A Chinese Monster: Guest Post by Matt Rees

After graduating from Oxford, Matt Rees served as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East before becoming an award-winning British crime novelist for his Omar Yossef mysteries. He currently resides in Luxembourg with his wife and two children. CHINA STRIKE: An ICE Thriller  (Crooked Lane Books) is the second in his Dominic Verrazzano series.

MATT REES:
A Chinese monster that warrants the fear we have of it

“There are very few monsters that warrant the fear we have of them.” The French Nobelist André Gide might just as well have aimed his phrase at current American politics and economics. Of course, it depends what you’re afraid of. China is often portrayed as the villain today, cited by Donald Trump (during his campaign) for “the greatest theft in the history of the world,” stealing American jobs by dumping manufactured goods and running up a mammoth trade surplus.

Let’s set aside the labor camps and the persecution of Christians and Tibetan Buddhists and the Falun Gong and…Yeah, let’s put it all aside and focus on things that might make you respond with more than just a shake of the head (I’m not trying to underestimate your compassion; I’m just assuming you’re human and you’re more likely to feel threatened when it’s close to home). China’s not playing fair, that’s for sure. Why should they? Some time I’ll tell you all about how diplomacy works and where it intersects with intelligence work, but in brief: everyone wants an unfair advantage in everything all the time everywhere, yet they like to tell each other to their faces that they’re cooperating. Right now there’s a big knife at the throat of the world and it’s held by Beijing.

The backdrop to my new thriller CHINA STRIKE is a negotiation between the US and China over trade. Right at the start of the novel, China makes a threat that’s backed up by a horrific piece of cyberwarfare. The novel’s hero, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Dom Verrazzano, has to track the hackers behind the cyberplot, otherwise there’ll be consequences even more devastating than the US caving at the trade talks.

The chase takes Verrazzano from Detroit and New York through several German cities and on to a Spanish island. In other words, when China strikes, the reverberations are everywhere.

That’s a concern—to diplomats, but also to you and me—right now, because China’s capacity to strike is getting bigger.

Much of the world sees China very differently to the way they did a few years ago. The withdrawal of the US from the Paris climate accord is an opening for China—current king of smog—to become the world leader on fighting climate change, because it has the capacity to make massive investments in climate technology and, of course, to sell it to everyone else. That will put China in the driving seat of a lot of other international forums as a result, so that Beijing gets still more powerful.

Why would you care? Because it’s a problem for international trade (which in the end means it’s a problem for jobs and living standards in countries that happen not to be China) and—as Agent Verrazzano discovers in CHINA STRIKE—it’s also a big problem for world security.

And your security.

Chinese military intelligence has an entire skyscraper in Beijing filled with programmers and hackers whose main aim is to get inside the computer systems of international companies. US companies are top of that list. Computer firms like to talk about “disruption,” by which they mean new products that question and change the entire playing field in a particular industry. China likes to disrupt, but it mainly does so by stealing someone else’s ideas.

China is building a massive infrastructure to exploit all this. Its policy is to develop a “New Silk Road” and a “Maritime Silk Road” across Asia. It plans to spend $1.4 trillion on the project.

Did you just say, why would you care again? Because when China steals industrial secrets (and uses them to create massive trade networks across Asia), they’re stealing from your economy. Now, your economy doesn’t share out the wealth as well as it could and chances are you’re getting less of the big cake than you think you’re due. But when there’s less to share out, you can be sure you aren’t going to get a better slice.

Worse, when China gets inside the computer systems of US companies they get all the data you’ve deposited with your credit card companies, your hospital, your social media profiles, and a whole bunch of other things that are presumably even more shameful than your bank account. Do you want the Chinese Communist Party to have access to your children’s social security numbers? You don’t know what they’ll do with that data, but they sure aren’t going to send out any lottery winnings.

The battle Special Agent Verrazzano wages in CHINA STRIKE is tied up with the dirty game of international diplomacy. It’s being fought out in more places than you’d know—right now.

The Damascus Threat: An ICE Thriller - Guest post by Matt Rees

Matt Rees is the author of seven previous crime novels and is the winner of a CWA Dagger and a National Jewish Book Award for fiction. His website is mattrees.net. Born in Wales, he lived 20 years in the Middle East and now lives in Luxembourg.

