🏺 Bonus: Murder Among the Pyramids

🔎 From lockdown to the land of pyramids: learn how I researched 1920s Egypt during 2020, and created a heroine who was one of the original travel influencers.

📸 Meet Blix, my intrepid lady photographer who captures foreign locations on film and then entertains lecture halls full of curious Brits with tales of her adventures.

🌴 In this bonus episode, I give you a behind-the-scenes look at the research and inspiration for Murder Among the Pyramids, including how true stories of 1920s tourists shooting golf balls off the Great Pyramid and hosting moonlit parties inspired scenes in the book.

Get your copy of Murder Among the Pyramids by Sara Rosett in audio, print, or ebook. 

🕵️‍♀️ 📦 Cozy Books Corner Subscription Box (affiliate code), a book box curated for cozy mystery readers.

➡️ Use code SaraR5 and get 15% off! ⬅️

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Welcome to Mystery Books Podcast. I'm Mystery Author Sarah Rosette. This is a bonus episode, and it's all about Murder Among the Pyramids. Well, Murder Among the Pyramids is a new book. It's the first book in a new series, but it's a spin-off from the High Society Lady Detective series. And this is a bonus episode. I just want to take a moment to tell you about the book, the series, and I normally have a script for this, but I have no notes, no script. I'm doing this the week before Christmas, and I just wanted to let you know about the book. Say Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, and I hope everyone's having a fantastic time. Hopefully, I will get this out before Christmas. If not, Happy New Year. Alright, so a little bit about Murder Among the Pyramids. So this book, the idea for this came when I was writing the book in the High Society series called Murder on a Midnight Clear. And it had a whole bunch of very eclectic characters who gather at this English country mansion for a Christmas holiday. One of those characters was Blix, and she's a lady traveler. Now I thought it was very interesting to have a lady traveler as a character, and I thought she would be fun to continue to write about. And where would I want to send her? Egypt, of course, because I wanted to write a book about Egypt for a while. So this was back in 2020, and I had big plans. I had an idea for the book. I wanted to travel to Egypt. But as with most things in 2020, that did not happen. And I could tell it was going to be a long time before travel was going to be possible. So I decided to go ahead and start writing a book. And I would research it like I normally do with lots of travel guides and maps and historical biographies and things like that. And I would just do what I could with what I had. And then if I could travel later, I would. And if not, that'd be fine. What I found out as I was researching it was that a lot of the places, a lot of the things that people did in the 1920s and 30s when they traveled to Egypt, that's not how people travel to Egypt now. They don't go see the same, they don't go along the same route. They fly from place to place. A lot of times they don't take the steamers up and down the Nile like they did in the 20s. So I was like, okay, I will just use my research. And I found that quite a bit with things from the 1920s. What exists today, even going to London and Mayfair, it's not possible to see a lot of the things that existed at the time that I'm writing about. So I pressed on and I just delved deep into research and found out tons of interesting things about the country, uh, the way people traveled there. So I'll tell you a little bit about the story itself. Blix is a travel lecturer, and I discovered that there were really people who did this. They went to a place, they took pictures, they had them made into glass slides, and then they would travel around and give lectures, show their slides and tell people about these different countries, these different places. It was at the time, it was the National Geographic, it was the Discovery Channel, it was the travel channel for the people back home. If you lived in England and had grown up in England, you may not have ever seen the Swiss Alps, you may not have seen uh animals that lived in Africa, in India, you might not know what a buffalo looked like or a cactus. So this was a way to learn about the world and to learn about other cultures. And that just appealed to me that I could have a character who could travel around and visit these different places. And so I decided that she would visit Egypt in this first book, and actually it's turned into three books where she will travel around Egypt. But so I had Blix, who's a travel lecturer, and then um she's on her way, she's made an agreement to be in a companion to a woman, and they're on their way to Egypt, and things do not go well. And in the course of the launching of the of this trip, uh they part ways, and Blix meets this woman named Hildi, who is quite a bit older than her. She's a very motherly person, she's a very kind person. And Blix has grown up as the daughter of a diplomat. So the diplomat and his wife were traveling a lot, and she was often by herself or just with a governess, so she didn't have a whole lot of social interaction. Basically, the two women meet each other and become friends, even despite their age difference. And Blix is able to help Hildi with the travel difficulties because Hildi has never traveled before. She's spent her whole life taking care of her bachelor brother. And when he passed away for the first time in her life, she had freedom and money, and she wanted to see the world. So she goes on this trip, but she quickly realizes that she does not have the experience that some travelers do. She's a little naive. So she asked Blix, who is a world traveler, to come with her. They agree to travel together. But it turns out that Hilde is actually very savvy in the ways of people and relationships, where Blix maybe is a little lacking in that because she just didn't have a whole lot of friends. She hasn't had a whole lot of friendships and relationships in her life. So the two women kind of come together, and that's part of the story of the first book, is how they become friends, how they decide to travel together. And then once they get to Egypt, there is of is, of course, a murder. And the interesting thing I found out is that at this time, when you traveled to Egypt in the 1920s, you could tour inside the pyramids, you could climb up the outside of the pyramids and have a picnic at the top, you could shoot golf balls off the top of the pyramid, you could even have a camp out, you could uh take a tent, camp out on the plane and watch the sunset and see the moon over the pyramids. That was all perfectly fine. So I was like, okay, all of this has to go in my book. So um I incorporated that into uh the story and had a great time researching about that and about the hotels people stayed in. A lot of this book takes place in Shepherd's Hotel, which was a real hotel, but it does not exist now. There is a Shepherd's Hotel, a building named at, but that is not the same building that existed in the 1920s. So that's a little bit about the book, a little bit about the story, a little bit about my research. So I hope you will check out the book. It's available in ebook, print, and audio, and the name of it is Murder Among the Pyramids. So that is it for this little quick update. If you can't get enough of the 1920s who does, you can check out my High Society Lady Detective series as well. And I will be back shortly with a new season of the Mystery Books Podcast, and hopefully that will be out in early 2025. So happy sleeping, and I will see you next time.