The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile, or details, details!

Sure, there's a killing in this fifth book in Michael Pearce's Mamur Zapt series. Not only that, there's an arms-smuggling ring, and the two connect in macabre fashion.

But I still like the details best, mostly of late-colonial politics, as interests play off one another, and the mystery of the dead woman (she fell off a prince's boat, no less!) bumps up against a looming Anglo-Egyptian diplomatic agreement.

And not just political details. Pearce has a sharp ear for the nerve-racking pitch of a lover's quarrel, for example, and an eye for the increasing prevalence of image over substance:

"`Have you noticed,' said the Prince, `that their business has changed? They used to sell beads and hippopotamus-hide whips and boa constrictors. Now they sell themselves to be photographed.'"

As for politics, how about this:

"The Khedive's an Absolute Ruler, well, relatively Absolute, and can conduct Agreements on his own, provided we say so."

or this wry observation about the origins of Egypt's French-style Parquet, or prosecution service:

"`New?' said Owen. The Parquet had existed, he thought, since at least 1883 when a reforming Minister of Justice had unearthed in his office some Arabic translations of parts of the French Code Napoléon and promulgated them as the new Egyptian legal system."

And for humor, this, from a bon-vivant heir to Egypt's nominal throne who nonetheless considers himself a progressive thinker, and is thus surprised when he finds himself a target of angry nationalists:

"`I'm all for reform myself,' said Narouz, `but does one have to be quite so drastic?'"

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Michael Pearce
Egypt crime fiction

The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in the Nile

While we're on the subject of colonialism and occupying powers, there are Michael Pearce's Mamur Zapt police procedurals. Pearce brings contemporary sensibilities to an old-style exotic setting: early twentieth-century Egypt, with its competing British, Ottoman and Egyptian interests and its French-style judicial system.

The Mamur Zapt and the the Girl in the Nile, fifth in a series that now numbers sixteen, offers all the trappings of espionage tales of an earlier era: hot, lazy days; cool, callously scheming British officials; and the odd lazy or ingratiating native. But then come the subtly contemporary touches. The mamur zapt's, or British secret police chief's, romantic involvement with an independent daughter of the Egyptian upper classes is the most obvious of these.

More intriguing are remarks such as this: "Not only that. He was also the façade which concealed the realities of British power in Egypt." That's not the sort of thing one is likely to find in, say, John Buchan.

Most intriguing, and likely to hit home with a force as fresh as today's headlines, are passing observations like this one about the populace's unease with police, whom they saw "as the agents of either an alien, infidel force (the British) or a dissolute secular power (the Khedive)."

I shall read this series with considerable interest.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

Technorati tags:
Michael Pearce
Egypt crime fiction