ICE in his veins
From a kids playground in Jerusalem to the civil war in Syria, Matt Rees tells the story of his new thriller hero, a US agent cool enough to set to rights a world gone mad with hate and terrorism. 

THE DAMASCUS THREAT (Crooked Lane) is the first in a new series about the ICE agency, which happens to be the second-biggest US law enforcement body and has a $20 billion budget--even if almost no one has heard of it.

Matt Rees:
The Damascus Threat: An ICE Thriller

Here’s where I had the ideas for my first couple of novels: in a square outside the church that marks the site of Jesus’s birth, while I watched Palestinian gunmen execute a supposed Israeli collaborator; in a Gaza refugee camp, meeting late at night with a wanted man; on a hilltop above the West Bank’s most violent town, as the gunfire echoed through the valley.

The idea behind my latest book? I got that in a children’s playground, chatting with the mother of my five-year-old’s little pal, while the kids chased around the jungle gym.

“What are you doing in Jerusalem?” I asked her.

“My husband works at the US consulate. He’s an ICE agent.”

As soon as I heard that acronym, I knew I had to be the writer who turned it into a thriller series. I was filled with the kind of awe for whoever came up with it. Can you imagine the excitement of the suits in DC when, after the new agency was mandated under the Patriot Act, they figured out that the somewhat dull-sounding issues of immigration and customs gifted them the super-exciting acronym ICE? In your face, Federal Air Marshal Service.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the second-biggest law enforcement agency in the US government, after the FBI. But relatively few people have heard of it. When it’s mentioned in the press, it’s usually as “immigration agents” or “customs agents.” ICE hasn’t gotten big thriller treatment, because it’s somewhat new and generally has an international element that makes its work less clear-cut than, say, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. That changes now with publication of my novel THE DAMASCUS THREAT. After all, you only have to look at what ICE does to see the scope for crime fiction--a big old series of it, too Any crime that involves the crossing of a US border is automatically at least partial ICE jurisdiction. That includes cybercrime.

My book’s set in Syria and New York City. ICE Special Agent Dominic Verrazzano is due to meet a UN chemical weapons official who has secrets to reveal about something dangerous going on in Damascus. She’s killed just as she gets to him. Verrazzano has to figure out the chemical weapons plot—and then stop it. He’s up against the kind of people I spent years covering as a journalist—terrorists, arms dealers, mercenaries. He has, of course, a secret—he was unwittingly involved in arm trafficking as a Special Forces op. ICE doesn’t know that. Nor do the two women and the man on his team. The only person who knows Verrazzano’s secret is his former Special Forces commander, and Verrazzano soon learns that he’s the one behind the chemical weapons plot.

THE DAMASCUS THREAT is the first of a series of ICE novels. With each one, I’m intending to lay out the expanding dimensions of the plot that Verrazzano must fight against. It’ll take him throughout Europe, Africa and the Middle East. And to Detroit too (one guy can't have all the glamor...) It’s an expansion of some of the international themes I took on with my Palestinian novels—the kinds of things that make front pages for violence, without ever being explained or understood on those same pages.

Right now, there are days I look at the front pages and find the world seems to have gone mad with violence and hate and stupidity. Verrazzano represents the kind of strength it takes to set that world to rights. I hope that, for you, reading THE DAMASCUS THREAT will help make sense of this world.

The Crime Writer and Gun Control: Guest post by Matt Rees

Today I welcome award winning author Matt Rees. Matt Rees was born in Newport, Wales in 1967, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1996. As a journalist, Rees covered the Middle East for over a decade for the Scotsman, then Newsweek and from 2000 until 2006 as Time magazine's Jerusalem bureau chief.  His first book was a non-fiction account of Israeli and Palestinian society, Cain's Field. He published the first novel featuring Palestinian detective Omar Yussef, The Bethlehem Murders, in 2007, which won the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger award. He blogs and podcasts at www.mattrees.net. Get a free ebook of his crime stories here

Matt Rees:

The Crime Writer and Gun Control

I’ve only fired a gun on a single occasion, though guns have frequently been pointed at me. In my writing, I’ve blown away many a bad guy and just as many good guys.

