[crashryan]

Claude Vernon Frost, author of the Inspector Chafik short stories, had been an intelligence agent in the Middle East. He drew on his experiences for his fiction. The blurb for a recent collection of Chafik stories says:

As a Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force he worked with Military Intelligence in Iraq during the Second World War. Child wrote that Inspector Chafik was a composite of associates whom he met in the Middle East, whose "agile minds" could "wind through a complicated maze."

Link to the book: Super Detective Library 052 - Who Killed the Ghost

[Andrew999]

Thank you - I had temporarily forgotten that Frost was the author of the Chafik stories - senile dementia setting in!

How right Frost was in his quote - how sad that so few of us take the trouble to investigate the culture and language of the Middle East - we would be enriched by the experience. This was not always the case, of course - in late Victorian and Edwardian times, orientalism (both legit and theosophical) was a bit of a cult activity.

[The Australian Panther]

Andrew, if you like this type of Story and you read books as well as comics, I think you would enjoy the series of the Mamur Zapt  by Michael Pearce. Pearce was also a British Public Servant in Egypt.
'The setting

[Andrew999]

Oh, wow, that's a huge tip, Panther - thank you so much - I've just looked Zapt up on Amazon. They look terrific and I've already ordered one - I can't believe I've never come across him before.

Yes, I've read the first two Jason Goodwin books. I loved The Janissary Tree but felt the other was a little slow. It might just have been that my life was very busy at the time, loads of stress, and I wasn't in the mood.

If you've not read her, I thoroughly recommend Elizabeth Peters Set in Egypt, they gallop along and whilst the stories contain intricate murder mysteries, they are also extremely funny and usually include an element of young romance as well.