic “A place of Greater Safety,” a novel about the French Revolution, is even more amazing than her now-famous prize-winner.

“Greater Safety” tells the story of the entire revolution through the characters of Robespierre, Danton and Desmoulins. From their childhoods to (it’s a historical novel so I don’t have to give any spoiler alerts) their executions. Each of them is built slowly, and we see their character arc in a way that even they don’t—watch their idealism tainted with violence, until it turns on them. Because we take that journey with them, we care more deeply for them, even as they become murderous and unjust.

The “stealing” comes in whenever I see a point that Mantel uses to build that empathy. Robespierre, we learn, always carries a tiny copy of Rousseau in his pocket. Some time later it’s on his desk and Desmoulins notices it. Just one sentence. A couple hundred pages later someone quotes Rousseau against him and only his close friends understand that he’s entirely defeated. We know he’s a man who has bent principles for his friend Desmoulins, but he can’t desert them completely. It’s a choice between Desmoulins, whom he loves, or the book that he keeps close to his heart. Books always win in contests like that.

That doesn’t make me want to replicate the exact same thing in my next book – that’s what I might’ve tried when I was 19. Instead, I think of ways in which to send a signal to the reader. To plant an object that inspires a character, that takes them on the path on which we follow them in the novel. Until ultimately it underlies their collision with another character; makes compromise an impossible undermining of everything they believe about themselves.

That’s stealing, and it’s a good thing to do.

You can find such moments in the small factoids of history books, if you’re researching a period, or in nonfiction. It’s in poems, where a phrase about a frieze on an urn (“Thou still unravished bride of quietness”) will spark a thought about your memories of your own wedding or of a sexual exploit which you can use for a character in your book.

A writer whose obvious focus is character would be the most direct place to start. In other words, not the kind of ultra-bland snoozing that appears in the short fiction of The New Yorker, which always seems to be written as though it were designed to mimic a relatively dull person telling you a story in a cocktail party or at the counter of a bodega.

Choose something with sweep, like Mantel. Someone with an eye for a mordant detail, like Graham Greene in “The Honorary Consul.” Someone who shows you an entire, devastated culture through the eyes of one man, like Martin Cruz Smith’s investigator Arkady Renko.

A novel’s like a marathon. Stop and sit down at the side of the road and no amount of sprinting will get you to the finish line. You have to write every day and once you’re started you can’t stop. “Stealing” is a way of warming up for the long run.

It’s a worthy premise, because it’s aimed at comprehending people who are frequently written off as bestial, bloodthirsty psychopaths, as though they’d been born that way. As a journalist with 14 years experience in the Middle East, I’ve written such stories often enough. But in my new novel I decided to highlight the desperate world of Arabs who struggle against the extremism that drags them toward their inevitable, tragic end. This is the most profound way of humanizing Arabs, because it shows them clinging to the very things that make them just like us, rather than succumbing to the ugliness of a politics that sets them against us.

That’s why I see my new crime novel, “The Fourth Assassin,” as an Islamic “Romeo and Juliet” set in the context of a political assassination plot in New York. I want to put a human face on Arabs, who’re so often seen as stereotypical terrorists. But I want to focus less on the pain and confusion that leads to hatred, and instead to reveal the love that can provide hope for Arab people in the face of so much destruction and division. To illustrate, for Western readers, what they’re up against, too.

“The Fourth Assassin” begins with Omar Yussef, the hero of my previous three Palestinian crime novels, arriving in New York for a UN conference. He uncovers an assassination conspiracy involving some of his former pupils from back home in Bethlehem. It unfolds in the neighborhood of Brooklyn called Bay Ridge. With its growing Palestinian community, Bay Ridge is in fact becoming known as “v”.

As he delves into the background of the plot, Omar looks for political explanations. That’s what journalists and writers typically do when they examine the Middle East. But gradually Omar sees that there’s a love story behind what’s happening. A love story between a young Sunni Muslim who has been sucked into the assassination plot and a Lebanese Shia girl who wants to enjoy the freedoms of American life.

The book’s a crime novel, so I’m not giving anything away when I say that Omar sees these lovers as tragic, somehow doomed by the politics around them. But he acknowledges – as the lovers do – that their human connection is so important that it’s worth any sacrifice. Just as Romeo does when he rails against the family politics that would deny him his Juliet and designate such divisions as fated. “Then I defy you, stars,” he calls out.

With Romeo and Juliet, the doom that surrounds them isn’t the point of the play. It’s their hope and defiance that draws them to us. If Shakespeare had written a three-hour examination of the political conflict between the Montagues and the Capulets, I don’t expect we’d pay it much attention these days. Neither would we be interested in the play had it focused on Tybalt, Juliet’s hot-headed, murderous cousin, or Mercutio, the pal of Romeo who shouts “a plague on both your houses” as he dies. Yet that’s exactly what journalists and writers give us in their attempts to “explain” the Arab world.

