The trouble with writing contemporary fiction

Hi, I’m Fiona Deal, author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, all available on Amazon. My books follow the adventures of my thoroughly modern heroine Merry as she unlocks secrets from Egypt’s ancient past and unravels centuries’ old mysteries.

I started writing the books back in 2012 and decided to set them in the present day. There are now nine books in the series, and I’m embarking on my tenth.

Deciding to make the books contemporary (rather than historical) fiction has been both a blessing and a curse.

I’ve been fascinated by ancient Egypt since I was a child, so researching its pharaonic history to provide the mysteries for my novels has always been a pleasure and never felt like hard work. But to actually set my books in ancient Egypt ? Well, that felt like a leap too far. I wanted my characters to experience Egypt the way I do. Part of the joy of writing them has been imagining myself into Merry’s shoes, and living her adventures along with her. And hoping that my readers might do the same.

But it’s meant I’ve had to stay true to events in Egypt and around the world as they’ve unfolded. When I started writing the series in April 2012, a little over a year after the Arab Spring I could never have imagined the political turmoil that would topple President Mohamed Morsi (Egypt’s first democratically elected president) from office just a year or so later. Nor the terrorist atrocities that would rock its tourist industry. And now we have the lockdown of the Coronavirus around the world. So travel to the Nile Valley (or anywhere else for that matter) is off-limits.

I’ve had to negotiate my way around these obstacles and – wherever possible – weave them into my stories. All of which rather makes me wonder if my decision to write modern stories was the right one after all.

Lucky for me, I do have a couple of years to play with. There’s an advantage to having been so deeply distracted by events in my own life recently. These have included taking on a whole new remit at work, and also a new relationship.

Merry’s last adventure took place in early 2017 when tourism to Egypt was just starting to pick up. (She herself may have had a small part to play in all that !!) So I can let her plunge headfirst into some new adventures while also bringing her up-to-date. And maybe Merry can somehow escape the Coronavirus-related restrictions altogether.

For the rest of us the options right now are more limited. I was lucky enough to visit Cairo twice last year. And I spent two weeks over Christmas and New Year 2019-20 in Egypt exploring the sites of Aswan and Luxor, with a short Nile cruise thrown in for good measure. But sadly my trip to Cairo scheduled for the 2020 Easter weekend became a Coronavirus casualty.

But on the upside… since world travel is impossible right now, it leaves only the opportunity of exploring foreign parts vicariously: through TV, films, books and online. Speaking for myself, this means throwing myself into writing Merry’s latest adventure. So I can take myself off to Egypt in my imagination and experience its sights and sounds, the dust and the heat and the wonder of its ancient monuments.

If you feel like travelling to Egypt right now, even if only from your armchair, you might want to join Merry on her adventures. Please click on each picture for the link. Happy travels.

Speaking of Inspiration…

I posted recently about the amazing author Elizabeth Peters and what an inspiration her Egypt-based Amelia Peabody series was to me.

My fascination with Egypt was sparked as a teenager when my parents took my brother and me on a half-term break to Egypt: a flying visit to Cairo and Luxor. I think it’s fair to say that once Egypt grabbed hold of me it never let me go. It’s become a lifelong fascination.

And I know I’m not alone. One only has to look at the Egyptian galleries in the major museums of the world, always thronged with people. The Metropolitan in New York, Le Louvre in Paris, the amazing Museo Egizio in Turin and of course our own British Museum.

Here I am outside the Egyptian Museum in Turin:

Switch on the TV on almost any night, skim through the channels and you’re bound to come across Egypt-themed documentaries.

But I thought I’d use this short post to highlight a few other amazing sources of inspiration for my Egyptian mystery adventure series.

Starting of course with the magnificent Agatha Christie – apparently only outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible !! Her book Death on the Nile has been made into films that I watch over and over – capturing the romance of cruising along the Nile, and shot on location at some of my favourite hotels and historical sites.

And I’m excited to say it looks as if a new dramatisation is scheduled for movie release later in 2020, with Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot (reprising the role he took in Murder on the Orient Express a couple of years ago). I can only hope the Coronavirus pandemic currently sweeping the world doesn’t put this on hold for too long.

But my greatest source of inspiration of all has to be the box-set documentary-drama “EGYPT” produced by the BBC in 2005. I’ve watched these over and over. They tell the stories of Howard Cater’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb (inspiration for my first three novels), Giovanni Belzoni’s remarkable discoveries along the Nile (inspiration for books 7-9) and Jean-Francois Champollion’s decipherment of the hieroglyphic language (also drawn on in books 7-9). I love the format which manages to combine history with drama to tell the story and bring the characters to life.

And this is just to skim the surface. If I listed all the books – fact and fiction – that have inspired me, I’d be here all day. Instead, I have writing of my own to do. I’m underway with book 10 in my series, set in Luxor and inspired by the murder mystery surrounding the death of the last warrior pharaoh Ramses III.

Fiona Deal, Author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, all available on Amazon. If you’re interested in joining Merry on her adventures please click on each picture for the link. Happy travels!

My inspiration: Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody series

Hi, I’m Fiona Deal, author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, all available on Amazon.

