A Memorable Tour of the Holy Land

One of the most interesting trips I've made took place late in 1998 when I visited the Holy Land. Being a mystery writer, though not published at the time, I viewed most places on the trip with an eye to how they might be used in a novel. I bought a camcorder just before heading to the Middle East and took about three hours of videos during the tour.

Traveling by Royal Jordanian Airlines, we flew into Amman and spent a day cruising by bus through the mostly desolate Jordanian desert to visit two interesting sites. We stood on Mount Nebo where Moses gazed across the Jordan River before his death. Then we toured the ancient city of Petra, made famous by one of its striking building fronts carved out of rose sandstone being used in the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Our first taste of the dichotomy between Israel and its neighbors came as we approached the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River. It’s called the King Hussein bridge on the east side. We had to leave the Jordanian bus and board an Israeli bus for the crossing.

Jericho provided our first taste of the Promised Land, the same as Joshua in the Bible. Billed as the world’s oldest and lowest city (820 feet below sea level), its ancient tel, or archeological site, has been peeled back to reveal 26 layers of civilization dating back to 8000 B.C. Heading on to the Holy City, we checked into our hotel in East Jerusalem, the Arab district.

Our savvy Nashville travel agent, who joined us on the tour, booked us through a tour company run by two Palestinian brothers (who, incidentally, attended the University of Tennessee). He said we wouldn’t have any trouble in the Palestinian territories as they knew the bus was owned by Arabs.

For the next few days, we shuttled around various Jerusalem sites, plus Bethlehem, the Dead Sea Scroll caves at Qumran, the Dead Sea shoreline, and Masada. We were advised to steer clear of the West Bank hotbeds of Hebron and Ramallah. We visited such fascinating spots as Hezekiah’s Tunnel, dug 1,500 feet through the rock from both ends at once in 700 BC. We also toured the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum; the Temple Mount with its striking Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on several levels and occupied by several different religious groups.

One of the more interesting stops was an Arab market filled with small but colorful shops. We had to stop and try the Israeli’s favorite fast food, a falafel (spiced chickpea fritter) tucked into pita bread.

During the next week, we traveled north through Samaria, with a stop at Jacob’s Well, heading into the fertile Yizreel Valley. We visited Mount Meggido, called Armageddon in Revelations, walking among the ruins, including a trip down 183 steps to see the historic water tunnel. Then it was on to the Sea of Galilee, where we stayed in Nazareth. We sailed on the sea in a fishing boat allegedly like the one Jesus rode in. They dipped in a net, but it came up empty.

We toured biblical sites around the Galilee, also known as Lake Kinneret, including the Mount of the Beatitudes, Capernaum, and churches dedicated to various incidents such as the multiplication of loaves and fishes. We visited the attractive Kibbutz Ein Gev and traveled up the steep slopes of the Golan Heights to an old artillery emplacement looking down over the kibbutz where Syrian gunners fired on the Israeli settlers.

Our tour began to wind down with a visit to Mount Carmel, where Elijah vanquished the priests of Baal. Then we headed for Israel’s third largest metropolitan area, Haifa. The hillside Baha’i Shrine and Gardens provided a striking panorama, as did a view of the Haifa port. Afterward, we headed south along the Mediterranean to the historic city of Caesarea, built by King Herod.

At the outdoor Roman Theater, our guide stood on the stage and showed how a normal voice could be heard all around the seating area. We also checked out the ruins of Herod’s hippodrome, which had seating for 20,000 people. Then we toured the remains of the king’s port, now part of the Crusader city. Just beyond this stood a Roman aqueduct built in the A.D. 100’s. It had steps leading up so we could walk along a section of the monstrous project.

After overnighting in a seaside hotel at Netanya, we headed into Tel Aviv, the country’s commercial center. Our final stop was the old port city of Jaffa on Tel Aviv’s south side. Old Jaffa had a special attraction for me, with its warren of stair-step streets through the reconstructed ruins of Turkish palaces, flanked by pastel colored artist’s studios, galleries, and outdoor cafes.

In fact, the experience led me to open the first chapter in Secret of the Scroll, my initial Greg McKenzie mystery, in Old Jaffa.

On our flight home from Amman, I read in the Royal Jordanian magazine about an archeological dig at Bethany in Jordan, the area where John the Baptist preached. It mentioned finding caves that had been occupied by monks in the early centuries. I thought what if someone found an ancient scroll in one of those caves. After I got home, it quickly developed into a plot. Happily, I had my videos to help out.

