Pebble Beach professor and novelist publishes his latest book, a sleuthing tale.

John Amos is a man of many professional lives – a professor, a novelist and a lawyer. The Pebble Beach resident released his newest novel, Cleopatra Caper, in November. It’s his fifth.

Amos, who holds a PhD from UC Berkeley and a JD from the Monterey College of Law, wrote his first book of fiction when we all entertained the idea, shortly after the outbreak of Covid. Elements of his own biography resulted in The Student, a story about a group of Americans studying in Cairo during 1967. A professor with 25 years of experience, his specialty was Middle Eastern politics and societies. He has lived in Egypt, Lebanon, Libya and Turkey.

“Academic language is flat,” Amos says, and he should know. His academic publications include two books, Arab-Israeli Military-Political Relations: Arab Perceptions and the Politics of Escalation and The Palestinian Resistance: Organization of a Nationalist Movement. “It’s just a string of information. Fiction is all about evoking emotions. But you have to learn the mechanics [of writing] all the same, until it becomes your second nature,” he says.

Since fiction knows no time and space limits, in Cleopatra Caper, Amos sets his plot in the London of an aging Sherlock Holmes. In fact, his young and careless characters are nothing but callow Holmes’ and Dr. Watson’s wannabees, annoyed that they don’t get as many cases to solve.

About Cleopatra, Amos says that she is underestimated in history. He calls her a kid who almost conquered the world. “She knew six languages and was an absolute ruler,” he says. “When she lived in Rome for 10 years, it was to unite [via her offspring] two empires – Egypt and Rome.”

All the roads in Amos’ fiction lead to the Middle East and usually have something to do with antiquity. He is also interested in the Victorians, pointing to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians. Strachey was a member of the Bloomsbury Group, along with Virginia Woolf.

“If I hadn’t become a professor,” Amos says. “I would like to be an archaeologist. My daughter is an archaeologist and she often helps me with questions I have while writing.”

Currently, Amos is working on a novel about the famous historical figure T.E. Lawrence, to whom the movie Lawrence of Arabia (1962) does no justice, Amos says, promising a more-lively portrayal.