In a recent post I wrote about the challenges of deciding to set my Egyptian mystery adventure series in modern times. I wanted to write the books as if I were experiencing them myself, on a tourist holiday caught up in the adventure of a lifetime. They were conceived as modern escapist fiction, something to read on the commute (in my case) into London, or perhaps on a sun lounger on holiday.

They were also written to fill a huge gap. Back in 2008 (and purely by chance on an Amazon search for novels about Egypt) I stumbled across the Amelia Peabody series written by the wonderful Elizabeth Peters. This is a writing pseudonym for the prolific Barbara Mertz, who also happened to be an Egyptologist. Here are her first three (of eighteen) books in the series:

I came to the Amelia Peabody books pretty late on as they were first published in the 1980s. By the time I discovered them their author was already in her nineties, although still writing. To say I devoured them would be the understatement of the century. A fabulous series of books, they differ from mine in being essentially murder mysteries and also set in Victorian times. But, like mine, they are (mostly) set in Egypt and draw from its glorious ancient past.

Elizabeth Peters’ Amelia Peabody stories were a massive inspiration for me. And the void they left when I realised there would be no more was part of what inspired me to write an Egyptian-based series of my own.

I don’t claim to have the Egyptological credentials nor the writing pedigree of Elizabeth Peters (AKA Barbara Mertz) – she published vast numbers of books across different genres and under different pseudonyms. But I do always take it as the most enormous compliment when I receive a review (and there have been a few) which liken my books to hers, and say I have gone some way towards filling a gap in their reading lives too.

So, thank you to Elizabeth Peters for bringing me the joy of Amelia Peabody and her wonderful family and hangers-on. She was truly an inspiration.

If you’re locked down in the current Coronavirus crisis and feel like travelling to Egypt, even if only from your armchair, might I encourage you to read the Amelia Peabody series. Or you might want to join my Merry on her adventures. Please click on each picture for the link. Happy travels.

In a Parallel Universe

In a parallel universe – one in which the coronavirus COVID-19 is not rampaging around the world – I would be spending this Easter weekend in Cairo, Egypt.

As it happens, the bank holiday weekend weather here in the UK is glorious: warm and sunny. So, with Britain (alongside much of the world) in lockdown, and with the sun shining, I am using my time productively. This entails sitting in my back garden and reading everything I can lay my hands on about Ramses III. For he shall be the historical subject of my next novel. A man murdered by a conspiracy from within his own household, led by one of his queens. Known as the Harem Conspiracy, his death marked the beginning of the end for the once mighty New Kingdom of Egypt – the so-called Empire period.

So, I am a millennia forward on the ancient Egyptian timeline this weekend than where I had anticipated being. The New Kingdom of ancient Egypt is the period in which all my books so far have been set. It’s the time of almost all of the A’List Pharaohs: names such as Tutankhamun, Hatshepsut, Thutmosis (pick a number I – IV), Amenhotep (again, pick a number I – IV), Seti and Ramses.

Of those named Ramses, there numbered eleven in total. Many sought to emulate, but none was able to recapture the might and majesty of Egypt under Ramses II – the Great. After Ramses III (known as the last of the warrior pharaohs, and subject of Merry’s next adventure) who ruled approximately 50 years after his more famous forebear, came the long dying. Egypt would never regain its earlier New Kingdom glory.

But there had been an older glory. The Old Kingdom. The Pyramid Age. This was already a thousand years in the past when the Ramses ruled, its pyramids already considered tourist attractions.

I have not yet set one of Merry’s Egyptian adventures in the Old Kingdom – so maybe that will have to come. So, to remind me of what I am missing out on this Easter weekend and to perhaps provide some future inspiration, here are some pictures of what I would have been doing in my parallel universe before COVID- 19 took hold:

Fiona Deal, Author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, all available on Amazon.

If you feel like travelling to Egypt this weekend, even if only from your back garden on armchair, you might want to join Merry on her adventures. Please click on each picture for the link. Happy Easter, and happy travels.

The incredible length of Egypt’s civilisation

The link below will take you to an article showing 23 “mind-blowing facts that will destroy your understanding of time”. The author requests shares, so I’m doing just that.

Two of the facts relate to ancient Egypt and help to demonstrate just what an incredibly long passage of time the Egyptian civilisation can claim.

First, Cleopatra lived closer in time to the building of Pizza Hut than the building of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Cleopatra ruled as the last Pharaoh at around 30BC, before Egypt fell to the Roman Empire. The Great Pyramid was already approximately 2,500 years old, having been built for the pharaoh Khufu in the Old Kingdom of dynastic Egypt in circa 2560 BC.

The first Pizza Hut opened in 1958, approximately 500 years closer in time to Cleopatra than Khufu’s pyramid.

I can’t help but wonder if Cleopatra’s knowledge and understanding of the reign of her Old Kingdom predecessor was much as ours is of her: coloured by myth and legend, and the passage of thousands of years.