I used much of my travel experience to tell the story, sending Greg and Jill McKenzie on an identical trip. Many of the locations appear just as they did to me. You can read the opening chapters on Amazon at this link. Give it a moment to switch to the Look Inside.

Visit my website at ChesterDCampbell.com.

Unscheduled Trip Down Memory Lane

We're painting the inside of our house. The biggest challenge is my office in the bonus room over the garage. It's packed with the clutter of 15 years of the writing life. The main problem is I've found it virtually impossible to throw anything away. You never know when it might come in handy, I've always contended. In the process, things kind of get piled up here and there (think everywhere).

But the painter must be able to get to the walls to paint them. So last week we started digging into the clutter. My wife would pick up something and say, "Can we throw this away?"

You can't go around willy-nilly throwing stuff away. It might be something of infinite value to posterity. Or at least something worth showing to a curious great-grandchild. To prevent such a tragedy, I would begin to read. I found it's like doing research for a book. When you get onto a fascinating subject, it's difficult to stop.

Taking some papers from Sarah, I found I was looking at notes I'd made from my trip to the Holy Land in 1998, the venture that led to my first published mystery, Secret of the Scroll. I took several hours of videos with the new camcorder I bought before leaving, and I looked through a partial script I wrote for an edited version I presented to my Sunday School class. Unfortunately, I loaned the tapes to someone who lost them.

It brought back memories of our tour starting in Jordan, where we visited Petra, the remarkable town carved out of reddish sandstone cliffs. Its best known site is the striking face of the Treasury, featured in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. We walked through the narrow 250-foot high sandstone slot canyon called the Siq where Indiana burst into the open facing the vivid facade of the Treasury.

In Israel, we spent nearly two weeks taking in everything from the stark, windswept heights of Masada to the multitude of historic sites around Jerusalem, up through Nazareth and the Sea of Galilee, the Golan Heights and the port of Haifa, then back down the coast to Tel Aviv and the ancient port of Joppa. That's where Secret of the Scroll opens.

I decided to keep these few sheets of paper and followed my wife's urgings to move on. The next slowdown came at a pile of magazines with colorful covers. It was my complete collection of
Nashville Magazine issues over the nearly seven years I served as editor. I started the magazine in 1963 and struggled to keep it afloat all those years.

After putting down the few issues I thumbed through, I resumed the trip down memory lane. I sifted through a stack of newspaper clippings of reviews for my earlier books. This was back in the days when our local paper and those in smaller towns where I did signings printed such things. There were also posters from bookstores about my appearances, something I no longer do now that my sales are mostly online. Reluctantly, I decided the lot of them were of no value to anybody but me, and I no longer had room for them.

File 13.

A little later, I found another itinerary for a trip through Europe Sarah and I took shortly after we married in 1999. Starting in Amsterdam where we watched a flower auction, we made a stop at the Luxembourg American Cemetery where World War II soldiers including Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. were buried. Then we toured Paris―the Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame Cathedral, the Louvre, Montmartre―and continued through Germany and Austria. We visited Vienna and such interesting sites as the Swarovski crystal headquarters.

Most of the tour was spent in Switzerland. We ranged across the country from Zurich to Geneva, plus soaring to the Alpine heights around 10,000 feet aboard a cable car where we looked across at of the magnificent Matterhorn peak. In the Montreux area along Lake Geneva, we toured Castle Chillon, location for Lord Byron's The Prisoner of Chillon Castle.


After all that reminiscing, I was forced to detour off Memory Lane and get back to the cleanup. But, alas, we're not finished yet.

Last Day Secret of the Scroll Is Free

Secret of the Scroll was ranked #1 in the Thriller Suspense category on Amazon this morning among free Kindle books. It ranked #16 in the Top 100 books category. If you'd like a free ebook, today is the last of my giveaway days.

As of this morning there had been about 7500 downloads, which I'm happy with after the late start because Amazon didn't list it as free until Thursday. According to many of my colleagues who have gone this route, I should expect a pickup in sales of all of my books over the next week or so. Since Secret is the first book in the series, if they like it there are four more to read.

There has been a lot of haranguing on the lists lately about giving books away that we labored so long and hard to produce. It's all a part of marketing. "Loss leaders" they're called in the retail business. You sell something way below its value to attract customers to your other products. I'll know if it works in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, back at the keyboard, I'm getting the final edits on The Poksu Conspiracy, book two in the Post Cold War thriller trilogy. Got a great cover from Stephen Walker, which I'll post in a few days after it's finalized.

