‘But now there’s another matter that needs my help – it’s to do with a foreign minister, and his great-nephew. That’s what – well, what we’re hoping you might be able to help with. We only arrived an hour ago, and Aunt Lucy came to get you. I asked to see you first, if that matters.’
‘It doesn’t matter! I mean, it does, but – I thought you were dead!’
‘You’ve said that, Hazel.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh – DAISY!’
And I flung myself on her.
‘I missed you, Watson,’ said Daisy, into my hair. ‘You know, I think you’ve got taller!’
‘Not in two weeks!’ I protested.
‘Perhaps I just missed it, when you were around me every day. See here, Hazel – I’m sorry I tricked you. Aunt Lucy didn’t want to do it, but Uncle Felix and I persuaded her. But the thing she asked you is real. Stop crying and listen to me properly.’
I took a deep, ragged breath.
‘I’m going to stay dead for a while. Not for ever – but it’s quite useful for Felix and Lucy to have a secret operative. I’m going to help them carry out missions for the government now, and not wait until I leave Deepdean.’
‘But what about Deepdean? What about Kitty, and Beanie, and Lavinia? And what about – Amina? The new term starts next week, after all. She’ll be back for that.’
‘I took a leaf out of your book and wrote Amina a letter,’ said Daisy, her cheeks pinking. ‘Not signed, but she’ll know it’s from me. And the others – well, I think we can trust them to stay quiet for a few months. But this goes no further! I can’t have the whole fifth form in on the secret. I assume you have written up the notes to our last case under the assumption that I am dead? Circulating that casebook might be rather helpful to throw possible enemies off the scent.
‘But that is hardly the most important question, Hazel – do focus. We were wondering if you wanted to help me in my work, just during the holidays. After all, who would suspect two young women of being spies? We’re really perfect for the job.’
‘Would it be dangerous?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ said Daisy.
‘Would we have to keep it secret?’ I asked.
‘From everyone else, certainly,’ said Daisy. ‘It’d be even more deadly secret than the Detective Society.’
‘But we wouldn’t have to give up the Detective Society!’ I said anxiously.
‘D’you think I’d have accepted if we would?’ asked Daisy. ‘It might have to change a little, since I can’t exactly be at school for a while, but Detective Society Forever, you chump.’
‘About that,’ I said. ‘I made myself President while you were – gone. I’m sorry.’
Daisy made a face. ‘I rather think I asked for it,’ she said. ‘But I suppose – why shouldn’t there be two presidents in future? I would be the first president, and the best one, but you could be one too, while I’m away doing other important things.’
It was so utterly Daisyish that I laughed. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Co-presidents.’
‘You haven’t said if you’ll accept Uncle Felix and Aunt Lucy’s offer,’ said Daisy, and I could hear worry in her voice.
‘Will I be with you if I do?’ I asked.
‘For ever and ever, Hazel Wong,’ said Daisy. ‘I promised a long time ago never to let you down or die and, as you see, I keep my promises. So what do you say?’
‘All right, then,’ I said. ‘I accept.’
Amina’s Guide to Egypt
Dear Hazel,
I got your letter yesterDAy. Thank you, It waS too kind of You. Here Is the List of reLevant Words you Asked for, for the account you’re wrITing.
See you next term.
ALL MY LOVE,
AMINA x
Amoona – my nickname!
Amun Ra – an ancient Egyptian sun god, particularly worshipped in Luxor.
ankh – a looped cross that symbolizes life.
ba – the part of a person’s soul that leaves their body when they die and then returns to them in the afterlife. It’s usually shown looking like a bird with a human head.
baba ghanoush – a delicious savoury paste made from aubergines.
Cleopatra – a very famous female pharaoh. She died quite horribly, by snake bite.
felucca – a type of sailing boat you see on the Nile.
galabeya – an Egyptian man’s dress.
habibti/ habibi – ‘darling’ in Arabic. Habibti is for a girl, habibi for a boy.
halwa – a delicious sweet, very dense and chewy.
Hatshepsut – a female pharaoh, supposed to be the daughter of Amun Ra.
hibiscus – a beautiful red flower that can be used to make tea or juice.
Horus – an ancient Egyptian god who usually looks like a hawk. The son of Isis and Osiris.
hypostyle hall – a large covered hall with columns in a temple.
ifrit/ afarit – an ifrit is a demon or unhappy spirit. Afarit means more than one ifrit!
Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi raji’ un – this is what Muslims say when we learn that someone has died. It means: ‘We belong to Allah and to him we will return.’
Insha’Allah – this is an Arabic word that means something a little like ‘god willing’, and Egyptian people use it all the time!
Isis – an ancient Egyptian goddess, the mother of Horus and the wife of Osiris.
jinn – a magical spirit from Islamic mythology.
Nahdat Misr – a sculpture by famous Egyptian sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar. In English it’s called Egypt’s Renaissance.
Nefertiti – the wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten.
