Matt Rees's Blog - Posts Tagged "nadel"

One of the jobs authors are required to perform to help promote their work is the strange task of procuring from other authors something called a “blurb”—the praise you’ll find on the back cover of books. They ought to come from authors whose readers might also be interested in your book--that's the idea. In 2006, when I sent out advance copies of my first novel “The Collaborator of Bethlehem,” I had no doubt I wanted one to go to Barbara Nadel, winner of the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger the previous year. Her fabulous series of novels about Istanbul detective Cetin Ikmen delves into a society that we think we know a great deal about – only to demonstrate how much more complex is the reality. That’s one of the things I was trying to do with my Palestinian detective Omar Yussef. I’m pleased to report that Barbara recognized that, and she was kind enough to read and comment (favorably!) on my book. She’s published 11 terrific Turkish novels and is about to publish a new novel in her other series, in which the hero is a London undertaker. The two series are rather different and make varied demands on this intelligent writer, so I thought it’d be fascinating to ask her about The Writing Life.

How long did it take you to get published?

I first started trying to get published in 1992. At that time the notion of a mystery book, much less a series set in Turkey, was rejected as almost laughable. I’ll be honest, I gave up and put my first book Belshazzar’s Daughter in a drawer for 7 years. The only reason I ever took it out again was because in 1999 I was, yet again, totally broke and I thought, ‘why not give this old thing one more go? Maybe someone will give me some cash?’ So I sent it to an agent who, on this occasion, liked it. The next thing I knew I was involved in a three book contract! Now ten years on, I write two mystery series; the Inspector İkmen stories set in modern Turkey and the Francis Hancock mysteries set in 1940s London.

Would you recommend any books on writing?

I have to admit that I’ve never read any!

What’s a typical writing day?

I live in the north of England and so my first task of the day is to look out of the window and see what the sky is doing. That done, I try to get to my desk by about 8am and then work through until lunchtime. I don’t generally do lunch – a legacy of past chain-smoking – but just have a cup of tea and maybe, just occasionally, a cigarette. I’ll then work through until about 5 or 6pm. I don’t do this every day but try to work this schedule Monday to Friday if I can. I have pretty heavy family commitments and so it’s not always possible.

Plug your latest book. Why is it so great?

I have two books out next month, one paperback, an İkmen mystery called River of the Dead, and a new Hancock hardback called Sure and Certain Death.


River of the Dead sees İkmen and his protégé Suleyman, in pursuit of an escaped prisoner. Yusuf Kaya is a murderer and drug dealer and when he escapes from prison in İstanbul it is suspected he has had help. Also because Kaya’s home town is in eastern Turkey it is strongly suspected he has gone back there. And so while İkmen pursues the investigation in İstanbul, Suleyman flies out to the eastern city of Mardin. There he finds not only drug dealing, gun running and the threat of terrorist attack, but also an exotic mix of people including Kurds, Suriani Christians and those who believe in an ancient snake goddess, the Sharmeran. This book came about as a result of a trip I made out to Mardin in 2007 and is I hope imbued with the same sense of magic and unreality that I found there. That said River of the Dead is also a tough book which address very real issues I talked to people about in Mardin, like the Iraq war. I think it’s great because although it is a crime story it is also a social commentary as well as, hopefully, introducing some people to the glories of south eastern Turkey.


Sure and Certain Death is about a series of killings that take place in the London Borough of West Ham in 1941. Middle aged women are being attacked and eviscerated. Local people start whispering about Jack the Ripper being on the prowl again. One such victim is discovered in a bombed out house by undertaker Francis Hancock. A veteran of World War I, Francis suffers from shell-shock which means that sometimes he doesn’t always know that what he is experiencing is actually real. But soon the murders come close to home and he finds himself fearing for his own sister. Sure and Certain Death is a story about World War 2 that has its murderous roots in the darkest corners of Word War 1. I think it’s a good book because it is not either an obvious murder story or a straightforward story of the London Blitz. My father experienced the Blitz when he was a child and although the Hancock books do tell of the heroism of that time, they also aim to tell it like it was too. Francis Hancock’s world is therefore one of privation, dirt, anxiety and sometimes madness.

How much of what you do is dictated by genre formula, personal formula or complete originality?

