Cairo Noir: Picture in The Sand by Peter Blauner

In the 1950s, Ali Hassan, a young man in Cairo besotted by movies and wanting to become a filmmaker himself, gets a job as driver and assistant to Cecil B. DeMille who is in Egypt to film the Charlton Heston and Yul Brenner, The Ten Commandments. Egypt has just suffered not one coup but two: the first ending the reign of King Farouk, the second installing Gamal Abdul Nasser as leader.

These events are being recalled and emailed by an aged one-eye former gas station owner in the United States to his adult grandson, Alex, who has run off and who appears to have been radicalized by Muslim extremists.

This is the set-up for Peter Blauner’s breath-taking page turning novel, Picture in the Sand.

Blauner is the author of several earlier thrillers, including one of my favorites, Slow Motion Riot (which I always wanted to turn into a movie), and had a long career as a TV crime drama writer for Law & Order, Law & Order SVU, the short-lived Law & Order LA, Law & Order Criminal Intent, Blue Bloods and The Division. All of which is to say that Blauner knows a thing or two about plotting and how just when things appear at their worst, the plot comes together in a cunning resolution. So, too, with Picture in the Sand —- but I won’t give away any spoilers here.

Picture in the Sand, the novel’s title, clearly refers to the filming of The Ten Commandments, and also speaks to ephemeral quality of the hopes and dreams of the characters in the novel. I also could not help recalling the lyrics of a song by the Kinks, called, Pictures in the Sand: “Every single day, I waste my time away, drawing pictures in the sand, and writing messages to you.” Grandfather and grandson, both are writing messages to each other as they face and suffer the consequences of playing with fire

Most impressive is the detail of 1950s Cairo in Blauner’s novel, down to street traffic and particulars of the Mena House Hotel, as well as his fluency with the details of Egyptian Politics and the history, most notably the rise and suppression of the Muslim Brotherhood. There are scenes in Nasser’s office that would have you believe Blauner must have been there. Blauner credibly brings us to the set of The Ten Commandments, both outside Cairo and in the Sinai desert, and delivers convincing portraits of DeMille, Heston and other cast members.

But, when reading Picture in the Sand, there is no time for the reader to linger on the details, because of the pressure cooker plot, in which there is a bomb set to go off on the film set, an assassination attempt on Nasser, scenes of prison torture, and even a prison break. Ali’s cousin Sherif, a radical hothead being on revolution, is his antagonist and, at moments, his savior. There is also a love story between two young Cairene’s, our protagonist and a young Coptic Christian woman who has a small role in the film, who must defer their own movie dreams to do what they believe is right, and best for each other. And threaded through the narrative are the emails from Alex, in which we fear he is about to do something very very wrong.

Picture in the Sand is a fast and absorbing read that will make you yearn for a Cairo you never knew you missed.