Protags...who are they and where do they come from?

There's a thread running around the mystery lists currently about physical and other attributes of protagonists. Some writers leave physical descriptions to the imagination; others go into great detail to paint characters in unmistakable terms. It got me to thinking about my own private detectives, what I say about them and where it all came from.

The first one I created was Greg McKenzie. I had a plot in mind for Secret of the Scroll, and it involved the protagonist going on a mission to rescue his abducted wife. I wanted someone with professional investigative experience, someone more toward my own age (though not quite that far--I was 73 at the time). Falling back on my own experience, I made him retired Air Force and of Scottish lineage. I had been in intelligence rather than criminal investigation, so I made Greg a former Office of Special Investigations agent.

When it came to physical characteristics, I chose to make him larger than me, five-foot-ten, and on the hefty side. I've made his struggle with keeping the weight down a constant problem through the series. It provides opportunities for wife Jill  to needle him on occasion. In the first book I had him going through the throes of giving  up cigarettes, backsliding as events closed in on him.

When I started writing this post, I looked back into my directory and found a March 6, 1999 file titled BACKGROUND. It contains this bit of description, some of which has never made it into the books:

"Gregory McKenzie was born in St. Louis in 1935. His father, Clyde, was a burly, garrulous, red-faced Scotsman who was a master brewer for Anheuser-Busch. And since he took his stature more from his smaller mother, Greg had grown up almost in awe of this jolly giant who was fond of quoting Bobby Burns in butchered Gaelic. What he had learned from his father was that being assertive was a major part of being a man. It had not always stood him in good stead.

"Greg was in Air Force ROTC in college, where he majored in political science. His elective courses varied from statistics to archeology.

"Martha McKenzie had some Highland blood in her from her mother’s side of the family, so Greg proudly claimed his Scottish heritage. In fact, at one point he had seriously considered learning to play the bagpipe. But when he was at the point of joining a class, the Air Force transferred him 3,000 miles away.

"Jill was a bit more reserved than Greg, and she wasn’t the demanding type. But whenever she put her foot down firmly, he knew better than to try and budge it. After he retired, Greg told her if he was going to be an RV vagabond, he should grow a beard. She quickly retorted that no man with a beard was going to sleep in her bed. He didn’t really think she would kick him out of bed, but he knew she was capable of it. He recalled that she had complained occasionally that he scratched her face when he kissed her before shaving. He quickly abandoned the idea of a fuzzy face."

I added this to his colorful background later, most of which appears is a book or two:

"Greg is descended from a long line of Scottish military men. It started with the first muster of the 98th Argyllshire Highlanders in 1794 at Stirling Castle, north of Glasgow. Sixteen McKenzies answered the call. Greg’s grandfather, Staff Sgt. Alexander McKenzie, was a member of the 1st Battalion, Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders Regiment, a descendant of the old 98th. He fought in the Boer War in South Africa and in Europe during World War I. A battle wound forced his retirement and led to his emigration to America when Greg’s father was fifteen."

Creating characters with all their imperfections and strengths is one of the more fun parts of fiction writing. I'll take up some of my other creations, particularly Jill McKenzie, in future posts.

How it all started in the Holy Land

About this time eleven years ago, I was in the midst of a trek through the Holy Land with about twenty people from my brother's Sunday School class at Brentwood (TN) United Methodist Church. What came out of the trip was the idea for a mystery plot that became the first book in my Greg McKenzie mystery series, Secret of the Scroll. Interestingly, Secret still sells well when I do a signing with all of my books available. Many Readers like to start a series with the first book.

Though the present does not seem like an auspicious time for Americans to travel in the Middle East, I would wager that a trip similar to the one our group took would enjoy pretty much the same reception we received then. Radical Muslims might cheerfully spit at us, but ordinary Jordanians and Palestinians would likely accept our devalued dollars just as eagerly as before.

The travel agent who set up our trip, and traveled with us, was a sharp guy who knew how to play the odds. He booked us through a tour company run by two Palestinian brothers (who, incidentally, attended the University of Tennessee). He said we wouldn’t have any trouble in the Palestinian territories as they knew the bus was owned by Arabs.