Osiris – an ancient Egyptian god, the Lord of the Underworld. Husband of Isis and father of Horus.
pharaoh – the ancient Egyptian word for king.
piastre – Egyptian money, like a penny in Britain.
Rameses II – a very famous pharaoh who put up statues of himself all over the Nile valley.
reincarnation – the idea that the dead come back to life as different people after they die. Ancient Egyptians didn’t believe in this at all, even though the Breath of Life think they did!
Sekhmet – an ancient Egyptian female god with the body of a woman and a lioness’s head.
Set – an ancient Egyptian god, the brother and murderer of Osiris. He usually looks like a made-up beast, but is sometimes shaped like a hippopotamus.
shabti – small figures made out of stone or clay that stand for servants in the afterlife.
shukran – the Arabic word for ‘thank you’.
Thutmose III – a pharaoh who ruled after his stepmother Hatshepsut.
Tutankhamun – a pharaoh who died young. His tomb was discovered mostly untouched in 1922, which made him very famous and a lot of European people very interested in ancient Egypt!
Author’s Note and Acknowledgements
This book, unsurprisingly, began with Agatha Christie. Her Death on the Nile (and the 1978 movie starring Mia Farrow and Peter Ustinov) was absolutely foundational for me, and I’ve known for a long time that I wanted to send Daisy and Hazel on their own Nile adventure as my tribute to an author and a story I adore. By the way, the part titles are all taken from of Agatha Christie books, so well done if you spotted that!
Theodora and the Breath of Life found their beginning in Bedford, when Rachael Rogan told me about the absolutely incredible Octavia, a woman convinced she was the Messiah. I read about Octavia and her Panacea Society in Octavia, Daughter of God by Dr Jane Shaw, and their story has influenced this one – though, of course, the Breath of Life members are not based on any real people.
For a long time, I sat with those two ideas – a religious society and the Nile – until my family friend Judith Ross asked me one evening if I would ever write a book about a sleepwalking murder. The whole plot of Death Sets Sail flooded into my head at that moment (I went very quiet as a result) and I absolutely knew that I had worked out a fitting end for Daisy and Hazel’s adventures.
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I first visited Egypt with my family as a seventeen-year-old, only a little older than my characters. I thought I still remembered it clearly, and so convinced myself that I did not need to visit Egypt during the writing of Death Sets Sail. My first draft proved me wrong. A thousand thanks to my husband, David Stevens, for pushing me to go on the trip that made this story work, and for acting as photographer, secretary, research assistant and general cheerleader during the week that I discovered I had imagined the Nile the wrong way up and a different shape.
In January 2020 we sailed up the Nile from Luxor to Aswan on the MS Tulip – thanks to our brilliantly knowledgeable guide, Waleed, and to the passengers and crew I met during our trip. We visited the sites Daisy and Hazel go to during their Nile trip, the Karnak and Edfu temples – the Temple of Karnak also features in the 1970s Death on the Nile film, if you want to know what it looks like. We also went to the Temple of Hatshepsut, which was sadly not in a good enough state in the 1930s to make it part of the book – but I did put in Hatshepsut herself, a fascinating female pharaoh who, like Octavia thousands of years later, called herself the daughter of a god to prove herself a suitable leader. Hatshepsut was succeeded by her stepson, Thutmose III, who spent a lot of time trying to erase her from the historical record (never trust family members!), but luckily it didn’t work. Hatshepsut and Thutmose III are also the ancestors of another pharaoh you might have heard of: Tutankhamun (yes, that one!). Was he murdered? Maybe, maybe not. His body isn’t in good enough condition for us to be able to tell. But it’s definitely true that he was succeeded by his regent (the man who ruled for him when he was a child), Ay. This isn’t a very usual arrangement – and it definitely gives Ay a great motive for bumping him off.
By the way, unlike Daisy, I was not offered any mummified fingers or mummified animals to buy at any point. That isn’t acceptable any more (and never should have been)! Please don’t take artefacts from cultural sites. But I spoke to someone who had been offered such a thing in the 1960s, and I’m fascinated (and disturbed) by how normal it used to be for tourists to buy real objects from ancient Egyptian sites.
I got a lot of details about Egyptian crime-solving in the 1930s from Sydney Smith’s Mostly Murder, a very lucky charity-shop purchase, and I pulled details about strychnine poisoning and Easton’s Syrup (a real thing, can you believe!) from Forensic Medicine by Keith Simpson, one of the most disturbingly useful books I own. The aeroplane route the girls take is almost all correct for the 1930s – though I did add a made-up Alexandria to Cairo leg. The case of Albert Tirrell is true, and Maud West is an entirely real and extremely interesting female detective who I discovered in Susannah Stapleton’s excellent The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective.
And now the thank-yous!
Thanks to the people who read early drafts of this book and worked with me to make my Egypt, and my Egyptian characters, feel vivid and real: Amina Youssef and her father; Rebecca Porteous and Ali Fahmi (and S.F. Said, for introducing us); and Laila Rifaat and Ahmed, Jamila and Amina Gaafar, who showed us round Cairo and gave my Amina her home. You never realize how very much you don’t know until you try to write about a country and culture not your own – everything I got right is because of them; everything I got wrong is absolutely my fault.
