Matt Beynon Rees was born in South Wales. He was previously the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine and has covered the Middle East as a journalist for more than a decade. He is the author of Cain's Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East, as well as four books in the Omar Yussef series, including the latest, The Fourth Assassin, published this month by Soho Crime. The first book in the series won the CWA New Blood Dagger.
On your nightstand now:
Strange Things Happen: A Life with the Police, Polo and Pygmies by Stewart Copeland, new autobiography of the Police drummer, who turns out to be the son of a Middle Eastern spy and a really spirited voice as a writer; Caravaggio by Catherine Puglisi--a life of the artist, plus very technical analysis of how he worked; Go, Dog, Go by P.D. Eastman, for when my two-year-old son invades the bedroom; and a small bottle of arnica massage oil (but that's not for reading...).
Favorite book when you were a child:
Straf Battalion 999 by Heinz Konsalik, a rather graphic and violent German novel about a punishment battalion on the Russian front. I read it when I was nine and my parents were worried it might make me morbid. It did. But as a writer of crime fiction I can say that it's an important attribute.
Your top five authors:
Paul Bowles. Every day he incorporated something from his travels of the previous day, which I've tried to do with my Palestinian novels.
Graham Greene. Did I mention that I was a bit morbid? Well, GG is the master of morbid.
Raymond Chandler. The greatest stylist, on the level of the sentence, ever.
Mary Renault. I read The King Must Die in Amman while I was waiting for King Hussein of Jordan to die. I've loved Renault ever since.
James Ellroy. I saw him give a reading in New York City when American Tabloid came out. One of a kind.
Book you've faked reading:
Finnegans Wake. I faked reading it at college because I knew no one would believe I'd read it in the first place, so there was no point in actually reading it anyway.
Book you're an evangelist for:
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century by Adina Hoffman, a history of modern Palestinian literature through the life of Taha Muhammad Ali, a poet from Nazareth. Much better than reading a political history of the Palestinians.
Book you've bought for the cover:
When I was in a bookshop in South London at the age of 16, I saw a striking image of the war in Spain on the cover of Homage to Catalonia. I stole it. (All my teenage shoplifting escapades were in bookshops.) So that doesn't quite answer your question, but it's the closest I've ever come to choosing a book for its cover, and in the case of Orwell I have to say I was right.
Book that changed your life:
The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett. I was a student of literature at Oxford University at the time I read it. I realized that Hammett had something gritty that French post-structuralists just couldn't match. I knew which side I was on.
Favorite line from a book:
From Chandler's The Long Goodbye, when a beautiful woman walks into a bar and all the men stop to look at her. A silence falls: "It was like just after the conductor taps on his music stand and raises his arms and holds them poised."
Close second would be: "Heat. Bugs. Bullshit." The entire opening paragraph of a chapter in The Cold Six Thousand by James Ellroy.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault. The fictional story (based on a snippet from Herodotus) of Alexander the Great's Persian manservant and lover. It's the greatest examination of love and of history.