Traveling by Royal Jordanian Airlines, we flew into Amman and spent a day cruising by bus through the mostly desolate Jordanian desert to visit two interesting sites. We stood on Mount Nebo where Moses gazed across the Jordan River before his death. Then we toured the ancient city of Petra, made famous by one of its striking building fronts carved out of rose sandstone being used in the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Our first taste of the dichotomy between Israel and its neighbors came as we approached the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River. It’s called the King Hussein bridge on the east side. We had to leave the Jordanian bus and board an Israeli bus for the crossing.

Jericho provided our first look at the Promised Land, just as had been the case with Joshua in the Bible. Billed as the world’s oldest and lowest city (820 feet below sea level), its ancient tel, or archeological site, has been peeled back to reveal 26 layers of civilization dating back to 8000 B.C. Heading on to the Holy City, we checked into our hotel in East Jerusalem, the Arab district, which the Palestinians want to include in their new state..

For the next few days, we shuttled around various Jerusalem sites, plus Bethlehem, the Dead Sea Scroll caves at Qumran, the Dead Sea shoreline, and Masada. We were advised to steer clear of the West Bank hotbeds of Hebron and Ramallah. We visited such fascinating spots as Hezekiah’s Tunnel, dug 1,500 feet through the rock from both ends at once in 700 B.C. We also toured the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum; the Temple Mount with its striking Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on several levels over the years and occupied by a variety of religious groups.

One of the more interesting stops was an Arab market filled with small but colorful shops. We had to stop and try the Israeli’s favorite fast food, a falafel (spiced chickpea fritter) tucked into pita bread.

During the next week, we traveled north through Samaria, with a stop at Jacob’s Well, heading into the fertile Yizreel Valley. We visited Mount Meggido, called Armageddon in Revelations, and walked among the ruins, including a trip down 183 steps to see the historic water tunnel. Then it was on to the Sea of Galilee, where we stayed in Nazareth. We sailed on the sea in a fishing boat allegedly like the one Jesus rode in. They dipped in a net, but it came up empty.

We toured biblical sites around the Galilee, also known as Lake Kinneret, including the Mount of the Beatitudes, Capernaum, and churches dedicated to various incidents such as the multiplication of loaves and fishes. We visited the attractive Kibbutz Ein Gev and traveled up the steep slopes of the Golan Heights to an old artillery emplacement looking down over the kibbutz where Syrian gunners fired on the Israeli settlers.

Our tour began to wind down with a visit to Mount Carmel, where Elijah vanquished the priests of Baal. Then we headed for Israel’s third largest metropolitan area, Haifa. The hillside Baha’i Shrine and Gardens provided a striking panorama, as did a view of the Haifa port. Afterward, we headed south along the Mediterranean to the historic city of Caesarea, built by King Herod.

At the outdoor Roman Theater, our guide stood on the stage and showed how a normal voice could be heard all around the seating area. We also checked out the ruins of Herod’s hippodrome, which had seating for 20,000 people. Then we toured the remains of the king’s port, now part of the Crusader city. Just beyond this stood a Roman aqueduct built in the A.D. 100’s. It had steps leading up so we could walk along a section of the monstrous project.

After overnighting in a seaside hotel at Netanya, we headed into Tel Aviv, the country’s commercial center. Our final stop was the old port city of Jaffa on Tel Aviv’s south side. Old Jaffa had a special attraction for me, with its warren of stairstep streets through the reconstructed ruins of Turkish palaces, flanked by pastel colored artist’s studios, galleries, and outdoor cafes.

In fact, the experience led me to open the first chapter in Secret of the Scroll with an incident in Old Jaffa.

On our flight home from Amman, I read in the Royal Jordanian Airlines magazine about an archeological dig at Bethany in Jordan, the area where John the Baptist preached. It mentioned finding caves that had been occupied by monks in the early centuries. I thought what if someone found an ancient scroll in one of those caves. After I got home, the idea quickly developed into a plot. Happily, I had taken three hours of videos to refresh my memory.

I used much of my travel experience to tell the story, sending Greg and Jill McKenzie on an identical trip. Many of the locations appear just as they did to me. You can read the opening chapters at my Website. The above is a revised version of a story I told a year ago on the Mysterious Musings blog.

Cast of Charcters for Mysteries?

There’s been a thread running lately on DorothyL, the big mystery listserv, concerning the use of a Cast of Characters in mystery novels. It’s something early practitioners of the genre like Agatha Christie did. I’m not a historical mystery reader, but I understand writers of historicals frequently put in a Cast of Characters to keep everybody straight.