Thanks to my other readers: Anne Miller (much nicer than the Millers in this book, I promise!), and my favourite Daisy/Amina shippers, Charlie Morris and Wei Ming Kam. Thanks to John J. Johnston for gently pointing out where I’d made up facts about ancient Egypt, and Adiba Jaigirdar for putting me right on jinn and reincarnation.
My mother, Kathie Booth Stevens, has been listening to my stories since I could speak, and has been reading drafts of Murder Most Unladylike books since 2011. She told me to keep going when I thought I would never be published, she has talked me through every wobble and every small author disaster and she has never wavered in her belief in me. I hope she’s forgiven me for making this book ‘too sad’, because I can’t think of anyone who deserves the dedication more than she does.
Thanks to my friends, especially Non Pratt, Authors Assemble and the Pugs, for being so supportive and understanding. Thanks to my publisher, Puffin, and the brilliant Team Bunbreak: my editor Natalie Doherty, who always knows the right thing to say, my publicist (and possibly sister!) Harriet Venn, my super-organized marketeer Sonia Razvi, Fritha Lindqvist, always calm and collected, Chloe Parkinson, Louise Dickie, Francesca Dow, Jan Bielecki, Steph Barrett, Jane Tait, Wendy Shakespeare, Toria Hegedus and Marcus Fletcher. Thanks to Nina Tara for another glorious cover – I feel so lucky to have her iconic artwork on all of the Murder Most Unladylike books.
Thanks to my excellent agent, Gemma Cooper, who seven years ago saw something in a dreadful 80,000-word draft with no plot that made her sign me up as a client. I’m so lucky she took a chance on me! I think it turned out pretty well, all things considered.
Finally, if you’ve made it this far, thank you to you, my reader. Whether you’re a bookseller, a librarian, a teacher, a parent, or someone Daisy or Hazel or May’s age, thank you for being part of this incredible journey and believing in my world and my characters. Your support turned a three-book series into a nine-book one and changed my life for ever. I feel so thankful that I’ve been able to tell Daisy and Hazel’s story the way I wanted to, and to watch my fans, and my detectives, grow up together into wonderfully impressive people. As Daisy is fond of saying, I can’t wait until they’re twenty. Just imagine what they’ll be able to do then …
Oxford, February 2020
May Wong will return in
THE
MINISTRY
OF
UNLADYLIKE
ACTIVITY
A Q&A with Robin Stevens
Death Sets Sail is the final adventure for Daisy and Hazel. How did you feel about writing it?
Incredibly emotional! Daisy and Hazel have been in my head for ten years – writing this book was like saying goodbye to my dearest friends. I felt a lot of pressure to make sure their last adventure was their best one ever, and it took me longer than usual to get the story right because I just didn’t want it to end!
Of all the books in the series, which is your favourite? And which did you find most challenging to write?
I love all of my books – though I have to say that this one might have ended up being my very favourite. Death in the Spotlight and First Class Murder are also very special to me because I’m so proud of the twists in them. I find the books set in countries I didn’t grow up in, like A Spoonful of Murder and Death Sets Sail, very challenging from a research perspective – I know that they’ll be read by people who live there, and so I work as hard as I can to make my versions of their homes and cultures seem recognizable. It’s a tough thing to do well, but I try my best.
Apart from Daisy and Hazel, who is your favourite character and why?
Some characters take a while to get right, and some just leap into my head with very distinct personalities. George was one of those characters, and May was another. Her voice has always been very clear to me – I love her boldness and naughtiness, and when I was thinking about a new series set in the world of Murder Most Unladylike she seemed like a very obvious main character. She’s got a lot to say – and so do her new friends. I can’t wait to introduce you to them …
What would you say to any readers who want to be writers like you?
It’s a very achievable dream to have! Anyone can tell a story, and to become a good writer you just need to be reading and writing as much as you can – and if you love stories you should be able to have a lot of fun as you do it. Write without worrying about grammar or spelling, and read without worrying about whether you’re reading ‘important’ things, or reading in the ‘right’ way. Ebooks, audio books, comic books, magazines, fan fiction – it’s all reading, and it’s all going to make you better at knowing how to shape a great story. Finally, remember that editing is important. My first drafts are nowhere near as good as my fi
nal drafts – a great author knows how to rewrite, not just write.
What do you think Daisy and Hazel will do next?
Become the world’s greatest detectives, of course! The Second World War is going to make that a little bit more difficult, but I know they’ll rise to the challenge. I’ve always been convinced that Hazel would be a great fit at Bletchley Park, while Daisy would be an excellent field operative. Learning about real historical heroes like Noor Inayat Khan, the Oversteegen sisters and Virginia Hall help me imagine what they might do – true stories are often just as incredible as fiction!
THE BEGINNING
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