Ancient Mysteries and Modern Travels. Egypt With Luke Richardson

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Why does Egypt continue to fascinate curious travelers? What hidden chambers might lie beneath the pyramids of Giza? How does the duality of Egyptian mythology influence thriller writing? Join thriller authors J.F. Penn and Luke Richardson for a conversation that weaves together archaeological intrigue, travel insights, and the creative process behind crafting compelling adventures in one of history’s most enigmatic settings.

Luke Richardson is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archaeological Thrillers and the International Detective Thriller Series.

• Why Egypt continues to capture the imagination: Ancient myths, tombs, and timeless sites
• Modern Cairo and Garbage City
• The Oasis of Siwa
• The Pyramids of Giza, and recent archaeological finds about what might be underneath
• Travel tips for modern Egypt
• Recommended books

You can find Luke at LukeRichardsonAuthor.com and his books on Amazon. You can also find his trip notes and pictures at LukeRichardsonAuthor.com/egypt

If you enjoy thrillers inspired by and set in Egypt, check out The Giza Protocol by Luke Richardson and Ark of Blood by J.F. Penn.

Transcript of the interview

Jo: Hello Travelers. I’m Jo Frances Penn, and today I’m here with Luke Richardson. Hi Luke.

Luke: Hello.

Jo: I’m so excited to talk to you. Just for the listeners, Luke is the bestselling author of the Eden Black Archaeological Thrillers and the International Detective Thriller Series, and today we are talking about Egypt, which inspires locations in several of our books, Luke’s thriller, The Giza Protocol, and also my Ark of Blood.

We share an enthusiasm for action adventure thrillers. Obviously, we both write them and this is a topic we like to geek out on.

What is it about Egypt for you? When did this fascination start and why did you want to go?

Luke: There’s so much about Egypt as a country, isn’t there, that just, it’s so evocative of the stories that we write, you know, there’s so much mysticism and so much magic there and, and it conjures up images from Hercule Poirot on the Nile solving murders to the glamor of Cleopatra, to the ambition of Rameses.

And we are not the first writers to be captivated by this. This has happened from Shakespeare all the way forward through the romantic movements, people have been captivated by the magic of Egypt. But there’s also that mystery to it there. There’s things that people don’t know about Egypt.

What were the pyramids for? How were they built? Of course, people say they’re tombs for the Pharaohs, but it’s far more interesting, I think, to consider some of the other theories about maps and power plants and really imaginative, fun stuff that makes our stories tick.

Jo: Yeah. And it’s funny ’cause I was thinking about this in terms of why did I become obsessed with it?

And you and I both have read a lot of the same books, you mentioned there that so many writers have done Egypt. And then of course I’m a little bit older than you, but Indiana Jones obviously and yet we still want to go and see it ourselves, I guess.

And I remember when I was little, we went to Bristol Museum and there was a mummy there and we actually went back quite recently and it was a pretty crap mummy, to be honest. It was pretty bad.

But as an 8-year-old, it made me think, what the hell? Who are these people? How is there a dead body here? Do you remember being interested in that macabre side and the Book of the Dead and hieroglyphics?

Luke: Yeah, certainly. I think when I was maybe 12 or 14, The Mummy film, the first one, I think it, maybe it’s 1998 or 99 or something like this came out, and the whole thing about the mummification process, cutting the tongue out and pulling the brain out through the nose and all this grim stuff that just the kids just go wild for that.

You’ve got a very sort of sick sense of humor, haven’t you, when you are of that age, and I remember that being fascinating as well. For sure.

Jo: Yeah, and I had these hieroglyphic like activity books where I would try and draw the hieroglyphics and I, I really, I really did think I was gonna be like an archeologist, but then of course I went myself in the, I guess, more than a decade ago now.

Tell us about your modern day trip.

Luke: Yeah, so we went in 2000 and I have to remember now, 2003 in January, 2003, and I’d written the first draft of the book, I did it a bit backwards on this. I had written the book and I wanted to go to check if I got it right, and then it was with my editor at the time or my first group of readers.

And then I took it back and then made all the changes about, no, it actually takes this length of time to walk from here to here or do this thing or that thing and, and sort of jiggled things around after going on the trip. But I knew for me it was really important. I was writing this book. I wanted it to be right. I wanted it to feel right. And for me, making that trip and I was fortunate enough to have the resources and have the time to be able to do that and incorporate that into my writing.