My aim is always not to write to formula but to produce something fresh every time. However within the crime/mystery genre there are certain constraints, like having a ‘tidy’ ending. Not to do this is unsatisfying for the reader, even though I do sometimes want to reflect the sheer messiness of real life. In addition series characters do have back stories which have to be addressed in some form in every book and so formula could be said to apply there too. In the main however I don’t write to formula.

What’s your favourite sentence in all literature and why?

From Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. These are the first words Miss Havisham ever speaks to Pip. They sum up both the bitterness and the tragedy of her situation perfectly.

‘This,’ said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, ‘is where I shall be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.’

She knows that her relatives will only ‘come and look’ at her. They won’t grieve. They are only interested in her money. All this is conveyed so well in this cold little sentence.

How much research is involved in each of your books?

Quite a lot, although of course it does depend on the book. For River of the Dead I had to go to Mardin and its environs and talk to people so that was pretty full-on. With the Hancock series of course I have to do historical research into aspects of World War 2 every time. Enjoyable but time consuming.

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

For the first 6 years of my writing career I couldn’t make my living just from my books. I had a day job in a psychiatric hospital and wrote at night and at weekends. Since the Hancock series began however (4 years ago) I have (just) been able to survive on writing. However it’s not easy and I do have to supplement my income by writing short stories and bits of journalism.

How many books did you write before you were published?

I had one academic book published before ‘Belshazzar’s Daughter’ but no fiction. Not that I didn’t try. I wrote two books which I haven’t had published. Goodness knows if they’ll ever see the light of day!

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

Meeting an old man who was called Mr İkmen and then, not twenty four hours later, seeing a Turkish policeman who looked just like my internal vision of İkmen’s protégé, Suleyman!

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

A horror story about a Victorian side-show man who kills people and then places them in sentimental tableau which he charges the public one penny to view. Ghastly and weird and clearly the product of a brain that is not what it should be. Mind you, Goths would like it I am sure!

My good pal Christopher G. Moore -- who shares with me a birthday today -- came up with a great idea for a new blog on international crime fiction. Chris, who writes a gritty, stylishly literate series of crime novels set in Bangkok, wanted to set up a blog where several authors of international crime would come together to write about their work and share ideas. The result is online as of today: International Crime Authors Reality Check. It features Chris, who lives in Bangkok; me, writing from Jerusalem; Colin Cotterill, a resident of Thailand whose delightfully acerbic detective character Dr. Siri is a Laotian coroner; and Barbara Nadel, author of the successful series of Istanbul novels about Inspector Ikmen.

The blog opens today with an amusing memoir from me called "Quick, woman. Go and get the Koran!"

I hope you'll follow the blog and see what this interesting collection of writers comes up with. (There'll also be some guest bloggers, so you never know who'll turn up.)

I've joined up with a few other crime writers to fill a single blog, International Crime Authors Reality Check, with original content. Last week Colin Cotterill wrote about his attempt to get a "vagina" into the title of one of his novels. This week, Colin has a hilarious post about his bemusing appearance at the Crime Writers Association's Daggers dinner -- at which Colin was awarded the "Dagger in the Library" for his excellent body of work. During the post, he notes that his name sounds like an adjective for the clitoris. (I was thinking he might have moved backwards from the vagina to another less specifically female spot, but there's always next week's blog for more bodily musings from the inimitable Colon Clitoris.) Tune in later this week for fellow bloggers Christopher G. Moore, Barbara Nadel, and yours truly.

My latest post on the International Crime Authors Reality Check blog:

Unlike the Palestinians (who don’t have one), Palestinian politics is in a real state. A civil war that’s been bubbling and sometimes burning for two years plus. No government in Gaza because Hamas, which rules there, is isolated. Accusations by a top PLO official that current Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had his predecessor Yasser Arafat poisoned.

But don’t worry, Palestine. I have the solution, insh’allah. I propose a plan to end the violence and bring Palestine out of its international isolation. I propose that my fictional Palestinian sleuth Omar Yussef stand for election as president.

There are supposed to be elections next year. Abbas, whose term is already up, has refused to step down because he says the parliament approved an extra year due to the civil war emergency. Hamas responds that it controls the parliament, which hasn’t been able to sit because of the civil war.

