Yellow Dingo asked on his blog:
yellowdingo Apr 29, 2012 08:38 PM
Hi Mr Heard. Nice to have you by...and yes the fiction is alluring. Lover of Egypt? or just exploring?
Bit
of a long story (no pun intended). Janet, my co-author, had come up
with the idea of Percival St. Croix and Devlin Quint. She originally
wrote a short story for the award-winning anthology Under Cover of Darkness (DAW), called Shadow of the Scimitar. She and I had long
discussions while she developed her story, and we planned to turn this
into a trilogy set during WW1.
I suggested we link Percival with Lawrence of Arabia and other personalities of that time. Cairo became one of Percival's preferred haunting grounds since he's supposed to be an Egyptologist. I knew virtually nothing about Cairo when we started, let along details of Cairo a hundred years ago! The research was a lot of fun and I've developed a fancy for the ancient city since we started this project three or four years ago. :-)
I suggested we link Percival with Lawrence of Arabia and other personalities of that time. Cairo became one of Percival's preferred haunting grounds since he's supposed to be an Egyptologist. I knew virtually nothing about Cairo when we started, let along details of Cairo a hundred years ago! The research was a lot of fun and I've developed a fancy for the ancient city since we started this project three or four years ago. :-)