Jo: Was it 2003, did you mean 2013?

Luke: I meant 2023. Sorry, I’m getting completely confused. It was like two, three years ago!

Jo: I was gonna say, how old were you?!

Luke: It was 2 or 3 years ago, yeah.

Jo: This is interesting because I went in, it must have been 2005, and one of the interesting things that we’re both obviously interested in is the pyramids. The Pyramids of Giza and when I went, there was still a really big distance between Cairo and the pyramids, but I imagine when you went, it was actually really close.

So tell us about that specific trip.

Luke: Yeah, it’s, it’s Cairo, just sprawled. It’s an incredibly vast city that’s so noisy and polluted, and busy. I love places like that too, because it’s fun and it’s vibrant and there’s great markets and mosques and monasteries and temples.

It’s a real sort of fusion of this African, Asian, with the European elements in there as well. It’s a really interesting city. And that’s featured in the book as well. Actually, I based part of it in this place called Manshiyat Nasser, which is the Garbage City they call it.

And it’s become a little bit of an alternative tourist attraction. It’s on the hill or one of the hills in, in Cairo. And on the top of the hill there’s a monastery carved out of the rock. And you go inside and it’s this giant cave that seats about 600 people in this auditorium. And then you walk down the hill and you walk through the borough of the city where the people sort out the rubbish, they recycle Cairo’s rubbish.

And on the ground floor of all these buildings, you’ve got people there sorting the the plastic forks and spoons into different trays and milk. Bottles from other bottles and glass for things to other things. And people coming in with donkeys and trucks laid them with this rubbish. And the thing that I loved about that is you walk through this place, and this is modern Egypt, right?

This is the way life is in lots of places around the world. You walk through this place and there are people living this sort of simple life, doing the job that they do, but yet there are still hair salons and nail bars and tea shops and restaurants and all the stuff that we have in our towns is there too, just in a different way, you know?

And I absolutely love that. It makes you think about your own existence. It helps you reflect on, I think, on some of the things that we hold important in our lives.

Jo: And well, and in fact, even thinking about the ancient Egypt that’s inspired our modern thrillers as well, is that they have the same thing, you know, hair salons, and the like.

I remember being fascinated by the little Egyptian glass jars that still you can find in the museums, and they were full of perfumes and all that kind of thing. That was just fascinating to me.

And I was just thinking also, what’s different between our two trips almost 20 years apart. The other thing is when I went, I visited the Old Museum of Antiquities and it was crazy.

I remember going in there and what was weird is it was crammed full. I mean, talk about the terrible mummies at Bristol Museum. This was mummies, mummies everywhere, like literally just hanging out and then everything had these tiny little handwritten notes on. It was a very strange experience.

What kind of experience did you have with the museums? ’cause I think that has changed.

Luke: Yes, it has. It is very different now. It’s this beautiful marble and chrome building. Really expansive, very sort of modern. It’s, it’s clearly had had a lot of investment in it. And you see that in the mummies and you can walk around and see them.

They’re all arranged in their sort of family groups through the various eras of Egyptian history. But you’re right, it’s still, you look at it and you, you think that is a person. And I feel in our society, Europeans perhaps. Death is quite detached from us, isn’t it? It’s not something we see and experience in a visceral sense.

We know about it. We know that it happens and we know people who have gone through it to put it in that sense, but we don’t often see them and actually seeing that person there and these are long dead people, you know, seeing that person there is is quite moving, isn’t it?

Jo: And I guess the other thing we should talk about cliche, because this is the problem with a place like Egypt, I often find where like Venice is the same, right?

People have this idea in their head and then it really might not be like that.

Tell us about visiting like the pyramids. Everyone in their head has the pyramids. Tell us about that and the sphinx. What was that experience like?

Luke: Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it, to think about that because you do have that sort of idea of what they would be like.

And I think the thing that resonated with me was just the vastness of not just the pyramids themselves, but the plateau on which they are created. It’s absolutely, it, it, it’s, it’s massive. You think about it, you know, the size of something like Stonehenge or the Vatican. These things that we’ve seen, which are tiny in comparison to these giant blocks of human created stone that are some distance apart, and then the desert just sprawls out of sight on all directions.