The two sides, Hamas and Abbas’s Fatah, are due to meet this weekend in Cairo to discuss a truce. Don’t hold your breath. Fatah’s long-awaited Congress is set for early August in Bethlehem and no one will go out on a limb before that – young reformers want to get rid of Arafat’s corrupt old hacks, and no one wants to go into that vulnerable to criticism for being soft on Hamas.

So here’s my pitch for Omar Yussef.

Unlike Fatah, Omar is not associated with massive financial corruption. Neither is he, like Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniya, drawing close to Iran for financial backing, in the face of an international boycott. Omar is a decent, honorable Palestinian who stands against the corruption and violence that engulfs the Palestinians.

On book tours, people often ask me if Omar and his stance accord with the views of real Palestinians. I say, yes, that’s exactly what most Palestinians want. They don’t have a political alternative to Hamas and Fatah because both groups are armed and backed by big international donors – and prepared to squash any opponents.

But you can’t kill a fictional detective, which means Omar is able to stand up to the gunmen who bully other Palestinian politicians into silence.

It’s not certain that the elections will take place, unfortunately. Either Hamas will succeed in stopping them, or Abbas will realize that he’d lose to Haniya and cancel them at the last minute (Arafat called presidential elections more or less every time anyone annoyed him, but somehow he almost never got around to holding them.) Who better than a fictional character to run in an election that’ll never take place for the job of president of a country which doesn’t yet exist (and looks further away from statehood every day)?

If they step aside for Omar Yussef, Abbas and Haniya could get down to the real business they seem so keen to sidestep: an agenda for peace within the Palestinian factions and true negotiations with Israel for an end to the conflict.

Or is that just fiction, too?

Stay tuned for more on Omar’s candidacy.

Note for a future blog: try to find the office in Ramallah where Presidential candidacies can be registered.

Second note to self: Remember to place bets with anyone who’ll take the other side that such a place doesn’t exist or that it’d be closed when I visit.

I've been writing for a new blog founded by me and three other crime writers. One of them, the ever-inventive Christopher G. Moore, came up with the idea for a competition. He got the idea after I suggested in a blog post last week that my Palestinian detective character Omar Yussef ought to stand for Palestinian president. Here's what Chris wrote on the blog and how to enter:

A Contest for Readers of The International Crime Authors Reality Check Blog

How to win a free book.

The credit (or blame) goes to Matt Rees for starting the ball rolling with his blog that recommended Omar Yussef for primo job as head of the West Bank/Gaza. This started the forward motion of an idea – always a dangerous thing. Why not ask readers to fill a high political office with their choice of a character from a work of fiction. The character can be a hero, a rogue, a child, or early primate so long as she, he or it appeared in a published book.

I suggested that Thomas Fowler from Graham Green’s the Quiet American might be a good candidate for Minister of Foreign Affairs or Secretary of State.

The character you choose doesn’t have to come from one of our books or indeed from crime fiction. So feel include old favorites such as Little Dorrit who would have made a good Minister for Education and Welfare.

The contest will end 21st August. Meanwhile we will post entries on the blog as they are received. Each of us will sign and send a copy of our latest novel to the contest winners. There will be 4 winners announced on 28th August. The signed books will be shipped also on 28th August. Four books. Strangely enough the same number as the number of writers who blog on this site.

Send your entry to: webmaster@internationalcrimeauthors.com

When foreign correspondents come to Jerusalem they often ask me for advice on stories and places from which to witness the various conflicts that play out in this city. Next time, I’m going to buy them a ticket to the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo.

I go there every Saturday afternoon with my two-year-old son. But perhaps because our favorite animals (the cute little prairie dogs) have hibernated, I noticed that the zoo is a microcosm of all the things I covered here in a decade and a half as a journalist—conflicts which have turned up in my Palestinian crime novels, too.

Because despite being a writer of fiction, this is stuff you can’t make up. Read on, and you’ll see what I mean.

Conflict number 1: Ultra-religious Jews and secular Jews.

