Riyadh – the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia, which also includes the port city of Jeddah, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Founded in 1932, Saudi is of course a massive oil and gas producer – wealthy, though with a dark underbelly of strict laws and social norms and huge numbers of migrant workers. So what’s the crime writing scene like?
Zoë Ferraris, an American who lived in Jeddah for many years, writes crime novels set in contemporary Riyadh and Saudi Arabia. Find Nouf (2008 – The Night of the Mi’raj in the UK) is the first in a trilogy featuring Katya Hijazi, a lab worker at the Riyadh coroner’s office, and Nayir al-Sharqi, a Palestinian desert guide living in Saudi Arabia.
In City of Veils (2010) Katya and Nayir are joined by Detective Osama Ibrahim to find who brutally beat to death a controversial filmmaker found on a beach in Jeddah. And finally, in Kingdom of Strangers (2012) Detective Ibrahim’s mistress has suddenly disappeared, but he can’t report her missing since adultery is punishable by death in Saudi Arabia. Ibrahim appeals to Katya, one of the few women in the police department, to help and they are drawn into a dark underground of female trafficking and a possible serial killer.
The Dove’s Necklace (2016) is a special novel for a number of reasons. When the body of a young woman is discovered in the Lane of Many Heads, an alley in contemporary Mecca, no one will claim it, as they are all ashamed of her nakedness. Detective Nasser pursues his investigation of the case noting that all of Mecca has an opinion. A clever, funny, profane, and enigmatic novel by Mecca-born novelist Raja’a Alem, the first woman to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction (in 2011). Not all her work is crime fiction, but it is pretty much all set in Mecca.
Danuta Reah’s Strangers (2011) reveals the expat side of life in Saudi Arabia. Joe Massey, a British expat working in Saudi, witnesses the execution of his friend, Haroun. Appalled by what he witnessed, he leaves the kingdom and returns to London; but he made a promise to Haroun, and knows he must keep it. This promise draws him, and his partner Roisin, back to Riyadh to investigate what led to the death of Haroun. Strangers was nominated for a UK Crime Writers Association Dagger award.
Lost in Mecca by Kuwaiti novelist Bothayna Al-Essa (2024 – translated by Nada Faris) is the story of a seven-year-old Kuwaiti boy who goes missing during the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Al-Essa is a very well known novelist in Arabic, especially for her dystopian satire of banned books, secret archives, and the looming eye of an all-powerful government, The Book Censor’s Library (2024).
And a superb YA murder-mystery novel set in Saudi Arabia – Djamila Morani’s The Djinn’s Apple (2024 – translated by Sawad Hussein). Set in the Abbasid period (750–1258 CE), Nardeen’s home is stormed by angry men frantically in search of something―or someone―she is the only one who manages to escape. And after the rest of her family is left behind and murdered, Nardeen sets out on an unyielding mission to bring her family’s killers to justice, regardless of the cost. Morani is an Arabic-speaking Algerian novelist and a professor of Arabic language and literature specialising in the Abbasid period.
A few more Riyadh and Saudi-set thriller genre novels:
- George Potter’s The White Bedouin (2007) sees Jake Sorensen takes a summer internship at a magazine in Arabia and seeking to uncover the truth behind the rumors of the mysterious White Bedouin, a nomad who roams the hostile deserts of Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter – a land that few dare enter. What he finds is corporate greed, the race for oil and a very sinister world.
- Keys to the Kingdom (2011) by Bob Graham is a very American type of thriller. Shortly after an explosive op-ed piece about the 9/11 investigation appears in the New York Times, its author, former Senator and Co-chair of the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry Commission John Billington, is murdered near his Florida home. Enter Tony Ramos, ex-Special Forces operative and former aide to Sen. Billington and currently a State Department intelligence analyst. Ramos, in conjunction with Billington’s daughter Laura, uncovers a shocking international conspiracy linking the Saudi Kingdom to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
- Robert Cullen’s Heirs of the Fire (1997) is in a similar vein to Keys to the Kingdom – veteran Washington reporter Colin Burke learns that the president, despite official denials, plans to sell advanced missiles to Saudi Arabia. He runs a story exposing the lie setting in motion a series of events that lights a match to the explosive tinder box of Saudi politics.
And finally, a writer you might not necessarily expect to be an expert on Saudi Arabia – Hilary Mantel. Mantel’s Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988) is a psychological thriller set largely in Riyadh and based on Mantel’s own experience living in Jeddah. For four years until 1986, the Booker prize-winner lived in Saudi Arabia though apparently found it beautiful yet repressive. She wrote Eight Months on Ghazzah Street just after she got back to London, and the book wonderfully captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of “expat” life in Saudi, focused on a high-security residential street. It deals with the tensions, restrictions, and surveillance felt by foreigners in Saudi Arabia. Frances Shore is a cartographer who goes to Saudi with her engineer husband. She dislikes both the Saudi regime and the boorish expats. Then things take a violent turn.
Mantel is by far the best-known author to have written about Saudi Arabia yet her novel is similar to many by local and expat writers dealing with the country – a raw beauty and the sheer power of the desert combined with an almost impenetrable society and labyrinthine repressive bureaucratic state. Saudi Arabia remains a key touchstone of global geopolitics and economics and likely to remain a popular subject for crime and thriller writers for years to come.
