Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "bbc"

I was a guest on the BBC World Service's The World Today programme this morning. It's an eclectic news show which ranges from Somali pirates, to the Sri Lankan government's bloody new assault on the Tamil Tigers, and the taste of capybara meat (a clandestine delicacy in Venezuela apparently, although the BBC's reporter sampled it in a roquefort sauce, which strikes me as a terrible mistake.) You can listen here. The other guest is a most sympathetic fellow, Kenyan journalist Salim Lone.

I was on the BBC World Service's The World Today chatting about my Palestinian crime novels today. Because of the nature of the show, I also was asked my opinions on Cairo's muezzins, Ethiopian distance running and the value of Michael Jackson's rhinestone-encrusted white glove (you remember, the one he wore at the Motown Awards the first time he ever did the moonwalk). Haven't you always wanted to know what I thought about such issues? Well, there are some well-informed characters on the show too, so it's worth a listen.

I was invited to appear on a BBC World Service programme last weekend. If you’ve ever wondered how radio producers feed their on-air people interesting information about their guests (thus enabling them to create a breezy “chemistry” and to relate the day’s news stories to the knowledge or experience of the guest), here’s the questionnaire sent to me for The World Today by Affan Chowdhry, along with my responses. If you try to imagine what your answers would be to some of the questions, I think you’ll see the unorthodox angles the producer is looking to wheedle out of you.

NAME
Matt Rees

PREFERRED TITLE
Author of a series of crime novels about a Palestinian detective.

WHAT NEWS-RELATED EXPERTISE DO THEY HAVE?
I’ve covered the Middle East as a journalist since 1996 for Time Magazine, Newsweek, The Scotsman, and some American news sites. I’m the author of a book of nonfiction about Israel and Palestine, three novels about Palestine, and a fourth which is coming out in February.

GEOGRAPHICAL BIOGRAPHY?
Grew up in Wales. I worked in Washington and New York from 1989 to 1996, mainly covering Wall Street. Since then I’ve lived in Jerusalem and have worked in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt. My books have been translated into 22 languages and I’ve visited a lot of those places to promote the books.

COUNTRIES VISITED IN 2009?
Denmark, Norway. Germany. France. Switzerland. (Israel, West Bank). Austria. Italy. Malta.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM LAST FEW MONTHS OF THEIR LIFE - PERSONAL OR
PROFESSIONAL?
I took my first holiday for nearly two years—a trip to Swiss wine country (yes, that’s right “Swiss” wine country, on the banks of Lake Geneva), with my wife and son. I completed the manuscript for my fifth novel, which is a historical mystery set in Vienna in 1791.

PLANS FOR THE NEXT MONTH?
In December I’ll be going to Rome, Naples and Malta to research my next novel, a historical novel set in 1610.

WHAT RECENT STORIES IN THE NEWS HAVE HAD DIRECT RELEVANCE TO THEIR LIFE/WORK?
Well, anything to do with Israel and the Palestinians. Although, frankly, nothing much’s really happening on that front…

WHAT ISSUES ARE PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT WHERE YOU LIVE THAT DON'T MAKE THE INTERNATIONAL HEADLINES?
Tarantino’s film, “Inglourious Basterds” is creating quite a stir in Israel over its portrayal of Jewish revenge against Nazis. Many Israelis cheer during the scenes of violent death for the Nazis, while some are disturbed that anyone should be so turned on by killing—even if the victims are the persecutors of Jews. I believe the film is actually quite “Israeli,” in that the Israeli establishment has long been ashamed of the way so many Jews went to their deaths without a fight and, in turn, treated them poorly when the survivors came to Israel.

BRIEF ENCOUNTER – (an interesting, funny or just plain weird anecdote
about meeting someone famous.)
I was the last journalist to interview Salman Rushdie before Khomeini’s fatwa. Unfortunately I was drunk. It was after an awards dinner. He looked rather disgusted with me, and considering that he looks disgusted even when he’s not, you can imagine that it was rather a withering glare he gave me as I tried to string a few sentences together. To be fair, I was only 22 and it was the first time I’d been to an event where all the booze was free.

QUIET ACHIEVER – (one person they have met who does important work with
little recognition)
My friend Caryn Greene immigrated to Israel from Texas and set up Crossroads, a home for at-risk youth who are the children of English-speaking immigrants. They often fall through the cracks of the Hebrew social services. With very little funding, Caryn has run this service for a decade. Most of my son’s babysitters turned out to be kids who’d gone through her doors and came out no longer rebellious but really rather lovely.

SECRET PASSIONS/HIDDEN TALENTS?
I play bass guitar in Jerusalem’s (justifiably) least well-known garage rock band, Dolly Weinstein.

FAVOURITE PIECE OF RADIO EVER?
The “Mornington Crescent” game on “I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue”.