Love is what helps us to understand those who seem otherwise to be set against us. That’s what Omar Yussef learns in “The Fourth Assassin.” I hope the novel will help my readers see that love is as much a part of life for Arabs as the violence that dominates their portrayal in the news pages.

As the winter wind came cold off the Judean Desert, I watched her weep and thought: “I have to write a novel about this.”

Forgive me if that sounds callous, but I’m a writer. Or, I should say, that’s the moment when I became a writer.

I was Time Magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief, covering the violence of the Palestinian intifada, when I went to that bereaved mother in her village on the edge of Bethlehem in 2002. I had always written fiction, but only published a few short stories. In the midst of the despair that engulfed Israelis and Palestinians, I found the very thing that could make me happy – the material for my series of Palestinian crime novels.

The killing of that woman’s son as he crept home in the dark was the basis for the opening death in my first novel “The Collaborator of Bethlehem.” The book won a Crime Writers Association Dagger. Since then I’ve published two more crime novels set in the Palestinian towns.

They’re a response to the emotional questions that, as a journalist, I was never able to answer. Strangely, fiction proves to be a better way to understand extreme events than journalism.

Since the first time I set foot in the West Bank in 1996, I had grown disillusioned with the ability of journalism to convey the depth of what I learned about the Palestinians. Back then, I visited the family of a Nablus man tortured to death in one of Yasser Arafat’s jails. The news article I wrote was a good one, uncovering the internal Palestinian violence so often overshadowed by the more spectacular conflict with Israel. But my impressions were much deeper.

I was struck by the candor and dignity with which the dead youth’s family spoke to me; the sheer alien nature of the place thrilled me. At the entrance to the family’s house in the casbah, an old oil drum held black flags and palm fronds, symbols of Islamic mourning. Men sat around smoking under a dark awning. I felt a powerful sense of adventure, as though I had uncovered an unknown culture.

The lawlessness of Palestinian life also gave me great characters for my fictionalized good guys. But also the villains. Unfortunately there are many Palestinians who have strong motivations to kill each other. I’ve spent a lot of time over the years with some of these men, trying to learn why they take the path of violence—time that has led to a deeper characterization of the villains in my books.

With my new novel, “The Fourth Assassin,” I brought my sleuth Omar Yussef to New York because I wanted him to confront the most important issue of the last decade – an issue which is crystallized in its most horrifically concrete form in the city of 9/11.

It’s a natural progression for a series that began in the cabbage patch near Bethlehem. When I stood there, it was seven months after the attacks on New York and Washington. The questions posed to anyone thinking about the Middle East had just become so much more complex. Too complex and emotional for journalism to encompass them and, all these years later, for politicians, too.

Whether it’s a single sniper’s bullet cutting through the chest of a man outside his mother’s house or a jetliner bursting through a 110-story building, my novels are aimed at the most explosive points in our recent history. That’s why I simply had to write them.

(I posted this on a joint International Crime Authors blog I write with three other writers. Check it out.)

A Different View of Palestine
Matt Beynon Rees has staked out real estate in the Middle East for his acclaimed CWA Dagger-winning series of crime novels featuring Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef. The books have sold to publishers in 23 countries and earned him the title “the Dashiell Hammett of Palestine” (L’Express).

His newest, The Fourth Assassin, out on February 1, finds Yussef in New York for a UN conference and visiting his son, Ala, who lives in Bay Ridge, a Brooklyn neighborhood with a large Palestinian community. Of course murder and mayhem greet Yussef in New York, just as in Palestine, and he is ultimately forced to investigate in order to clear his son of a murder charge.

Scene of the Crime caught up with Matt in New York, where he is promoting his new book. He was kind enough to take time away from his busy schedule to answer a few questions.

Describe your connection to Jerusalem and Palestine. How did you come to live there or become interested in it?

I arrived in Jerusalem for love. Then we divorced. But I stayed because I felt an instant liking for the openness of Palestinians (and Israelis). When I arrived I had just spent five years as a journalist covering Wall Street. Frankly that exposed me to a far more alien culture than I experienced when I became a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. People in the Middle East are always so eager to tell you how they FEEL; on Wall Street no one ever talked about feelings, just figures. Rotten material for a novel, figures are. I’ve lived now 14 years in Jerusalem.

What things about Palestine make it unique and a good physical setting in your books?

Palestine is a place we all THINK we know. It’s in the news every day. Yet the longer I’ve been there, the more I understand that the news shows us only the stereotypes of the place. Terrorism, refugees, the vague exoticism of the muezzin’s call to prayer. What better for a novelist than to take something with which people believe themselves to be familiar and to show them how little they really know. To turn their perceptions around. The advantage is that I begin from a point of some familiarity – it isn’t a completely alien location about which readers know nothing. Imagine if I’d set my novels in, say, Tunisia or Bahrain. Not far from where my novels take place, but much more explanation needed because they’re rather a blank. With Palestine, I’m able to manipulate and disturb the existing knowledge of the place we all have.