I think it’s a good idea. I keep a list when I’m writing and add names to it when I come up with a new character. It prevents the confusing practice of using names that sound too much alike, or starting more than one character with the same first letter. Sometimes the latter can’t be helped, as in my current work in progress. I have the name of a real person I promised to use in the book, and up pops a character from a previous book with the same first letter. I’m also using a couple of characters with “T” names who appeared in different books. One is a minor character, though, and the names don’t sound much alike.

I understand historicals often use a Cast of Characters to show relationships. It’s the old Family Tree idea. If I did that with my Greg McKenzie mysteries, it would only look like a twig. Greg and his wife, Jill, would be left hanging out on a limb. One book does include a cousin, but that would hardly warrant a trunk and branches.

I’ve thought about putting Casts of Characters for my current five books on my website. New readers could drop by and pick up a program (you can’t tell your players without your program, as the ball game hawkers used to chant). I thought I’d try it out here to see how it works. So if you haven’t read the first McKenzie mystery, Secret of the Scroll, here’s your chance to get started. The characters are listed more or less in order of their appearance.

SECRET OF THE SCROLL (October 2002)
Cast of Characters

Khaled Assah – Palestinian youth from Ramallah studying archeology in Jordan
Abdullah Kafi – Assah’s cousin from Ramallah, Palestinian town near Jerusalem
Levi Katz – Israeli border police sergeant at Allenby Bridge entry point
Greg McKenzie – retired Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent from Nashville, TN
Jill McKenzie – Greg’s wife, former charter air service owner
Sam Gannon – retired Air Force pilot, friend of the McKenzies and Holy Land tour organizer
Wilma Gannon – Sam Gannon’s wife, Jill McKenzie’s best friend
Tim Gannon – Sam and Wilma’s son, young architect/engineer
Jake Cohen – American working as a travel guide in Israel
David Wolfson – co-owner of Nashville market research firm, Bible Codes buff, friend of Cohen
John Peterson – young CPA, target of Metro Nashville homicide detective over wife’s disappearance
Tessa Peterson – John’s wife, a successful interior designer and mother of a small son
Harland Walker Blackford – Tessa’s father, president of large Nashville bank
Mark Tremaine – Metro homicide detective who goes after Peterson
Pat Intermaggio – another Blackford son-in-law, owns firm that hauls equipment for musicians
Sgt. Christie – Metro patrol officer, brother-in-law of Mark Tremaine
Phil Adamson – Metro homicide detective who checks into Jill’s disappearance
Jay Rogers – the McKenzies’ next-door neighbor
Ricky Rogers – Jay’s observant 12-year-old son
Charles (Chili) Hankins – Nashville Bell South security man
Julian Quancey Welch – Vanderbilt Divinity School Old Testament professor
Ted Kennerly – OSI Special Agent in Charge at Arnold Air Force Base south of Nashville
Kevin – Metro police sergeant, Wilma Gannon’s nephew
Eli Zalman – former Mossad officer now employed by the Temple Alliance
Asher Lipkowitz – colleague of Zalman
Kamal Nazari – Palestinian affiliated with the Guardians of Palestine
Colonel Erikson – Greg’s former OSI commander, now Ted Kennerly’s superior
Alice Baker – neighbor of Kermit Nagy (a.k.a. Kamal Nazari)
Capt. Grubbs – Tennessee Air National Guard C-130 pilot
Yolla – classmade of Khaled Assah, daughter of Jordanian official
Moriah – code name for Moshe Levin
Moshe Levin – former Mossad officer now security chief for the Temple Alliance
Col. Warren Javis – Air Force Attache in Tel Aviv
Mr. Jabbar – Bedouin owner of the Saladin antiquities shop in a Jerusalem bazaar
Kamal – Arab owner of jewelry store in Jerusalem
Father Coughlin – American priest at the Church of St. Peter in Galicantu
Yelena – Russian Jew working for the Temple Alliance
Ambassador Hamilton – American ambassador to Israel

Except for a few walk-ons who merited no more than a paragraph in the book, that covers the cast. Is this the sort of thing readers would be interested in? Please leave a comment.

When fact becomes fiction...

True crime writers take a murder case and explore it from beginning to end, going into great detail about the partipants, their actions, and their motivations. It takes a mountain of research to make sure all the facts are correct. Otherwise, they would likely face a lawsuit. Some do anyway.

Mystery fiction writers take an actual case and change enough of the facts that they can say whatever they wish without getting into trouble. That's what I did in my first Greg McKenzie novel.