And that was one thing that resonated with me, or I remember from it, but I also quite like how you can get up close to them. You can stand next to that block and even that first level of block is out of my arms reach.

And I like that you can be very tactile with that as a monument. Whereas in some places, in some monuments, you’re kept at a distance, aren’t you? Away from them.

Jo: Well, that’s interesting ’cause I also have a picture standing on that first level—

Luke: Oh, you wouldn’t get away with that now.

Jo: Oh, really? Interesting. And of course you can’t go inside. I mean, I wanted to talk about this — as just in the last few days as we are recording this, there have been these new findings of potentially a vast complex of underground chambers and shafts extending nearly two kilometers.

This 3D radar thing that they’re showing could revolutionize the understanding of ancient Egyptian engineering. Tell us a bit more about how you’ve woven that into your thriller and your thoughts on what the hell is going on with all that?

Luke: Yeah, I know, and there’s always you, you use the word conspiracy theory there, which is an interesting one, isn’t it? And there’s always people that say, it’s this, it’s that, you know? There’d always be this back and forth between it. But ultimately, I love the fact, and I say this to people all the time, I get quite a lot of comments saying this isn’t true. We know it’s not true. And it might not be true. Okay? But my point is.

Isn’t it fun to think that the conspiracies might be true?

Isn’t it more fun to be open a little bit and go, there’s a possibility that this is true and this exists. And I really enjoy exploring that possibilities both in my writing and in the stuff I read and the conversations I have and those sorts of things as well. So yes, that’s my first thing. It would be fun to consider that it isn’t true.

Now, here’s an interesting story. Have you heard of a guy called Edgar Casey? I don’t think so. He was a clairvoyant. He’s American. Never went to Egypt. He was a clairvoyant in, I want to say sort of the 1920s, but I might be wrong. And he used to go into a meditative state and predict stuff, and he predicted stuff like the war and the Wall Street crash and stuff like this.

And he also predicted in one of these things he predicted that beneath the pyramids of Egypt was this massive library that contained all of the lost scripts from Atlantis or the Alexandria Library, and I just thought, that’s amazing, isn’t it?

Now. Of course, it might not be true. He might have just made it up, but he said some things which did become true, and that’s one of the things I’ve played with on this story, the idea that that could be there and no one exactly knows, because most often digs and archeology on that site is not allowed to take place.

Jo: And then of course you could say, well, they don’t let it happen because there is something there.

You mentioned modern Cairo and how it’s not at all like how people would have ancient Egypt in their head. I mean, like you said, well, for a start it’s Muslim and in thinking interestingly about Egyptian gods.

The mythology that is so rich and in The Valley of the Kings, the stories that are painted there, and the Book of the Dead and all that kind of thing.

How did Egyptian mythology and the ancient religion come through for you?

Luke: I play a lot with this idea in my story in quite a lot of my stories, actually, not just specifically this one, with that idea of duality that the Egyptians loved, you know, as above, so below.

The ground representing the stars, the heaven representing the Earth, and mirroring each other. You know, the monuments that set up to supposedly mirror the constellations and the sphinx supposed to look at the constellation of Leo during the point at which it was there and the Nile that reflects the Milky Way and all of these different things that they talk about, the mirror image between the skies and the earth.

I like that. And I think that’s particularly important or relevant in when we talk about ancient Egypt because you think about how clear the skies must have been. We have so many electric lights now, and cars and all these things that street lights and whatever that turn our skies, that bleach them,  this orange that we see all the time.

But in those days, it must have been so crisp that the night sky, you’d have seen so much that it would’ve been hard not to have been enchanted by what you saw and what you saw after dark. And that’s something I’ve really lent on heavily in the book.

Jo: And then I guess a lot of the monuments do have these figures of gods.

I was thinking then of Abu Simbel, which I went to visit in the desert towards like what would’ve been Nubia back then and just how, again, the size of it to stand there right by the Pharaoh’s feet. And of course that’s, although that was moved for the Lake Nasser, it still is orientated towards the sun, so the rays of the sun will hit the statue of the God at the back.

What are the other places that stick in your mind from your trip?

