Workers' Liberty

Review of two new books The Saladin Murders and the Bethlehem Murders by Matt Rees.

In the last ten years detective fiction fans have been introduced to sleuths from South America, various bits of Asia, Africa and all over Europe. Generally this globalisation has improved my life.

But the authors of noir and detective fiction don’t often do politics. And if they do, they might mess it up (e.g. Henning Mankell spoils his Kurt Wallender books when he begins to believe he understands how the world works).

Omar Yussef from Bethlehem ticks the right boxes: ex-alcoholic, grumpy, etc. Yussef is not (yet, perhaps) as fully-formed a character as, say, Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins — but a compensation is that Rees does understand politics. Rees is British but spent six years as Time magazine’s chief in Jerusalem.

Rees clearly believes and has one of his creations say so that it is sometimes easier to discuss issues through fiction. Here the point he makes is unusual: that the main day-to-day problem faced by most Palestinians is other Palestinians.

In the first book Omar Yussef comes up against the Bethlehem branch of the Al-Asqa Martyrs Brigade; in the second, set in Gaza between the time of the Israel withdrawal and the seizure of power by Hamas, the problem is the lavishly corrupt brutality of the Fatah-led Palestinian security services.

The Israelis are in the background (a collaborator is exposed in The Bethlehem Murders), Hamas is too – but the armed Palestinian resistance and the Palestinian security services are the main target.

Something to ostentatiously open at a Workers’ Power meeting.