Broadly contemporary with Cleopatra was the first century Romano-Jewish scholar and writer Josephus. As far as we know his work contains the only reference to the earlier Egyptian historian and priest, Manetho, who wrote his fabled Aegyptiaca some 300 years before Cleopatra ascended to the throne. It gave a history and chronology of the pharaohs. Whether it shed any more light on the historical facts of the dynasties that pre-dated Cleopatra’s Ptolomaic ancestry than Shakespeare did on Cleopatra’s own story is a matter for debate.

The other fascinating fact is that the first pyramids were built while the woolly mammoth still roamed the earth. A small population of mammoths survived until circa 1650 BC, by which time Egypt’s empire was well established, and the pyramids were already about a thousand years old.

I’s bind-bending stuff : how the Egyptian civilisation spans what we might consider almost prehistory, right up to the Roman Empire whose influence can still be felt in Britain today.

Perhaps this explains why ancient Egypt is such a rich source of inspiration for writers of fiction such as myself. With a history spanning something like three thousand years, with so many famous names, and with so much gold, how can we help but be fascinated by its mystery and romance? And with the inevitable gaps in our historical knowledge after such an immense passage of time, how tempting it is to try to fill in the blanks.

That’s what my fictional series following Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt aims to do. In each story, I take an ancient mystery and weave a story around it, letting my imagination put the flesh on the bones of what we know from archaeology and historical research.

Here is the source article, which got me thinking about Egypt’s incredibly long history : http://higherperspective.com/2015/02/understanding-time.html?utm_source=cleo&ts_pid=2

Fiona Deal – author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt, available in paperback or to download from Amazon and all major ebook retailers.

Causeway of the Great Pyramid Found

Photo Credit : Ahram.org

Reading ‘Ancient Origins’ online, I see a report that after years of searching, the causeway for the Great Pyramid of Egypt has been found.

As is often the case, the facts read like something from a novel: a local resident living near the Giza Plateau was illegally digging beneath his home when he discovered a tunnel leading to the Pyramid of Khufu, the largest of the three pyramids in Giza.

Apparently a resident in the village of El Haraneya in Giza, a prohibited area for drilling, began digging beneath his house to a depth of about 10 meters. He discovered a passage consisting of huge stone blocks.

reconstruction-of-the-pyramids-of-Giza-causeways

Artists impression showing pyramid causeways. Credit: Saint Anselm College

The Minister of Police for Tourism and Antiquities was alerted to the discovery (it’s not clear whether this was by the resident himself). Whatever, security forces immediately placed a cordon around his property. An archaeologist was placed in charge of a committee to investigate. The committee’s report confirms the finding of the corridor leading to the Great Pyramid, the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in Giza. It’s thought these causeways were covered corridors or passages linking each pyramid to its temple complex or maybe with the Nile.

How exciting! I love it when new discoveries are made in Egypt. As a writer of fiction, it’s a never-ending source of inspiration.

What became of the resident beneath whose home the causeway was found is not clear. Perhaps I can somehow weave him into a story !

Fiona Deal

Author of Meredith Pink’s Adventures in Egypt

What sparked my enduring fascination with Egypt?

Ok, so here I am aged 16 with the ram-headed sphinxes at Karnak. It’s October 1983. I’m on my half-term break. I’m in Egypt with my parents and younger brother, on the cheap, courtesy of my dad working for an airline and qualifying for concessionary travel.

Cute red pixie shoes, huh? It took me almost thirty years to actually start writing adventure stories about the land of the pharaohs. Yet the fascination was sparked back then. Why?

Perhaps something in the light quality? It’s a soft pink in Egypt – you can kind of see it in the sky in the photo as it fades to the distance. I think this has something to do with the quantities of sand and dust in the atmosphere, and so little rain. Whatever, it makes for some of the most spectacular sunsets on earth. And a filmy haze over everything that’s like looking at everything in soft-focus. There’s something very romantic about light quality I think.

Then there’s the immense SCALE of everything. Standing on the giza plateau and craning up at the great pyramid. Likewise in Karnak, dwarfed by the columns in the Hypostyle Hall. How did they do it without modern equipment and engineering? Was it spacemen? As a teenager, this was an intriguing thought!

And, of course, the history. Stepping into the thick, stifling atmosphere of a centuries-old tomb that looks as if the artisans laid down their paint-pots just yesterday. Learning from the guide that they got light into the depths of their ancient sepulchres while they were carving and decorating them by reflecting the sun from great sheets of electrum at the tomb entrance. True? Possibly – not sure if it was really electrum ! But the guides demonstrated it ably enough with a metal biscuit tin.

Standing inside Tutankhamun’s tomb … gawping at the sarcophagus that still contained the remains of the boy king … Trying unsuccessfully to grapple with the unimaginable period of time – thirty-or-so centuries – that he’d been there.

Or perhaps it was the weird and wonderful stories about the pharaohs and their queens themselves. Did Ramses II REALLY have more than two hundred children, some by his own daughters? It was a thought to make me squirm – standing alongside my own father listening to the guide. Were brothers and sisters REALLY married to each other? I remember looking at my fourteen year old brother and thinking ‘ugh’.

So somehow, it’s all larger than life, a little bit Hollywood, and desperately mysterious and intriguing. Nowhere like it on earth ! It reached out and grabbed me. More than thirty years later it shows no sign of letting go.