Luke: We visited Luxor as well on that trip, but we started off taking a trip out to Siwa, which is an Oasis right out in the desert. It’s about 50 miles from Libya, in fact, and it makes its way onto a lot of countries Do not visit list, perhaps including ours. But I didn’t check. I make a habit of not checking because I feel like if I do know, I’ll be worried about going.

I generally find, by the way, that places that are on do not visit lists are the best places to visit at the most. Interesting.

Jo: That is not travel advice, everyone!

Luke: Yes. Certainly not travel advice.

So we visited Siwa, which is this Oasis in the middle of the Sahara, it’s an eight hour drive in on one road and an eight hour drive back on the same road. There’s only one place to go on along this road, and it’s just a fantastic mystical place.

The Templars are said to have visited there. Alexander the Great is said to have made it that far. If you were traveling across the Sahara during any point before air travel, you’d have stopped there because it was the only place within three or 400 miles to get water and to have a meal.

Because of that, it’s just a really fascinating mystical place. And I remember on one of the days, we hired a local guide and he drove us out to the start of the desert, and what I didn’t realize is that the oasis itself is probably a hundred feet lower than the surface of the desert, hence why it’s got the water.

So we climbed up, we reached this giant wall of sand, literally like the end of the earth. It looked like it just absolutely vast ahead of us. And we scrambled up this wall of a wall of sand and sat on the edge to watch the sunset over the desert there, and I just sat there thinking about the enormity of it all.

This body of sand stretches from where we are right the way over to Morocco at one side, right the way down to Sub-Saharan Africa at the other side, and thinking about how that has remained unchanged quite a long time, and how our lifespans don’t even compare to this thing that I’m witnessing now. It’s very powerful.

Jo: Yeah. Well I think this is another sort of my obsessions as well, this Memento Mori — remember, you will die — and making the most of that time. And of course that sunrise, sunset over an oasis, the ancient Egyptians would’ve seen that too. So I think that that is lovely.

And it’s interesting what we discover that changes our perspective.

But I guess water is a really big deal. Obviously you mentioned there the desert, but also the oasis, the Nile is hugely important in Egypt, the dam and Lake Nasser and the coast. You went up to Alexandria I think as well.

Talk a bit about how some of the other aspects of water played a part in your trip.

Luke: Most of the people in Egypt, I think like 95% live within 50 miles of the the Nile because it’s the only part that’s green and and lush. And there’s obviously a couple of oases dotted around through the desert, but water really is the most powerful thing for them.

And you can see it, it switches from night to day as you travel up the up the Nile Delta and then out into the desert. It just dries up instantly and it becomes this desert that stretches forever. And that’s an important thing to both the modern Egypt and I think the ancient ones as well, and that’s something that’s changed, I think.

I don’t know exactly how much, but I know that when the dam was built in the 1950s or sixties, the Nile has become a lot smaller than what it was prior to that period, and that’s affected, obviously the way I know it used to actually run past the pyramids a lot closer to Giza, whereas now it’s about five or six miles away near the center of Cairo.

Jo: The other thing that’s weird of course, is that, I dunno why we think this, but I think it’s because our maps have Egypt, and you think, oh logically the river must go south, but it doesn’t.

Luke: Yeah, I think it’s one of the only major rivers that runs south to north, isn’t it? It’s quite unusual. I mean, there would be no logical reason why it would have to run the way of our maps. How convenient!

Jo: But it’s interesting ’cause where you went, you went to Alexandria, right?

Luke: MYeah, we started there.

Jo: Which I haven’t been to, but of course that’s more like a delta with lots of little tributaries and all of that kind of stuff. But how was that? ’cause of course, again, Alexandria, you mentioned the library earlier, has a mythological status in people’s minds.

What was Alexandria like?

Luke: It wasn’t our favorite. It was noisy. It was busy. It was just an industrial sort of city that you’d expect. And there isn’t much left of the old things.

The library obviously isn’t there. The Alexandria Lighthouse isn’t there. One of the famous wonders of the world that isn’t there? So after a couple of days of being in Alexandria, we moved down to get out of the city, but it’s a real snapshot of proper modern Egypt I feel.

Jo: I did a story called The Dark Queen, which is based on the sunken city of Thonis Herakleion, which isn’t far off the coast.

Luke: Oh, wow.

Jo: I mean, that’s another thing, like a lot of this is underwater or under sand or buried or drowned, and I think that’s what’s so fascinating with that. But just coming back on modern Egypt.