I write crime fiction. In crime fiction bad things happen. Often involving guns. It’s much like life. Except that it’s not.

Every time there’s a mass shooting, like Elliot Rodger’s murder of six people May 23, I go through the manuscript of my latest novel and take a long, hard look at myself. Most writers—like TV producers or movie directors—are quick to deny any connection between the violence that appears in their art and real violence. I don’t think of crime fiction readers as a particularly dangerous bunch, but still I’m not so glib.

Perhaps that’s because I’ve seen a lot of actual violence, as a war correspondent. I mentioned that people had pointed guns at me. Here’s a brief list: Hamas gunmen in Gaza, PLO militiamen in Hebron, Israeli soldiers all over the place (including one who pointed the barrel of his tank at me), Hizballah gunmen in southern Lebanon and Beirut and the Bekaa Valley, a mysterious Iraqi guy in Jordan, and a couple of people whose identities I still don’t know in Nablus, West Bank. You get the idea.

Winston Churchill wrote that “nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” I can vouch for that too. (Nablus again, where I found myself running through narrow casbah alleys to escape gunfire whose source I simply couldn’t see). It’s one reason why there’s violence in crime fiction. It isn’t only that bad guys use violence. Crime fiction also gives us a sense of the Churchillian buzz, as if the violence was directed at us and we were escaping it, like our novel’s hero.

Many of my experiences on the wrong end of a gun barrel came when I was a foreign correspondent for Time Magazine during the Palestinian intifada from 2000 to 2006. Afterwards, I wrote four crime novels about a Palestinian sleuth named Omar Yussef. I made sure that my hero was too aged and infirm to take the path of violence that attracted so many of his compatriots. I wanted him to face down the gunmen without the option of blowing him away. That’s far more inspiring.

I’ve thought hard about the way I write about guns, and I’ve examined other thriller writers’ approaches too. Certainly I think it’s possible for writers to glamorize violence and gunplay. A recent Brad Thor email newsletter included a “gear” link to a snazzy jacket in which you’re invited to carry your iPad, iPhone and handgun, as though a Glock were just another yuppie gadget. I'm prepared to accept that the photos of the "Alpha Jacket" may be tongue-in-cheek, but I very much doubt it.

I’m about as sympathetic to gun glamor as I am to techies who describe the screens of their Apple devices as “beautiful.” Like cellphones, guns are functional, not beautiful.

I decided not long ago I ought to know what that function feels like. I had never even fired a gun. I went to a basement range in Jerusalem and rented a range of weapons. It was truly fascinating to feel the difference between the popping reports of a 9 mm and the heavy kick of a Magnum, which actually hurt my thumb after cocking it a few times (poor baby.)

My trainer got very excited and decided to give me a treat. He clipped a Glock inside an Israeli Tabor conversion. My pistol was suddenly transformed into an assault weapon with a red laser sight. Hitting the center of the target with that gun was easier than typing this sentence. Wherever the red dot went, so did the bullet. Many times I had wandered through conflict zones, knowing that there were gunmen about and blithely figuring they wouldn’t shoot and if they did they’d probably miss. I started to imagine that red dot on my body and it made me more than a little queasy.

Now I’m working on a new series about a US agent. Unlike my Palestinian sleuth, this guy will be armed. The Isla Vista killings—and the many less-publicized school shootings since—remind me yet once more that I have to examine the ethical framework for everything my main characters does. After all, an actual government agent must answer for his conduct every time he draws his weapon. So should a fictional one.

I want to be sure that no reader will come away from my books with the idea that violence is just a lifestyle option, let alone a heroic one. Even in fiction.

R is for Rees: Matt Rees

Today I continue the Mystery Author Alphabet Meme with a guest post from Matt Rees. R is for Rees.

Matt Rees is the author of five crime novels, the latest of which is MOZART’S LAST ARIA. For more about his books, go to www.mattrees.net. For his podcast and blog, go to www.themanoftwistsandturns.com.

WIN A COPY OF MOZART'S LAST ARIA. MAKE A COMMENT ABOUT MATT, MOZART OR OPERA. Be sure and give your email address. Random winner.

