In this classic mystery from Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in the Egypt of the 1900s, the Mamur Zapt investigates the discovery of a young woman's body at the site of a dam. Cairo, 1908. When an attempt is made to blow up a key regulator in the Cairo Barrage, the Mamur Zapt, British head of Cairo's secret police, is called in to investigate. To make matters worse, the ceremonial cutting of a dam always requires careful policing, especially on this occasion as it is going to be the Last Cut. Which means the discovery of a young woman's body at the site of the dam is extremely embarrassing. Is this the traditional ritual sacrifice? Or something more sinister?

In this classic mystery from the award-winning Michael Pearce, a powerful politician is murdered in Cairo in the 1900s and the Mamur Zapt is called in to investigate. Cairo in the 1900s. As the long period of indirect British rule draws to an end, tensions mount. The attempted assassination of a politician raises the possibility of a terrorist outrage at the city's religious festival, the Return of the Holy Carpet from Mecca. When the Mamur Zapt, British head of Cairo's secret police, begins to investigate, he finds himself in a race against a deadly group of terrorists to protect the city from a catastrophic attack.

In this classic mystery from the award-winning Michael Pearce, a powerful politician is murdered in Cairo in the 1900s and the Mamur Zapt is called in to investigate Cairo, 1910. The end of the boom and everyone seems to have money troubles. Then one day a civil servant dies at his desk. Was it pressure of work or something nastier? The whiff of corruption is in the air, with even Gareth Owen, the Mamur Zapt, under suspicion... Owen's investigation takes him to the heart of a sinister organization. But will he be up to taking them on? And will he be in time to stop the Camel of Destruction running through the city?

In this classic murder mystery from Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in the Egypt of the 1900s, the Mamur Zapt investigates the murder of an Italian man in the backstreets of Cairo. Cairo, 1908. When an Italian man is murdered in the city's back streets, there is concern that this could be some kind of ethnic cleansing. Were the guns in his warehouse anything to do with it? Gareth Owen - the Mamur Zapt - has to find out fast. And then there are other difficult questions. What are Trudi von Ramsberg and Gertrude Bell really doing in Cairo? As the Mamur Zapt is drawn deeper into the investigation, he's not the only one who has problems over where his allegiance lies...

A classic historical mystery from award-winning Michael Pearce, in which the body of a young woman washes up in the Nile and the Mamur Zapt is drawn into the seedy world of Egyptian politics. Egypt, 1908. A young woman has drowned in the Nile, her body washed up on a sandbar. Apparently she had fallen off a boat. Owen, as Mamur Zapt, Britsh head of Cairo's secret police, deems it a potential crime. But when the poor girl's body suddenly vanishes from its resting place, Owen begins a puzzling search for the truth that will take him from Cairo's sophisticated cafes through its dingiest slums - and into the seething waters of Egyptian politics.

In this engrossing murder mystery set in the Egypt of the 1900s, the Mamur Zapt finds himself under threat from a campaign to discredit Cairo's senior policemen. Cairo in the 1900s. The Mamur Zapt, Head of Cairo's secret police, finds himself in a compromising position. The city's senior policemen are the subject of a smear campaign, a stinging attack which raises uncomfortable questions about their integrity. The Mamur Zapt himself is suspected, but is he above suspicion? Owen's investigation takes him into hitherto uncharted territory: the underworld of Cairo and the dangerous profession of snake-catching...

From the award-winning Michael Pearce, comes a delightful murder mystery set in Egypt in 1908. A body is found on the tracks of a new electric railway and the Mamur Zapt is called in to investigate. Cairo, 1908. It's called the Tree of the Virgin, a site of religious interest, perilously close to the construction site of the new electric railway. Sinister power groups are jostling for position, but who dumped the body of the humble villager on the track? When the Mamur Zapt begins to pick his way through the local and national power structures, he has to ask, what is the significance of the Fig Tree? Does it matter that the caravans for Mecca gather only a mile or so away? And what of the ostrich that passed in the night?

A classic murder mystery from Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in Egypt in the 1900s, in which the Mamur Zapt confronts the secrets of his past. It is the beginning of the war and the Mamur Zapt, Gareth Owen, British head of Cairo's secret police, is called in to investigate a human corpse abandoned in a cat cemetery. Is the villagers' talk of a mysterious Cat Woman mere superstitious nonsense, or something rather sinister? The Mamur Zapt is preoccupied with missing guns and dubious ghaffirs, but the face in the cemetery refuses to go away. And Owen comes to realise that it poses questions that are not just professional but uncomfortably personal...

