Confessions of a Knight Errant: Drifters, Thieves, and Ali Baba’s Treasure

Confessions of a Knight Errant is a comedic, picaresque novel with a loose plot and a flamboyant cast of characters. It’s written in the tradition of Miguel Cervantes, Laurence Sterne and Henry Fielding with a modern twist. Dr. Gary Watson is the picaro, a radical environmentalist and wannabe novelist without any technical ability who has been accused of masterminding a computer virus, which wiped out the files of a major publishing company. His Sancho Panza is Kharalombos, a fat, gluttonous Greek dancing teacher, who was wanted by the secret police for cavorting with the daughter of the Big Man of Egypt. They return to Cairo on the eve of the most violent day of the Egyptian uprising in 2011. The adverse Dulcinea in this story is Gudrun Grunwald, a German-American tourist. She arrives on the scene with a Russian aristocrat, Viscount Triksky, who is much like the Duke in Huckleberry Finn, and an Egyptian archaeologist, Ramses El-Kibir. Gudrun owns a girls’ camp in central Texas with a retired American missionary, Mary Alice Bodewell. A dead body turns up on a neighboring property, and is connected to antiquities and documents from the Middle East, a revelation causing pandemonium amongst the main characters. But little do we know what the final revelation would be. Perhaps as implausible as fiction.