NEW FACT THEY'VE LEARNED THIS THE WEEK (important or trivial, but an interesting "i-never-knew-that" factoid)
I met the man who recently came to live in Israel and whose mother introduced the “pooper-scooper” law in New York (forcing dog owners to pick up their dogs’ poop). I suggested he get a similar law going in Jerusalem, because the city’s streets and parks are fuller of canine poop than a grass verge on a 1970s British pavement.

STORY OF THE WEEK (something that's intrigued them or has not received as much coverage as it should have done in their eyes)
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu almost falling in the water when he went to inspect an Israeli navy boat which recently intercepted a big Hizballah arms shipment.

CRYSTAL BALL (what will they be watching in their field of expertise over the next
six months/year?)
Will Mahmoud Abbas really quit as Palestinian president? He says he will. I say, No.

I’m in between drafts of a novel, so I thought I’d look for something to clear my head. Inspired by a BBC broadcast last week in honor of the 80th birthday of Broadway lyricist and composer Stephen Sondheim, I’ve been working on a musical version of my Palestinian crime novels. (Only in the shower, so far…)

I’m thinking of updating the Romeo and Juliet story and setting it in Bethlehem. In tribute to the Sondheim-Bernstein classic “West Side Story,” it’ll be called “West Bank Story,” of course, and will be the tale of the rivalry between two gangs, one Fatah and the other Hamas. I’ve already scored a couple of the numbers (“Aisha, I just met the mother of a girl named Aisha” and “I feel pretty, Oh so pretty, I feel pretty and witty and…I’d best not talk about it because the Hamas guys won’t like it.”)

I'm proud to say I have accrued quite a track record at developing disastrous failed concepts for musicals. I’ve been driving my wife crazy with these ideas for years. This is inspired by the large number of distinguished writers who’ve penned opera librettos and discovered that writer-turned-lyricists have a special graveyard all their own in Hell. Vikram Seth, Russell Hoban and, most recently, Ian McEwan have turned their hand to it. None of them seem to be rivals to Lorenzo da Ponte, Mozart’s greatest librettist, no matter how hard they’ve tried.

Which is why I’ve always thought it’s a better idea to write a failed musical. After all, did you ever see a musical that didn’t seem like it would’ve been better left in the librettist’s bottom draw – or in this case, his blog? Believe me, I know: I saw “Falsettos” on Broadway.

I’ve particularly enjoyed working on failed musicals which fall into the category first popularized by the Buddy Holly biosical (biography-musical, new word all my own) “Buddy” and recently by Green Day’s “American Idiot,” in which music people already love is jammed into a ridiculous storyline. (Ridiculous storylines are de rigeur in the Middle East, so maybe the Palestinian musical isn’t so silly…)

That brought me the following list of future Tony Award Winners:

BLOOD ON THE CHANTILLY LACE: A detective discovers that Buddy Holly and Richie Valens died when their plane came down only because gangsters wanted to rub out the third, largely unremembered passenger, The Big Bopper.

FUGUE! The life of J.S. Bach, fun-loving father of 20 and writer of the scariest piece of music ever (Toccata and Fugure in D minor for organ).

I’M A BELIEVER: The songs of The Monkees performed in Gregorian plainchant by monks.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

When Peter Cook admitted to Dudley Moore that he was “turned on by dead Popes,” it was a satire on those among us who’re so bored by their lives as to be infinitely suggestible. Thus a dead pope lying on a catafalque in white robes looks “at peace, at rest, and ****ing fanciable.”

The joke, of course, is that no one could imagine the Pope as a sexual object, whether alive or dead. The same might be thought to be true of classical musicians. While Shakira shakes her “fanciable” ass on every video, classical musicians are supposed to be much stuffier.

However, during the research for my new historical thriller MOZART’S LAST ARIA I discovered that the sexiest performers today are not the booty-shaking R’n’B divas, nor the pouting rockers (none of them has ever been able to compete with Joan Jett.) They’re the opera singers and clarinetists and pianists.

Followers of my blog The Man of Twists and Turns will have seen a couple of videos featuring the music from MOZART’S LAST ARIA performed by current musicians. I cite them here to prove my point. Check out Diana Damrau and tell me that when you hear this beautiful blonde Bavarian singing Mozart (as she does on her homepage), you don’t feel a stirring in areas you might have thought were as dormant as a dead Pope. She’s also evidence that the days of the fat lady singing are over. Opera divas are quite gorgeous these days.

Or there’s the Israeli clarinetist Sharon Kam who appears in a video on my blog playing another of the pieces from my novel. A prominent performer around Europe, she’s much more expressive on stage in her body movements than most soloists. I will stop here before I get into further Cook-and-Moore territory with comments about the shape of the clarinet and where the soloist places it… (And after all Spike Milligan’s orchestral penis substitute was a different woodwind which he dubbed “Pink Oboe.”)