A classic murder mystery from the award-winning Michael Pearce, in which The Mamur Zapt races to prevent an explosion of religious violence in the Cairo of the 1900s. Cairo in the 1900s. When the body of a dog is discovered in a Coptic tomb - a Muslim insult that could spark an explosion among the Christian community - the Mamur Zapt, British head of Cairo's secret police, is called in to investigate. Equally volatile is a command from an English Member of Parliament that the Mamur Zapt, Gareth Owen, show the MP's niece the sights of the city. When a dancing dervish is stabbed before the lady's very eyes, Owen begins to uncover a plot to set Cairo's ethnic communities at each other's throats...

A classic historical mystery from the award-winning Michael Pearce, set in the Egypt of the 1900s. When gang violence strikes the city, the inimitable Mamur Zapt is called in to investigate. In 1908, the city of Cairo lives - and dies - by its cafe culture. But for restaurant businesses, the protection rackets pose a problem. And the city's cafes are experiencing a sudden upsurge in threats from various gangs. When one cafe proprietor is attacked, his legs broken for noncompliance, everyone is worried. Then the Russian Charge files a complaint - the Mingrelians may be targeting a Russian Grand Duke. Now the Mamur Zapt, Head of the Secret Police, must find a way to prevent an international incident...

The world is changing aroung the Mamur Zapt, British Chief of Cairo's Secret Police. It's 1912 and there's a war on that no one's heard of. When an Italian man is murdered in the city's back streets, there is concern that this could be some kind of ethnic cleansing. "One of us" Morelli may have been, but was he "one of us" enough? And were the guns in his warehouse anything to do with it? Gareth Owen -- the Mamur Zapt -- has to find out fast.
And then, as external pressures crowd in, there are other difficult questions. What is Trudi von Ramsberg really doing in Cairo? Not to mention that other noted traveller, Gertrude Bell, or the irritating little archaeologist, T. E. Lawrence? And why has the post of Khedive's Librarian suddenly become so important?
Owen is just the man to solve these problems. He is less successful, though, in his relationship with Zeinab, especially now that she's approaching thirty.
As Cromer's Egypt gives way to Kitchener's Egypt, Morelli is not the only one who has problems over where his allegiance lies. Maybe the solution is for Owen to go to Zanzibar...

Witty and irreverent, this is the first in an irresistible crime series set in Tsarist Russia in the 1890s from the award-winning Michael Pearce. Tsarist Russia in the 1890s. Dmitri Kameron, a young lawyer, must deal with the disappearance of a well-connected young woman. She has been shipped off to Siberia, in one of the prison wagons outside the Court House. But is this a bureaucratic bungle or something more calculated? On a journey to the furthest outposts of Russia, Dimitri's search becomes horribly complicated. To unearth the truth in a treacherous world of Russian officialdom he is forced to make some strange allies, not least among them the redoubtable Milk-Drinkers...

From the award-winning Michael Pearce comes an engrossing murder mystery set in the Cairo of the 1900s. After a series of attacks on public officials, the Mamur Zapt is called in to investigate. Cairo in the 1900s. While riding home, Fairclough of Customs is shot at from behind. It is the first of many similar attacks - all seemingly aimed at public officials. The Mamur Zapt, British head of Cairo's secret police, is told to catch the killer - and quickly. His efforts to do so take him into Cairo's student quarter and out to a remote rural estate. And require him to handle a fading Pasha and a dangerous gypsy girl - whose claims he has to balance against those of his fiery Egyptian mistress.

Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.

Black British Drama: A Transnational Story looks afresh at the ways black theatre in Britain is connected to and informed by the spaces of Africa, the Caribbean and the USA. Michael Pearce offers an exciting new approach to reading modern and contemporary black British drama, examining plays by a range of writers including Michael Abbensetts, Mustapha Matura, Caryl Phillips, Winsome Pinnock, Kwame Kwei-Armah, debbie tucker green, Roy Williams and Bola Agbaje. Chapters combine historical documentation and discussion with close analysis to provide an in-depth, absorbing account of post-war black British drama situated within global and transnational circuits. A significant contribution to black British and black diaspora theatre studies, Black British Drama is a must-read for scholars and students in this evolving field.