MATT REES: 

From the little house in the mountains above Salzburg where Nannerl Mozart lived, I looked out across the lake. As I watched the sun on the glimmering surface of the water, the first intimations of how I would write my novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA came to me.

Nannerl was packed off to be married to a boring local functionary in the tiny village of St. Gilgen. I imagined how it must have been for her after her years as a child piano prodigy, playing in the great palaces of Europe with her brother Wolfgang. It was in this village that I had the idea of transplanting her to the Imperial capital to probe her brother’s death – the idea for MOZART’S LAST ARIA.

Then I went about finding the other places that would’ve touched the lives of Nannerl and Wolfgang. Writing about Mozart for my new novel MOZART’S LAST ARIA (http://www.mattrees.net/mozart.html) required considerable imagination. The people and events are, after all, more than 200 years distant. Yet I was able to tie the fiction to existing places where the great composer lived and worked.

It was my visits to Vienna, Salzburg, Prague and the Salzkammergut mountains which transformed me from a Mozart music fan to someone prepared to devote years of his life to writing a novel about the great man’s last days. (In MOZART’S LAST ARIA, the composer’s estranged sister, Nannerl, goes to Vienna to uncover the truth about his premature death. She discovers a story of intrigue, espionage and secrets hidden in The Magic Flute – as well as a new perspective on the love between her and her brother.)

Many of the places where Wolfgang played his music still exist. In some cases the décor – as well as the basic structure – remains the same as in his day. I was able to set much of the action of MOZART’S LAST ARIA in existing streets and buildings where Mozart lived and worked.

In MOZART’S LAST ARIA, Nannerl investigates her suspicion that Wolfgang was poisoned. She’s aided by Baron Gottfried van Swieten, an important patron of her brother. Swieten was Imperial Librarian, and you can see the majesty and learning of that time arrayed on the shelves of the Prunksaal, the great library attached to the Hofburg, the Emperors’ palace in central Vienna.

The library is open to the public, but you’ll rarely find more than five or six other visitors there at one time – most people are shuffling with the crowds through the Emperor’s rooms down the way. The library’s a gem hidden in plain site.

The house where Mozart died was destroyed some time ago (though you can visit an excellent museum in the house where he wrote The Marriage of Figaro nearby on Domgasse). There’s a plaque on the wall of a department store there now, on Rauhensteingasse. But if you stand with your back to the spot, you can look to your left, your right, and in front of you, and you’ll see just what Wolfgang would’ve seen – except there’ll be less horse manure on the streets.

Even when the buildings of Mozart’s time have gone, there are traces I was able to use. The interior of Mozart’s last home has been the subject of a number of academic theses about the furniture and layout of the apartment. (Some years ago, the startling discovery was made that not only did he have two windows on the front of his studio, but he also had another one on the side. It sounds like a triviality – well, it IS a triviality -- but I’m very grateful to those dedicated Mozartians.)

You can look at a photo tour (http://www.mattrees.net/tour/vienna1.html) of other Mozart sites in Vienna on my website.

But it isn’t only in the city where he died that Mozart’s presence can be felt. After I first visited Vienna, I took a train north to Prague, where I saw a production of Don Giovanni in the Estates Theatre. It was here in 1785 that the “opera of operas” was premiered. During the summer, the theatre rotates Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutti, and The Marriage of Figaro. The performances are quite good, but most of all it’s astonishing to see opera in an unchanged, historic theatre of such intimacy -- where Mozart actually performed and where the concert scenes of the film Amadeus were shot.

Mozart reputedly wrote the overture to Don Giovanni at his friends’ house Villa Bertramka on the day of the first performance. You can visit Bertramka, which is not far from the city center. It was a country retreat in Mozart’s time, though now it’s ringed around by shiny new office towers and shopping centers. It’s one of the more intimate spaces in which one can try to feel the lingering sense that Mozart was there.

Naturally Mozart’s birthplace, Salzburg, is filled with places to visit for his fans. But for me the most significant place remains an hour’s drive up into the Salzkammergut mountains. St. Gilgen, the tiny village where Mozart’s mother was born and where Nannerl lived her married life. And where my novel was born.