Our book today is Michael Pearce’s 1991 novel The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind, the fourth (and my favorite) in Pearce’s long-running series of novels set in Edwardian Cairo and starring a blandly resolute Welshman named Gareth Owen in his capacity as the Mamur Zapt, a strange kind of hybrid police detective-Secret Police Czar that was particular to Cairo at the time. Owen’s responsibilities are fluid and have encompassed a great many things in the series’s long history (I think the ‘Mamur Zapt’ novels are up to #20 or so by now – I stopped keeping track once they started having arrestingly hideous covers); and always in addition his official channels of power and information, he’s keenly sensitive to the more nebulous and often more reliable channels that then – and now – run under the surface of Cairo life:

It was the rumours from the cafes and bazaars that he gave most attention to, for they were a gauge of the temperature of the city. It was from them that he would learn if things were getting out of hand, if there was a danger of things boiling over.

The unrest in this novel starts on the first page, when somebody in the crowd takes a shot at a minor Accounting official in the street. The potential tension is always simmering, of course: the British run the country that’s technically ruled by its Khedives and their corrupt officials, so any act of violence against one of the British has the potential to flare up from mayhem to terrorism. Pearce leaps into all this political complexity – the learning-curve in these books is steep but well worth it – and he somehow manages to maintain a strong current of wry humor throughout even the most tense plot developments.

When there’s a further attack – this time on one of the Khedive’s over-powerful servants, Ali Osman Pasha – Owen goes to the Pasha’s ornate residence, which Pearce conveys with wonderful concision:

Owen walked past the guardian eunuchs, named according to custom after flowers or precious stones, across the courtyard, his feet crunching in the gravel, and into the reception room, the mandar’ah, with its sunken marble floor and fountain playing.

Ali Pasha has not been injured, but he’s a pampered autocrat, so he’s mighty outraged. And in the oscillation between Old World Ottoman severity and quasi-Victorian British lawful phlegm, Pearce perfectly encapsulates the hopelessness of East meets West:

‘Savages! Jacobins!’

Like most of the Egyptian upper class, the Pasha habitually spoke French. He looked on the French culture as his own, identifying, however, more with Louis-Philippe than with the present Republic.

‘They shall be tracked down.’

‘And tortured,’ said Ali Osman with relish. ‘Flayed alive and nailed out in the sun.’

‘Severely dealt with.’

‘I would wish to be present myself,’ said the Pasha. ‘In person. Please make arrangements.’

‘Certainly. Of course, it may take a little time … Legal processes, you know …’

Ali Osman raised himself on one arm.

‘Justice,’ he admonished Owen, ‘should be swift and certain. Then people know what to expect.’

‘Absolutely! But, Pasha, surely you would not wish it to be too soon? Might not your injuries prevent  – ?’

‘Grievous though they are,’ said Osman, ‘for this I would make a special effort.’

He collapsed on his face again and a eunuch hastily began to massage him.

Re-reading The Mamur Zapt and the Men Behind (I recently found an old paperback at, needless to say, my beloved Brattle Bookshop) was even more enjoyable than I expected. There’s an understated wit in these books that’s sometimes easy to miss  – I’m sure I got more out of this reading than I did the one 25 years ago. Maybe I even got enough out of it to catch up on the rest of the series, hideous covers or no.