Filled with real examples of the way people use English in different contexts, The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies is an indispensable guide to the richness and variety of the English language for both students and the general reader.

From abbreviation to zero-article, via fricative and slang, the Dictionary contains over 600 wide ranging and informative entries covering:

• 
  
• the core areas of language description and analysis: phonetics and phonology, grammar, lexis, semantics, pragmatics and discourse
• 
  
• sociolinguistics, including entries on social and regional variation, stylistic variation, and language and gender
• 
  
• the history of the English language from Old English to the present-day
• 
  
• the main varieties of English spoken around the world, covering the British isles, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia
• 
  
• stylistics, literary language and English usage.

The latest novel in Michael Pearce's award-winning series, set in the Egypt of the 1900s. 'Irresistible fun' Time Out. Everything in Egypt depends on the water of the Nile. So when an attempt is made to blow up a key regulator in the Cairo Barrage, Gareth Owen -- the Mamur Zapt, Chief of Cairo's Secret Police -- is hurriedly called in. What exactly is a regulator, though? Owen doesn't know. But then, he doesn't know many things: who is the Lizard Man, for instance, and why does he appear to have a grudge against Egypt's irrigation system? Quite unconnected (or is it?) is the ceremonial cutting of a dam which allows water to flow through the city. It is a ceremony which always requires policing, but on this occasion more than ever, for it is going to be the Last Cut. Which makes the discovery of a young woman's body at the site of the dam extremely embarrassing. Is this the traditional ritual sacrifice? Definitely not, says Owen -- but this could be another of the things he doesn't know...

The second in the delightfully witty and diverting new crime series set in Tsarist Russia from the award-winning Michael Pearce. A dreamy province of Tsarist Russia. An ambitious young lawyer of Scottish-Russian descent anxious to make his way. And the One-Legged Lady goes missing. A nasty case of kidnapping? Not quite, for the One-Legged Lady is just the popular name of one of the most important ikons in the district. Exactly how important, the sceptical Dmitri, whose task it is to track her down, comes to see. Who has taken her and for what reason? Is it someone interested in adding to his art collection? Is it, as some darkly suggest, just the monastery cashing in on its assets? Or has it something to do with a wave of popular feeling at a time of famine? The sinister Volkov, from the Tsar's Corps of Gendarmes, suspects the latter -- which means trouble for some innocent people unless Dmitri gets there first Dmitri finds, to his surprise, that the ikon, which he had taken merely as an irrelevant relic from the past, raises some awkward issues about the present and that the One-Legged Lady is very much alive and kicking. Dmitri and the One-Legged Lady is the second novel in the

The ludic element of drama in the Middle Ages - or drama with early subject matter - is here to the fore. Medieval English Theatre is the premier journal in early theatre studies. Its name belies its wide range of interest: it publishes articles on theatre and pageantry from across the British Isles up to the opening of the London playhouses and the suppression of the civic mystery cycles, and also includes contributions on European and Latin drama, together with analyses of modern survivals or equivalents, and of research productions of medieval plays. This edition combines, perhaps unexpectedly, royalty and games. Games of all kinds, from jousting and "Christmas games" to those usually associated with children, are shown, it is suggested, to be more than they at first appear. Apparently run-of-the-mill entertainments, when presented to the court by the Londoners, by the court to a visiting emperor , or by the retainers of royalty and nobility to the general public for commercial gain, turn out to have unexpected political resonances; while the potential underlying sadism of children's games gains a horrific immediacy when diverted to the torturing of Christ. Even today, the musical SIX says a great deal more about royalty and role-playing than initially might appear, especially when set against eye-witness accounts of the first meeting of Anna of Cleves with Henry VIII, and what modern novelists have made of it . In the process we learn a great deal more about the detail of these games, from the maskerie costumes of James VI and Anna of Denmark to the elaborate fantasy challenges of the jousters in 1400/1401, which incidentally suggest that fourteenth-century court culture, whose language was Anglo-French, is a major missing link in the history of what is usually treated as purely English literature. Contributors: Philip Bennett, Philip Butterworth, Sarah Carpenter, Elisabeth Dutton, James Forse, Gordon Kipling, Michael Pearce, Meg Twycross.

Filled with real examples of the way people use English in different contexts, The Routledge Dictionary of English Language Studies is an indispensable guide to the richness and variety of the English language for both students and the general reader.

