Novelist writes 40+ Egypt mystery thrillers on the dark side of the moon. (Well, in outback Australia.)

In 2011 I made an exodus from the big city to the wilderness of Australia, where I became a writer on the road.

This time my wife and I journeyed in search of mystery across the world’s biggest island continent. We travelled in a Mercedes Benz motor home.

And there I wrote close to fifty novels, mostly about ancient Egypt, but several about the mystery of Australia (The Poisoned Well, Hero Virus and Lightning Ridge.) Proving, if nothing else, that I could write books on the dark side of the moon. Ironically, Australia has not been an escape from my heartland of Egypt. Echoes are everywhere. Deserts like Egypt, acacia and baobabs trees like Africa’s, crocodiles, the white ibis bird, symbol of the Egyptian god Thoth who features in many of my novels. The bird’s curved surgical beak, white feathers and ugly-elegant black head and neck like a walking stick handle constantly appear in my vision like a living hieroglyph.

Sadly, the African sacred ibis went extinct in Egypt around 1850. Yet today, the bird's close kin, the Australian white ibis (classified as the same species until the 1990s), roams freely across the continent. The sacred white ibis features most notably in The Ibis Apocalypse, my archaeological thriller novel about the so-called Book of Thoth, said to have been written by Thoth, god of magic, wisdom, writing and science and in this novel the forbidden tome of magical power took the form of a stone tablet.

Where to from here? Still a mystery. ‘DEATH WAS THE FIRST MYSTERY; it started man on the road to the other mysteries,” the French historian Fustel de Coulanges wrote of ancient Egypt. ‘Nowhere else was life so completely dominated by preoccupation with life after death; nowhere else was such minute and complicated care taken to secure and perpetuate another existence for the deceased. The funeral literature, of which we have found a very great number of documents, had acquired a development equalled by no other, and the architecture of no other nation can exhibit tombs comparable with the pyramids or the rock-built sepulchres of Thebes.’ But another mystery is like it and it is equally impenetrable. The future.