Thank you for reading The Egyptian Antiquities Murder! This book grew out of my love of reading Elizabeth Peter’s Amelia Peabody books. When I wrote the first book of the series, Murder at Archly Manor, I intentionally set it in 1923 so I could explore the fascination with all things Egyptian that gripped Europe after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in November of 1922.
People have always found Egypt intriguing. Ancient Greeks and Romans were early tourists and traveled to Egypt. Napoleon mounted a campaign to capture Egypt and took along a group of scholars to study and document the land. When Howard Carter’s team uncovered a set of stairs in 1922 that led to the sealed tomb of a little-known boy pharaoh, it was just the most recent wave of Egyptomania—Tutmania.
The burial chamber was opened in February of 1923, and the amazing finds influenced art, architecture, fashion, and entertainment. Egyptian motifs and themes cropped up in movies, music, dress, and cosmetics. Even crime writers of the day were drawn to the subject. I was reading the archives of The Sketch on the British Newspaper Archive when I ran across the first publication of Agatha Christie’s short story The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb under the heading The Grey Cells of M. Poirot in the September 26, 1923 edition.
While researching the supposed victims of King Tut’s curse, I read about Lord Westbury, a peer who jumped from the seventh-floor window of his London flat and died. The newspapers reported Lord Westbury was despondent after the death of his son, who had worked as a secretary to Howard Carter. Lord Westbury left a barely legible letter that stated, “I really can’t stand any more horrors.” The news articles were quick to point out the connection to King Tut and play up the curse angle. The death even made news in America. The Gettysburg Times of February 22, 1930 pointed out that in the years since the tomb had been discovered, there had been eight deaths of people “more or less intimately connected” to the tomb excavation, and most of those people had died sudden or violent deaths. Lord Westbury’s death was the ninth. Although Lord Westbury’s death occurred in 1930, I decided it would make an intriguing jumping off point for the fictional murder in The Egyptian Antiquities Murder.
Once I had the gist of the murder, I needed a setting and modeled my fictional Mulvern House on The Wallace Collection, a museum I was able to visit and highly recommend if you’re in London. It’s located at Hertford House in Manchester Square and houses an extensive collection of paintings, furniture, ceramics, sculpture, and armor. The house itself is gorgeous too! You can see images of The Wallace Collection on my Pinterest board dedicated to The Egyptian Antiquities Murder along with Olive’s “gun” compact. Compacts’ shapes went far beyond the basic round or square styles. There’s also plenty of beautiful “frocks” as Olive would say on the board as well.
Monsieur Pierre Dupin is a fictional character I made up and wasn’t in charge of granting archeologists the right to dig in Egypt. In reality, that person was Pierre Lacau. He was the director general of the Department of Antiquities of Egypt in 1923. He and Howard Carter didn’t always see eye to eye.
Albert Rathburn didn’t exist either, but I based his character on Sir E. A. Wallis Budge, who worked for the British Museum and made many trips to Egypt, where he bought antiquities from local dealers for the museum. All the large European museums wanted antiquities for their collections, and there was a race to acquire as many as possible. The methods used to procure the antiques were often questionable. The story Rathburn relates at dinner about tunneling underground from the Luxor Hotel to a nearby house to get a valuable papyrus was one of Budge’s real-life experiences, which was recounted in Brian Fagan’s book The Rape of the Nile: Tomb Robbers, Tourists, and Archaeologists in Egypt as well as in Wallis’ own book, By Nile and Tigris: A Narrative of Journeys in Egypt and Mesopotamia on behalf of the British Museum between the years of 1886 and 1913. Wallis’ book is available online at the Internet Archive. Fagan’s book is a fascinating read if you want more details on how so many statues, obelisks, and mummies ended up in Europe.
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