This is all more than idle comment on a few good-looking women, of course. There’s an important artistic point to be made. And now that I’ve given you links to what Pete and Dud would’ve called “the crumpet,” I shall make that artistic point.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

I’ve seen two things in the last week that allowed me to compare something
of the way crime writers used to appear in public and their present avatars.
It only made me wish for the good old days even more than I used to.

The comparison is between: a delightful radio chat on the BBC in 1958 between Raymond Chandler and Ian Fleming; and a load of paranoid weirdness from Henning Mankell.

First, Chandler and Fleming. Listen to their talk. I rarely bother listen to
an entire half hour of anything online, but I’m telling you this is
beautiful. Both of them are unpolished as all hell. For anyone who’s been to
a book fair and seen the well-honed wisecracks and calibrated personae of today’s authors, this’ll be refreshing.

When Fleming asks Chandler to explain how a hit is done in America (which
surely seemed like a very dangerous place to the average BBC listener of
half a century ago), gruff old Ray puffs on his pipe and spins an unlikely tale of gunmen brought to New York from that den of iniquity, Minneapolis. It
impresses Fleming so much that he refers to it in summing up the broadcast
as something very enlightening and shocking and underground that Chandler
has given us.

But most of all from Chandler’s side there’s the news that he intended
another Marlowe novel in which the great shamus would be married (see the
end of “Playback”) and, though he’d love his wife, he’d be frustrated by her
friends and the ease with which he lives.

Fleming, meanwhile, is very British and self-deprecating, pointing out
several times that his novels are pale shadows of what Chandler writes. In
turn, Chandler is amazed that Fleming writes a novel in two months during
his annual Jamaica vacation, having never written one faster than three
months himself. He then opines that “you starve 10 years before even your
publisher knows you’re any good.” Amen to that.

This truly beautiful conversation – hearing the voices of these fellows is
priceless in itself – was in stark contrast to Henning Mankell’s appearance
in an Israeli newspaper last week.

The starting point for Mankell’s piece was his deportation from Israel a
year ago. He was among the pro-Palestinian activists aboard a flotilla of
ships headed for Gaza, which was intercepted by Israeli commandoes. Aboard one of the ships, the commandoes and activists fought and nine activists were killed. Mankell was among those brought back to Israel on the boats and then deported.

His article in Ha’aretz last week goes through the story of a Facebook page
opened in his name. It declared support for the Lebanese Islamists of
Hezbollah and other positions he claims not to share. Facebook took the site
down twice at Mankell’s request. Mankell wonders who was behind the Facebook page.

To anyone who’s been in the Middle East, the most obvious answer is: a
Palestinian supporter saw that Mankell was on their side and decided to
hijack his name for some other causes to which he or she thought Mankell
might be inclined. Or at least that they’d be causes to which readers might
assume Mankell was inclined, knowing his position on Palestine.

But no. With a circuitous logic never apparent in his plodding Wallander
novels, Henning tells us that he heard the Israeli government wanted to use
social media to attack its enemies. Is this behind the “Henning Mankell”
Facebook page? Twice he writes: “Who would benefit from this?”

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.

When I worked as a journalist at a major US magazine, it was clear that readers didn’t respond to hard news. They wanted features. Not fluffy features. Serious features. But they'd had enough of news stories about what happened that week.

What did the editors do? They ordered correspondents to write hard news. Because they didn’t care what readers wanted. They wished to appear as serious journalists before their peers, and serious journalists write tough hard news stories. Even if no one wants to read them.

I was put in mind of this as I listened to a BBC Open Book podcast about whether crime fiction has become too gory. Specifically whether descriptions of violence – and the torture of women in particular – have gone too far. I interpret that to mean: whether the violence is indulged for its own sake, rather than for the sake of plot or character development.

After listening to the show I felt as though I had been tuned in to a discussion by European liberals about multiculturalism – or some other subject on which all “decent” types agree and then simply talk about the nuances of their shared position, rather than ever saying “hey, there’s a case to answer here.”

I’ve seen a great deal of violence in my life. I’ve been a foreign correspondent in the Middle East for 15 years. I’ve seen people shot, blown up, burned to death, horribly maimed, and I’ve been threatened myself. I take no pleasure in that and I have no sympathy for those who would treat others’ suffering as entertainment. Perhaps that’s why I believe there is very much a case for crime fiction to answer: too many writers and presumably readers appear to be indulging in psychotically prurient interest.

That isn’t to say there’s no violence in my novels. But I’m very careful about its purpose, and I don’t require it to take place in front of the reader’s eyes, as it were. I try to think about Chandler’s great dictum on Hammett – that he put murder back in the hands of those who actually commit it in real life. No doubt some of those people are sadists, but most are criminals and most murders are committed with dispatch. That’s how I like it to be done in my books: by a criminal, not a psycho, and quickly, as a piece of business.

Read the rest of this post on my blog The Man of Twists and Turns.