‘A post-colonial spy story, full of intrigue and passion.’
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Category: romance
CAIRO MON AMOUR PAPERBACKS NOW DISTRIBUTED IN AUSTRALIA
I’m delighted to announce that my publisher is now distributing paperbacks in Australia. You can order Cairo Mon Amour online at the retailers below. The really good news is that you pay local freight rather than copping a big postage bill from the UK!
BOOK DEPOSITORY, AMAZON AUSTRALIA, AMAZON US, AMAZON UK, BOOKTOPIA, KINOKUNIYA, ANGUS & ROBERTSON
‘An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity’ discounted this week only
It hit the Amazon best seller ranks in 2016. Help me hit those dizzy heights again!
Here’s the short blurb:
The Walsinghams dabble in petty crime as they try to enliven a failing marriage. But a figure from the past tips them into a double murder plot. Could this respectable Home Counties couple really be killers?
And here’s where you can buy it for 99c/99p between 5 and 15 March 2018:
Giveaway to Oz residents – two signed copies of Cairo Mon Amour
I’m giving away two signed copies of Cairo Mon Amour in March 2018 to Australian residents only. Simply tell me in the LEAVE A REPLY box below the name of the cafe Pierre visited on the first page of the novel (hint – check out this link and hit the ‘Look inside’ arrow). The first two correct answers get the freebies! I’ll contact the winners privately to get their Australian postal addresses.
Open for entries 1-5 March 2018.
‘An Englishman’s Guide to Infidelity’ relaunching soon!
No, it’s not a how-to-do-it manual! It’s my second novel, which hit the Amazon best-seller ranks in 2016. I’ve left it unattended and unpromoted through 2017, when I was busy with the publication of Cairo Mon Amour.
As with all my novels, I set myself a special challenge: This time, I’d write a thriller with three points of view, two of them female. If the Amazon reviews are anything to go by, I pulled it off (with the help of my friends in the Write On! group at the NSW Writers’ Centre, who put me back on track when I wandered into blokiness).
Here’s the short blurb:
The Walsinghams dabble in petty crime as they try to enliven a failing marriage. But a figure from the past tips them into a double murder plot. Could this respectable Home Counties couple really be killers?
And here’s where you can buy it for 99c/99p between 5 and 15 March 2018:
Cairo Mon Amour gets big surge from Goodreads
After Goodreads giveaways in November, December and January 2018, word is spreading about my espionage romance Cairo Mon Amour. In total, 2597 people entered the giveaways, and 547 have the book on their ‘to read’ list.
I’m planning more giveaways this year, but if you want to skip the line, just click here to find out how to buy a copy.
Sincere thanks to publisher Austin Macauley for organising the December and January giveaways.
How I created my femme fatale
Cairo Mon Amour started out as a noir novel. Whether it ended up as one, you can be the judge. But in the noir tradition, I needed a femme fatale, and that’s why I created Zouzou Paris.
She’s the childhood sweetheart of Pierre Farag, my Armenian-Egyptian private eye. But they’ve been long separated. The sweet girl he knew as a teenager on holidays in Alexandria is now a notorious film actress, protected by powerful men.
But she’s in danger, fearing that a high-ranking official wants her murdered. And that’s how she and Pierre meet again after nearly twenty years – she summons him to her private apartment to ask for his help. He sits agog as she levers off her luxuriant wig, peels off her eyelashes and wipes away the make-up: She’s no longer the hard-bitten Zouzou Paris, but the girl he knew as Aziza Faris, who fluttered her eyelashes at Pierre in their teens.
Well, with a reunion like that, how could I hold back? They’re bound together for life. But first I have to get them out of Egypt. I put them on the last ship to leave Alexandria when the Yom Kippur war breaks out, and then I follow them through France, where they are married – a condition that Zouzou imposes before she will allow Pierre into her bed. There’s a curious reason for her stipulation on wedlock, but you’ll have to read the book to know what it is.
We leave them in exile in 1970s London, both trying to negotiate a city of coin-fed gas meters, evil landladies, cambric bedspreads, and Dixon of Dock Green on the TV.
I’m fascinated with Zouzou – her volatility, her odd wisdom, the depth of her loyalty, her resignation to fate. I purposely didn’t give her a point of view; rather than writing from inside her head, I allowed the layers of her character to build through Pierre’s observations. My aim here -and I think it worked – was for Zouzou to be enigmatic and unpredictable.
A final word on her name: Zouzou is an affectionate version of her real name Aziza. But there’s a connection with a a film that was showing in Cairo around the time the novel is set: Khalli baalak min Zouzou, or ‘watch out for Zouzou’. In the movie, Zouzou is a college student who has to work secretly as a belly dancer to make ends meet – the nice girl with a shameful secret. How could I resist calling my femme fatale anything else? And of course, my Zouzou claims to be half-French, although nobody believes it. The surname Paris is her clumsy attempt at European sophistication, and it’s not so distant from her real family name Faris.
OK, I confess: I’m smitten.