On the enclosure that’s home to the peccaries, there’s a sign in Hebrew and Yiddish. “Das ist nisht a khazir,” reads the Yiddish. “This is not a pig.” That’s because the large number of ultra-Orthodox Jews who cram the walkways of the zoo during the week would freak out if they thought there was a pig running on the sacred earth of Israel. (There used to be a pig farm in northern Israel where the swine were elevated on wooden platforms so they didn’t touch the holy land.)

The zoo’s original idea was to display only animals that appeared in the Bible. A special prize to any reader who can find me a peccary in the Bible. (The Chosen People wandered a long time, but I believe they didn’t claim to have made it to Central America.)

Conflict number 2: Secular Jews and ultra-religious Jews.

Of course, on Saturday afternoon, when I usually hit the zoo, there aren’t any ultra-Orthodox Jews there. They’re either dipping back and forth in prayer at the shtieblach or sleeping off a big Sabbath lunch. The fact that people like me can go to the zoo during the Sabbath is a secret from the ultra-religious. A woman passing through the gate asked about that fact recently. The guard explained, “We’re told to tell the dossim [rather negative Hebrew slang for the ultra-Orthodox:] that we’re closed on the Sabbath.”

So you can violate the Sabbath if you keep it a secret and adopt strange little dodges to stay within the letter of the law. The zoo doesn’t sell memberships on the weekend. It does sell tickets. But not from its regular ticket booth. It sets up a little kiosk a few yards away, so that it can claim that its ticket office is truly closed on the Sabbath. Just in case any of those dossim bother to ask…

Conflict number 3: Israelis and Palestinians

Just down from the elephant enclosure the zoo is preparing a new exhibit. It looks quite exciting. There are pools of carp and water falls. Rumor among the regulars is that we’ll soon be able to stroll among sea lions down there. As I was gazing longingly over the new layout (have you got it by now—I’m even more excited by the weekly zoo trip than my son), I glanced down at the checkpoint.

A small white hut, a raised bar and green-and-white concrete blocks, it looks rather like the old Checkpoint Charlie, except that it’s at the bottom of a deep, dusty valley spotted with olive trees. Checkpoints looked this way when I first came to Jerusalem 13 years ago. Most of the main ones have since been turned into enormous terminals, filled with security gear, designed to prevent potential suicide bombers from walking or driving right up to Israeli soldiers. But this checkpoint hasn’t changed. I sighed with something like nostalgia for the old days.

“That’s the West Bank right there,” said my wife.

“Yeah, this road goes around the back of that hill and into the Sidr checkpoint at the top of Beit Jala,” I said.

It’s a beautiful drive, even if the names signify conflict. This is the way I used to go to Bethlehem during the intifada. It takes you to the Christian village of Beit Jala where I set much of my first novel THE COLLABORATOR OF BETHLEHEM.

I pointed toward the hillside. “That rectangular, cream-colored building. That’s Cremisan, the monastery in Beit Jala where they make wine.”

My wife didn’t ask me if the wine was any good—she’s the one who benefits most from the fact that I’m tee-total, if you see what I mean. But I saw her eyebrows rise. I wondered if she was thinking how nice it is that wine is grown in a town that has Hamas members on its city council.

Conflict number 4: Arabs and Jews

Most of the week the bulk of the visitors to the Jerusalem Zoo are either the black-clad ultra-Orthodox Jews and their crowds of children, or East Jerusalem Arabs, their women’s heads covered. The Arabs bring crowds of children too. It’s one of the few public places where these two groups mix. The city’s hospitals are the others main locations for such frissons. If I was naïve, I’d say it’s a sign that beneath everything there’s hope that these two peoples can live together in peace.

But I’m not naïve, and the hospitals aren’t so nice. I just like zoos.

Conflict number 5: Lemurs and humans.

Lemurland is an enclosure of olive trees at the zoo where you walk through on a path surrounded by the animals. The ring-tailed lemurs are supposed to frolic delightfully while you watch. They don’t seem to have received that message. They keep jumping on people. Lemurland is closed briefly every time the lemurs get into someone’s bag of corn chips.

Are the lemurs mad? Perhaps they’re angry because, though they’re caged up at the Biblical Zoo, they didn’t get a mention in the Bible. Strange, because that doesn’t seem to bother the meerkats.

(I posted this on a joint blog I write with some other crime noveliest. Have a look at the other posts.)