Did you consciously set out to use Palestine as a “character” in your books, or did this grow naturally out of the initial story or stories?

I arrived in Jerusalem as a journalist, but I’ve felt that I’m on a vacation every day of those 14 years I’ve lived there. Every minute I spend in a Palestinian town or village, my creative senses are heightened, to the point where it becomes quite exhausting. Part of that is because of the people, the way they speak and feel. But most of it is the experience of place. The light so bright off the limestone. The smells of spices and shit in the markets. The cigarette smoke and damp in the covered alleys. It’s important to note that each Palestinian town is extremely distinctive – which might not be evident from the news. My first novel takes place in the historic town of Bethlehem. The second is in Gaza, which seems like another world. Nablus, where the third book is set is an ancient Roman town, built over by the Turks. …My new novel sees my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef come to Brooklyn. I move him around BECAUSE place is the driver of the novels. The main characters are the same; but I draw something different out of each of them by shifting them to new places.

How do you incorporate location in your fiction? Do you pay overt attention to it in certain scenes, or is it a background inspiration for you?

The texture of a Palestinian town is so rich, it ends up defining the atmosphere of the novel. With the casbah of Nablus for example: I was stuck in its old alleys during the intifada with gunfire all around, not knowing who or what might be round the next corner, and it seemed so sinister and beautiful at the same time. The locations are more than background. They’re significant because I write about Palestinian culture and society and people, in the context of a mystery. You couldn’t take my mysteries and change the names and put the Golden Gate in the background and say they were set in San Francisco. They’re the books they are because Palestine is as it is.

How does Omar Yussef interact with his surroundings? And conversely, how does the setting affect him?

Omar Yussef, my detective, is based on a friend of mine who lives in Dehaisha Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. It’s important to me that he should be a Muslim, someone who loves his traditional family life and tribe, someone who belongs very deeply to Bethlehem. That’s because I’m trying to show readers what they’re missing when they see the Palestinians only as stereotypical terrorists or victims. His reaction to the chaos around him is that of an honorable man who finally is driven to stand up against the negative forces at work in his town.

Has there been any local reaction to your works? What do local Palestinian and Israeli reviewers think, for example. Are your books in translation in Palestine, and if so, what reaction have they gotten from reviewers?

Hanan Ashrawi, a former Palestinian peace negotiator and a leading political figure, said of The Collaborator of Bethlehem that “it reflects the reality of life in Bethlehem– unfortunately.” (After all, it’s a crime novel of exceeding chaos.) I get a lot of emails from Arabs noting that I’m showing the reality of their people in a way that isn’t reflected in Arab media – which just blames Israel for everything – or in Western media, where the Palestinians are usually just stereotypes set in opposition to Israel. Translation into Arabic is a slow business – Henning Mankell sold 40 million books before he got an Arab translation last year – but I’m hopeful. Meanwhile the first book was translated into Hebrew and got good reviews. Israelis were very glad to have an opportunity to learn about life beyond the wall that they’ve built between Jerusalem and Bethlehem.

Of the novels you have written set in Palestine, do you have a favorite book or scene that focuses on the place? Could you quote a short passage or give an example of how the location figures in your novels?

In my third novel. The Samaritan’s Secret, there’s a scene in an old palace in the Nablus casbah called the Touqan Palace. This was the real palace I discovered on my first visit to the West Bank (to cover the funeral of a man who’d been tortured to death in the local jail). I finished my reporting and went for a walk about the casbah. I’d heard about the Touqan Palace and a friendly Palestinian helped me find it. We shouldered open the door, climbed through the goat pen inside, and came into a courtyard strung with cheap laundry and with chickens living in the ornate fountain at the center. The wealthy family that built the palace had moved to a new place up the hillside; now the palace was home to poor refugees. It struck me very powerfully as a political irony. But I also loved the stink of the chickens and the way the goats nuzzled at me and the children who lived there came through the dust to chat with me. I tried to get that feeling of a people estranged from their history into the novels through Omar Yussef, who’s a sleuth but also a history teacher. So the scenes in the Touqan Palace are quite pivotal, thematically, for me.

Who are your favorite writers, and do you feel that other writers influenced you in your use of the spirit of place in your novels?

I love Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky, Let it Come Down). He used to travel the Arab world and, each day, would incorporate into his writing something that had happened the previous day as he journeyed. That’s a technique I’ve used. It makes you look sharply at the emotions you experience when you’re in a strange place. In some ways it was most useful when I wrote The Fourth Assassin, which is set in Brooklyn. I know New York very well but I made a great effort to see the place as a new immigrant or a total foreigner might. I discovered that it was daunting and oppressive and crowded and huge and threatening and cold as hell – it actually made me a little depressed. Which was the point of doing my research that way. I think of it as method acting for writers.

Visit Matt at his homepage, and also on his blog. Thanks for the insightful comments, Matt, and good luck with the new book.