Because let’s just say this is the Books and Travel show. We hope people are going to go travel places. So people might have in their minds. You’ve mentioned noisy several times.

Luke: Yeah. It is noisy.

Jo: Yeah, it is noisy. It is very, very full of people. Obviously Cairo. I remember coming in the road was just jam packed.

What are your tips for surviving a trip to modern Egypt?

Luke: It really depends on who you are and what your travel experience is.

We are quite, my wife and I are quite experienced travelers and we were happy to wander around on our own and ward off people who offered us things. And you get a bit of people shouting, buy this, take this, have this, and that’s fine.

You just wave and get quite used to it. But if you are not, if that’s something that would affect you or you’ve got mobility issues or whatever, get a guide, get someone to drive you, that’s absolutely fine. And there are people that will do that.

You can book through a tour operator or even you could go to a hotel and ask them to book it for you. There are loads of people that will help you see things. We tend not to do that because we find it’s a lens through which you see the thing, isn’t it? If you’ve got a guide, and whilst that’s nice. And that’s great. ’cause they will tell you a lot, they rush you past some things and they make you look at others and they stop you here and take that photo and whatever.

So we tend to try and see it under our own steam, if at all possible.

Jo: I went with a small group tour, so at the time I was a solo traveler.

As a solo woman in the Middle East, being with trips, I feel safer that way.

Yeah. I think as you said, it depends who you are, how experienced you are, but there are lots of trips to Egypt. What I would say is the small group tour is much better than the big coaches. I mean, you can turn up at the Valley of the Kings and there’s like massive coach parks stretching off into the distance.

I agree with you though. What I don’t like is people telling me what I should be interested in. You know what I mean?

Luke: Yeah, I think things have become a lot easier now with like ride hailing apps. Like they have Uber in Egypt. It’s a fantastic thing. Anywhere you wanna go, you call a taxi, you know it’s gonna be trusted. It’s all tracked by satellite and whatever. So perhaps if I’d have gone in when you were talking, what, two early two thousands? It would’ve been a lot more crazy trying to sort public transport and things like this.

Jo: Yeah. And we went on the train actually, from Cairo to Luxor. It was the overnight train and I will say like, I found the food to be wonderful. What did you think of the food and any tips for people there?

Luke: Yeah, I loved it. Breakfast was the best meal of the day. Even in the most basic hotel, they just bring trays and trays of sort of flatbreads and fava bean tahini type things, and fresh vegetables. And coffee. And coffee and, yeah. Oh, the coffee is

Jo: very thick for everyone listening. Yes, it, the coffee is very thick

Luke: and sweet. If you react badly to sugar, don’t have that, you know?

Jo: Come back to Luxor because II remember that very well because it was one of the hottest days I’ve ever been in. And it was, frankly, it was pretty awful. But it is that the Temple of Karnak, isn’t it? It was in Indiana Jones, the really famous columns. Amazing place. But for me it was just the hottest, hottest, hottest, hottest day. How was that for you?

Luke: We actually did a really good thing by going in January.

Jo: Brilliant.

Luke: Firstly, because England’s weather is rubbish in January. For anyone who’s never been to England in January don’t come. It’s a waste of time. In fact, in Luxor, we stayed in this really cool hostel and there were these Australian travelers there, a bit younger than us, mid twenties and they just had a month in Europe and they were really disappointed by how rainy and cold it was.

I said, well, didn’t you look that up? Like a Google search would’ve told you that.

Anyway, we went in January, so it was nice sort of 20 degrees Celsius. We knew we were gonna be out and about looking at things, spending days not in the shade. For that reason, chose that time.

Jo: That is very sensible. I think I must have been there in June, June-ish and it was like 42 degrees Celsius. But Luxor was amazing and just beautiful. And then I was on a felucca going up the Nile, which was also cool. Did you go on any boats?

Luke: No, unfortunately not. We didn’t get to do that at this time. We ran out of time when we got to Luxor, we didn’t make it to Abu Simbel either, which I’d have loved to have done, but that’s for another trip.

Jo: Oh yeah, that was very memorable. You actually have to fly there, even from Luxor because it’s so far into the desert. Okay. Anything else you want to tell us about Egypt or about any aspects of the book?

