Matt Beynon Rees

For ten years, Matt Beynon Rees has reported on the Middle East, most recently as Time magazine’s Jerusalem bureau chief. Now a contributor to Time, the Welsh-born author makes his fiction debut with The Collaborator of Bethlehem (LJ 11/1/06), the first volume in a new Palestinian mystery series featuring Bethlehem schoolteacher Omar Yussef.

Your first book, Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide and Fear in the Middle East (2004), examined the internal conflicts facing both Palestinians and Israelis. Why did you turn to fiction for your next book?

Fiction tells us more about reality than nonfiction ever can. Nonfiction has many structural limitations and, anyway, whenever I wrote nonfiction I always tried to make it read like dramatic fiction, so that it wouldn’t seem dry. My ambition has always been to write novels. In a sense, I was waiting for the right raw material. After ten years in Jerusalem, I have shelves of notebooks filled with stories of murder, corruption, hatred, and deceit. I decided to take some of the unconnected stories in those notebooks, to change the names, and weave them into a single mystery.

Omar Yussef is a wonderful character, a man of principle who seeks justice against impossible odds. How did he come about?

Omar is based on a Palestinian I’ve known a long time. I can’t say who he is, as that might endanger him. He’s a man whose ability to transcend the violence and division (and to maintain a grip on reality in the direst of circumstances) marked him out for me among Palestinians. But he’s also very much a man who’d never leave his hometown, who’s rooted in the very culture that he often criticizes.

Your novel offers an intimate portrait of Palestinian daily life. How did you, as a journalist, get people on the West Bank and in Gaza to open up to you?

I listened to them and withheld judgment. You’d be surprised how many foreign correspondents don’t do that—they go to an interview with a preconceived idea for a story, and they need someone to give them a specific quote to slot into their framework. To them, everyone’s a stereotype. I learned Arabic soon after I came to Jerusalem and that, too, has helped me to build relationships, to understand the culture. Palestinians are deeply hospitable, and if you show that you’re willing to learn their rather difficult language they’ll be impressed and flattered.

How did the lawlessness and corruption on the West Bank that you depict affect your ability to make Omar Yussef a plausible detective?

During the intifada, the government—which was already corrupt—broke down completely, and each town was dominated by a different gang. There were links of money and loyalty between some of the gunmen and the government security forces, but that only made the Palestinian towns even more lawless. In Bethlehem, this was very much the case. That highlights the need for an independent detective like Omar Yussef to take on a case, because the official police are afraid of the gunmen. But it also left me with the issue of how Omar would be able to stand against them. However, I made him a member of a particular clan in his refugee camp, which is big enough to have members in all the different “militant” groups, like Hamas and Fatah. This gave him some degree of protection, so that the gunmen can’t just whack him as soon as they discover he’s on their case.

What’s next for Omar Yussef?

Omar’s going to Gaza, where he lacks even the modest protection he has in his hometown of Bethlehem. In the second book, which I’m completing now, Omar confronts the corrupt chiefs of the Palestinian military in Gaza and a weapons-smuggling ring. The third book is set in Nablus and involves Islamists. I intend to have Omar gradually deal with every element of Palestinian society throughout the series. I also want to use the distinct character of Gaza and of Nablus to create mysteries that could only happen there—Palestinian towns are much more idiosyncratic than you’d expect.

I’ll also be unfolding more of Omar’s backstory. The pleasure of a series is to see some of the minor characters—Omar’s wife Maryam, his 12-year-old granddaughter Nadia, the Bethlehem police chief—develop. As I’m writing the second book, I’m very gratified to see that this development is happening naturally and that each of these characters is filling out very well.