GM: Hi Nick. First of all, can I say how much I enjoyed Nefertiti! Historical novels aren't new, but this one was thoroughly original, a fresh take on the idea, and really enjoyable. Do you have an interest in Egyptology per se, or did you simply decide it would make a good idea for a detective novel?
Thanks very much. I’ve been interested in Ancient Egypt for some time, at least since the Tutankhamun exhibition in London in the 1970s, which I saw as a kid. I wanted to take the period seriously, treat Ancient Egypt at the time of the 18th Dynasty as a world power at war with itself, and write characters who knew they were living at the very edge of the present tense. That way, I hoped the setting, and the themes of power and illusion and religion, might have a contemporary resonance. I thought it would be interesting to do something like that using the genre of the detective novel. And when I discovered Nefertiti had disappeared, that was my big clue.
GM: How did you set about researching the period? I was fascinated to learn that the Egyptians had their Medjay police for investigating suspicious deaths and crimes.
There are an enormous number of books on all aspects of Ancient Egypt. Many are very old fashioned in their assumptions and approaches, but there are others that are wonderful and insightful. The evidence, at least for the 18th dynasty and for Amarna, is often quite slight and from a very specific strata of society. Whole visions and versions of the culture are conjured from not much, and people often make the evidence mean what they want it to mean. So I found certain books very useful for research (eg the 3 volume reprint of the drawings made of the rock tombs of Amarna), and some very challenging in a good way. I read a lot to try to get inside the world view of these characters, and to find out what they worried about, ate, listened to, etc. And there’s a great deal of useful material on the internet. I found out things as I went along, too; so if a scene included wine, I found out about the wine culture, about the growing regions, about the marks that the vintner put on the jars. The game of senet, which the Egyptians loved, is important in the book, and I researched that carefully. I’ve tried to be really accurate historically with objects and cultural elements and things of the Egyptian mind. Don’t know how far I have succeeded!
GM: I imagine you watched loads of films on Egypt to get a feel for the atmosphere of the time – it came across really well in the book, very scenic, and visual.
I didn’t really, although there is a wonderful Polish film made in the 70s called PHARAOH that is like an art film, very visually powerful. In fact the best thing I did was to spend a few weeks travelling with a study group visiting the major monuments outside Cairo, especially Amarna, which is very difficult to get to both practically and in terms of permissions. We had very knowledgeable guides. Egypt is so strikingly unusual in that most of what there is to see is within ten miles of the Nile.
GM: What sort of literature did you read as a young boy?
I loved Sci-fi best I think when I was young. Robert Heinlein. J G Ballard. Arthur C Clarke. I remembered a wonderful novel by Peter Dickinson called THE BLUE HAWK which is a brilliant evocation of Ancient Egypt, with a young boy protagonist at its heart. Then when I was about sixteen or so I discovered ‘english literature’ – Eliot, Dickens, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and so on…
GM: Are you hoping that Nefertiti will be made into a film? If so, would you be writing the screenplay yourself?
Sure, I’d love it to become a film, in the right hands. I think it has an epic panorama, but it’s also focused on a small cast of players… and there’s a lot at stake. Also, I don’t think films have taken the Ancient Egyptian world at its own value; it has become the staple of B-movies, but why? It’s as rich and powerful and diverse and influential as Ancient Rome or Greece… or the US today.
As to writing the screenplay, I’d love to have a go at it. My first screenplay is in production at the moment in Australia, and I’ve loved the collaborative process.
GM: It would be nice to think of Rahotep starring in a series, like an Egyptian Inspector Morse, but I guess that would involve filming on location. The press release says this is the first Rahotep novel – are you working on a sequel yet?
Yes, I’m working on Book Two now. It features many of the same characters, but ten years down the line; things have changed in rahotep’s life; his kids are older, his marriage is ten years older, his parents are very elderly now; so there’s an evolving family story which I can write more now that my detective is back in his home town of Thebes. At the same time, there are big changes happening politically, which focus on the ascension to power, and the sudden death, of Tutankhamun.
GM: Who are your literary heroes? By that I mean whose books do you enjoy reading? Have you read other historical novels, like Cadfael, for example, to get a feel for how they portray historical figures, or did you just jump in at the deep end, as it were?
My big heroes in this vein are Robert Graves above all – I CLAUDIUS – and Marguerite Yourcenar, whose MEMOIRES OF HADRIAN is brilliant and very dense and shows what can really be done with the ‘historical novel’, and of course Raymond Chandler. All of these books are told in voices that are very specific and carry with them vividly the whole of the world they speak about. I think Martin Cruz Smith is wonderful; DOGS EAT WOLVES is fantastic. And likewise Robert Harris and Iain Pears.
GM: Are the hieroglyphics in the book genuine? Do they actually say something, or are they just there for decoration?
No, they’re absolutely genuine. I got them from a scholar! I wanted all that to be accurate.
GM: I've read somewhere that Smenkhkare, possibly married to Nefertiti's daughter Meritaten, is thought by some scholars to be an alternative name for Nefertiti herself, and that the historical record showing her disappearance, as she does in your book, was followed by her reappearance in the guise of Smenkhkare – do you believe that could have been a possible explanation, especially since most records do not have any evidence of her reappearing after that disappearance?
I do think that’s a strong possibility. And the more I wrote the story, the more likely it seemed to me. The interesting problem is that the evidence is extremely ambiguous. Names and titles could be used very fluidly, and are hard to interpret where we lack the necessary contexts. Likewise it’s possible to read the apparently ambiguous gender of Smenkhare in several ways – some people have argued that ‘he’ was Akhenaten’s gay male lover. Others that ‘he’ was Nefertiti returned to power in male guise, with even more authority than when she was ‘Nefertiti’. For the novelist, however, this ambiguity gives room for manoeuvre. Robert Graves said he was trying in his novels to solve a historical ‘problem’ or enigma, and I suppose I’m trying to do the same thing, for Nefertiti.
GM: Finally, can you name your top five books or authors, and say why they are special to you?
Well, I can reply to that in terms of who means a lot to me at the moment; the list might have been very different ten years ago, or in ten years’ time. first I guess Robert Graves for being a great poet as well as a compelling author of historical fiction; and I love the way everything he wrote was original. I also love the novels of Haruki Murakami, for the way he holds very diverse stories together in the same book, and for the way he writes about the world now, and for the sense of heartbreak that underlies the stories. Edward Thomas, the poet; a small number of poems written in a few rich years before his death in the first world war, and they have such a true sense of the experience of being alive, made more vivid by the prospect of mortality. Raymond Chandler, because his view of the world – and of human dreams and their Hollywood corruption - is so tough and so sensitive at the same time; and because his ability to do something original within the genre of the detective story is marvellous. And predictably enough, perhaps, Shakespeare because more than any other writer he embraces the whole world, in poetry.
GM: Thanks for taking the time to do a Q&A session. Good luck with your future projects, and I hope Nefertiti becomes a best-seller!
Thank you. I hope readers enjoy the book, get hooked by the world, and will follow me into the story of Tutankhamun.