Luke: Well, one more bit of travel advice, which someone gave me a while ago, which I thought was genius, and I give this to everyone dependent wherever they’re going, but particularly in places like Egypt, and it sounds obvious when you think about it.

Just don’t take anything valuable with you.

If you’ve got nice jewelry or an expensive watch or anything like this. Leave it in your hotel room. And that’s not because, I’m not saying that because someone’s going to take it from you, but when you are in a place like this, it’s so, you feel much more comfortable knowing that you haven’t got something expensive on you.

You can be much more free with yourself and with conversations. Not always having to watch over your bag or your stuff if you just don’t have it. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it in that way.

Jo: My first thought is, what about my phone, which is also my camera?

Luke: Yes, that’s true. That’s, that’s perhaps your one thing, your one thing that you have to take.

Jo: I mean, Egypt is obviously like many countries. It’s certainly got a very rich group of people, but it’s also got poor people. People will try and sell you stuff, particularly at the tourist locations. And as British people, you feel like you don’t wanna be rude.

Luke: You lose that quite quickly. I found within a couple of days. You just get on with it.

Jo: Absolutely. So this is the Books and Travel show.

Can you recommend a few books about Egypt or set in Egypt?

Luke: Yes, yes. I’ve got three. The first one is not a book, but it’s an essay and it’s by a guy called Rolf Potts, who I’m sure you’ve heard of.

Jo: Mm-hmm. Vagabonding. Famous.

Luke: Yes. It’s not in that one, but it’s in his book. Marco Polo Didn’t Go There, and he talks about his first trip to Egypt and he talks about his anxiety not to see the pyramids because he fears that he’ll be disappointed by seeing something that he’s got so much expectation about.

And in fact, in the essay, which is probably a few thousand words, he doesn’t even mention the pyramids, but he talks about how vibrant and interesting Cairo is. He talks about how he’s meeting really interesting characters there and staying in this sort of funky backpacker hostel and all of these sorts of things.

And I like that. I like the idea that Egypt is so much more than the pyramids.

The second one is by a guy called Stel Pavlou, and it’s called Decipher, and that’s an archaeological thriller, similar to ours, which plays on a good amount of the same sort of mysticism to mine about hidden vaults underneath the Giza Plateau.

But they discover, and I love this, they discover a Hadron Collider underneath the Giza Plateau that’s been there for tens of thousands of years. It’s a great idea.

Jo: Okay. I haven’t read that. I’m always shocked when there are things I haven’t read that are thrillers about Egypt!

Luke: Yeah. There you go. And the third one is a guy that I think you know Sean McLachlan.

Jo: Yes. And,

Luke: and his Masked Man of Cairo Books. The Case of the Purloined Pyramid is the first one. It’s set in Cairo in 1919, I think this first one. The rest of the series goes into the 1920s, but it’s a particularly interesting time because it’s talking about Cairo evolving as opposed to what Cairo is like now and how Egypt’s fight for Independence showed on the streets and all of these things. It’s a really interesting book.

Jo: Slso just tell us a bit more about The Giza Protocol and also your thriller series.

Luke: Yes. So my thriller series follows the exploits of my heroine, uh, Eden Black, and she goes all around the world finding ancient relics, dodging ancient curses, and finding out about secret societies, these sorts of things.

If you love Indiana Jones or Clive Cussler, Tomb Raider, or any books or films in that sort of world, I think you’ll absolutely love them. The first one is The Ark Files and The Giza Protocol, which we’re talking about today, is number two, the second one in the series.

Jo: Fantastic. And yes, if you enjoy my ARKANE thrillers with Morgan Sierra and Ark of Blood is my third, but they can all be read as standalone. I think that’s the same for yours, isn’t it?

Luke: Yeah, yeah,

Jo: You can pretty much start anywhere and you’ll get the hang of it, but yes, both with the female main characters, which we love. Where can people find you and your books online?

Luke: Fantastic. So I talk about the adventure stories behind my stories on my podcast, The Adventure Story Podcast. You find that wherever podcasts are the Adventure Story podcast, and as I say, if archeological adventures are your thing, search online for the Giza Protocol by me, Luke Richton.

Jo: Brilliant. Thanks so much for your time, Luke. That was great.

Luke: Thank you.