From abbreviation to zero-article, via fricative and slang, the Dictionary contains over 600 wide ranging and informative entries covering:

• 
  
• the core areas of language description and analysis: phonetics and phonology, grammar, lexis, semantics, pragmatics and discourse
• 
  
• sociolinguistics, including entries on social and regional variation, stylistic variation, and language and gender
• 
  
• the history of the English language from Old English to the present-day
• 
  
• the main varieties of English spoken around the world, covering the British isles, the Caribbean, North America, Africa, Asia, and Australasia
• 
  
• stylistics, literary language and English usage.

This title is set in Athens, 1913, the capital of a country on the brink of war. The new Greek prime minister, Venizelos, tired of the Ottoman overlords, has what he calls the Great Idea - a vision of a new Greece which unites all the Greek people scattered around the Mediterranean. Not such a great idea, in the view of other countries, among them Britain, which believes in letting sleeping dogs lie. And cats. Including the one recently poisoned in Athens and which belonged to the exiled former Sultan. Unfortunately, as is the way with the Balkans, rumours start flying around; one being that this was a sighting shot for the ex-Sultan himself. This, in the Balkans, could start a war and so Britain has to sit up and take notice. Something has to be done. Fast. And - please, urge the diplomats - low-key. The lowest key of all is to send out a police officer from Scotland Yard to investigate, and, as it happens, the Foreign Office has a person in mind: Seymour, of the CID, who has had some experience of this sort of thing before...

Naples, 1913. Sun-baked, blue-skied, and with its amazing bay, one of the most beautiful spots in Italy - but also, one of the most backward. Into that world is sent a minor British consular official, Scampion, banished from Florence because he has allowed himself to be caught up in the mad social whirl surrounding D'Annunzio, the famous Italian poet, Nationalist and revolutionary. Scampion brings with him from Florence the new craze that is sweeping Italy: bicycling. And one day as he walks home after a road race that he has been organising, he is stabbed to death. Nothing extraordinary about that in Naples - it happens all the time - but his wallet was not taken, a fact that is remarkable. Could Scampion's murder have something to do with the racing? Bicycling may seem like a harmless pursuit but in Italy passions run high and Neopolitans, too, are great gamblers; they gamble on anything, including bicycle races. And where there is gambling, in Naples there is usually the Camorra, the powerful Neopolitan secret society. But then the Foreign Office receives a tip off that the murder may be more complicated. It might be linked to high politics in Rome. And that's when Seymour, the foreigner from the F.O., is sent south to investigate . . . Praise for Michael Pearce's A Dead Man in . . . series 'The steady pace, atmospheric design, and detailed description re-create a complicated city. A recommended historical series' Library Journal 'Sheer fun' The Times 'His sympathetic portrayal of an unfamiliar culture, impeccable historical detail and entertaining dialogue make enjoyable reading' Sunday Telegraph

From the author of the award-winning Mamur Zapt books, the second in a new series introducing Seymour of Special Branch and set in the British embassies and Consulates of Europe in the early 1900s. The Second Secretary of the Embassy in Istanbul has died in decidedly strange circumstances while attempting to swim the Dardanelles Straits, the passage between Europe and Asia, heavily used by warships, liners, tankers and cargo vessels of all kinds. A romantic attempt to repeat the legendary feat of Leander, as the Embassy says? Or an attempt to spy out a possible landing place for a British military expedition, as the Turks insist? Whichever, Cunningham has ended up with a bullet in his head. The suspicious circumstances of his death have to be investigated so the Foreign Office sends out an officer of the Special Branch: Seymour. As Seymour tries to untangle the threads which lead to Cunningham's death, their ends lead him into all parts of the city, from the little box shops of the Avenue of Slippers to Les Petits Champs des Morts, where fashionable Turkish ladies loiter among the tombs to eat sweets; from the crowded coffee houses around the Galata Bridge where men sit all day smoking bubble pipes to the heart of the Topkapi Palace itself.

Trieste in 1906 is of vital strategic importance and one of the world's greatest seaports. But assorted nationalist movements are threatening to pull the place apart and the militarist regime has trouble keeping a lid on things. Amid all the chaos the British consul goes missing, and Special Branch Seymour is sent to find him. Born to an immigrant family in London's East End, Seymour has an acute linguistic ear - crucial in turn-of-the-century Trieste. As he attempts to solve the riddle of the consul's disappearance, Seymour discovers dark and disturbing corners of the city and finds that it holds the secrets of his own family's past.