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You can buy a copy of Cairo Mon Amour here.
My publisher is giving away paperbacks
In case you missed my November giveaway of Cairo Mon Amour paperbacks, my publisher Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd is running a giveaway in December. Click here to enter and get the chance to win one of five free paperbacks!
A ringside seat under the kitchen table
War makes an irresistible setting for fiction, as the never-ending flood of WWII novels and movies shows. Gulf War thrillers are almost a genre in their own right.
The Yom Kippur War has its novels – Herman Wouk and Tom Clancy both weave stories around it. But I wanted to do something different – my novel set during the Yom Kippur War Cairo Mon Amour, is set in Egypt – not Israel.
I felt especially well qualified to write this book: I was a student at Cairo University when the war broke out in October 1973, and I had a ringside seat – or sometimes a seat under the kitchen table when the air-raid sirens went off.
If you can’t remember the main points about this particular conflict, Egypt invaded Sinai to reclaim land lost to Israel in 1967, and Syria attacked the Golan Heights. The conequences of the war included the 1978 Camp David Accords and the final withdrawal of Israel from Sinai in 1982.
What compelled me to write this book was the extraordinary lengths that Egypt went to in concealing the date of the attack. How did President Sadat keep preparations for a massive ground and air attack secret? And how could I spin a story of espionage and romance around this?
Details have emerged in memoirs and works of research: Hospital wards in Cairo were emptied under the pretext of epidemics in anticipation of floods of wounded troops; a military sports carnival was scheduled for the day of the attack; false stories were planted about the attack date. When I did my research, I found so many events that I could dramatise: The sudden evacuation of Soviet families just days before the outbreak of war; the last ship to leave Alexandria, crowded with Americans desperate to get away.
I also wanted to write a very human story, so I created a handful of flawed characters who all have a personal stake in finding out – or concealing – the date when the attack will be launched. We have a Cairo private eye of mixed Armenian and Coptic background; his childhood sweetheart who is now a notorious actress; a Soviet diplomat with divided loyalties; and two British spies who happen to be former lovers.
I made a decision to stick closely to the historical record: The chapters in the first part of the book follow exactly the days just before and after the start of the war. When the Soviet diplomat Zlotnik, drunk in his flat, hears the rumble of the huge Soviet aircraft flying in armaments, it is real; I heard them on that very night myself.
And I tried to capture the day-to-day atmosphere in the streets of Cairo, when, as a British student taking Arabic courses at Cairo University, I found myself in the midst of a populace that swung between elation at the first flush of victory, and distress as the wounded began to stagger home.
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An earlier version of the blog article appeared under the title ‘The Middle East conflict that inspired Cairo Mon Amour’.
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Going easy on the f-word in fiction
Writers are getting more foul-mouthed
The recent Guardian article on the increasing rates of foul language in literature got me thinking about my own use of the f-word and its derivatives.
I checked my f-quotient in my last three novels and – yes, my language is getting fouler with every book, rising from a demure 0.012 f*cks per hundred words in my first novel to 0.031 f*cks per 100 in Cairo Mon Amour, my latest.
Highly skilled at cursing
Confession time: I spent my early years on a council estate just outside London, and I Iearned to handle the f-word like an East End fishmonger. Later I became part of the Australian intelligentsia, and honed my skills so that I could out-f*ck any Professor of English Literature in the room.
But why do I use f*ck in my novels?
Here are the results drawn from the 26 f*cks in Cairo Mon Amour:
- Sometimes I use it to locate a character on the British class scale:
Bellamy said, “If we’re right about this we’re finished when those f*ckers from Ealing work out that they’ve put us together.”
“How come you talk like a barrow boy sometimes? I remember that from Shemlan. It’s quite a turn on, you know!”
2. Here’s a similar example, where I contrast the restrained and courteous Pierre with a thug:
“It’s a .22 calibre model 70,” he grunted. “Israeli military issue. Good quality. Liberated from the enemy. Probably used to shoot some poor Egyptian f*cker. Haha!”
“Take it back,” Pierre hissed.
3. And here’s Pierre learning to swear in English:
“Well, sort of gallop like f*cking hell. We’re being shot at.”
4. In this example my Soviet diplomat Zlotnik is supposed to be speaking in Russian, and the f*ck is a translation of the common Russian curse:
“Where’s that f*ck-your-mother Englishwoman gone?” Zlotnik rarely cursed. It had all unravelled, all gone to shit. He sank into the sofa.
5. In this last example, I have a bunch of American diplomats fleeing Egypt on ship. There has been a stream of f*cks as they lose their cool. Here’s the last one:
As the Cynthia’s engines groaned rheumatically into life, an American in a suit and a baseball cap pointed at the Soviet ship and shouted, “Look, they’re unloading f*cking missiles!”
I’m actually very pleased with my self-diagnosis: Every example has been strategically selected. There’s not a gratuitous f*ck in the book. Obviously, I was well trained!
Let me know what you think!
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Stuart Campbell author 