I wanted to saddle Greg with a recent troubled past. I had him quickly tire of retirement and take a job as an investigator for the district attorney in Nashville. I needed something that would get him fired from his job, plus anger many in the police department. I picked a case that remained unsolved but was in and out of the news on a regular basis.

A young lawyer had reported his wife, a talented artist, missing two weeks after she supposedly left home for a "12-day vacation" following an argument. Her friends said she would never leave her young son and daughter like that. The police quickly targeted the husband but were unable to find a body.

I changed the husband to a CPA and the wife to an interior designer. They had only a young son. But I kept most of the circumstances of the police search and their concentration on the husband as the murderer.

In the real case, the wife was the daughter of a prominent local attorney, who sided with the police in believing his son-in-law guilty. I made the missing wife the daughter of a prominent banker, who was the chief backer of the district attorney. When my protag, Greg McKenzie, makes some off-the-cuff remarks quite critical of the lead investigator, they turn up on the front page of the newspaper. The wife's father is infuriated and Greg gets fired.

Long after my book was published, the actual case reached a conclusion when the husband's father turned on him and testified he had helped dispose of the wife's body. The story was told in a true crime book titled An Unfinished Canvas, by Nashville author Phyllis Gobbell and Michael Glasgow.

Fictionalizing fact is a much simpler operation. Of course, Nashvillians who read my book recognized the similarity to the Janet and Perry March case. After his conviction in August of 2006, March was sentenced to 56 years in prison. I can't tell you what happened to the young CPA in Secret of the Scroll. That would be a spoiler.

Israel, a fertile ground for mystery writers

Herod's Mountain Fortress at Masada

A recent news story about new findings from King Herod’s burial site in Israel brought back memories of my trip to the Holy Land in 1998. We visited the impressive construction projects Herod the Great built in the port city of Caesarea and atop the famous mountain fortress of Masada.

Being a mystery writer, though not published at the time, I viewed most places on the trip with an eye to how they might be used in a novel. I had bought a camcorder just before heading to the Middle East and took about three hours of videos during the tour.

Traveling by Royal Jordanian Airlines, we flew into Amman and spent a day cruising by bus through the mostly desolate Jordanian desert to visit two interesting sites. We stood on Mount Nebo where Moses gazed across the Jordan River before his death. Then we toured the ancient city of Petra, made famous by one of its striking building fronts, carved out of rose sandstone, being featured in the climax of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Our first taste of the dichotomy between Israel and its neighbors came as we approached the Allenby Bridge over the Jordan River. It’s called the King Hussein bridge on the east side. We had to leave the Jordanian bus and board an Israeli bus for the crossing.

Jericho provided our first taste of the Promised Land, the same as Joshua in the Bible. Billed as the world’s oldest and lowest city (820 feet below sea level), its ancient tel, or archeological site, has been peeled back to reveal 26 layers of civilization dating back to 8000 B.C. Heading on to the Holy City, we checked into our hotel in East Jerusalem, the Arab district.

Our savvy Nashville travel agent, who joined us on the tour, booked us through a tour company run by two Palestinian brothers (who, incidentally, attended the University of Tennessee). He said we wouldn’t have any trouble in the Palestinian territories as they knew the bus was owned by Arabs.

For the next few days, we shuttled around various Jerusalem sites, plus Bethlehem, the Dead Sea Scroll caves at Qumran, the Dead Sea shoreline, and Masada. We were advised to steer clear of the West Bank hotbeds of Hebron and Ramallah. We visited such fascinating spots as Hezekiah’s Tunnel, dug 1,500 feet through the rock from both ends at once in 700 B.C. We also toured the Shrine of the Book, which houses the Dead Sea Scrolls; Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum; the Temple Mount with its striking Dome of the Rock; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on several levels and occupied by several different religious orders.

One of the more interesting stops was an Arab market filled with small but colorful shops. We had to stop and try the Israelis' favorite fast food, a falafel (spiced chickpea fritter) tucked into pita bread.

During the next week, we traveled north through Samaria, with a stop at Jacob’s Well, heading into the fertile Yizreel Valley. We visited Mount Meggido, called Armageddon in Revelations, walking among the ruins, including a trip down 183 steps to see the historic water tunnel. Then it was on to the Sea of Galilee, where we stayed in Nazareth. We sailed on the sea in a fishing boat allegedly like the one Jesus rode in. They dipped in a net, but it came up empty.

We toured biblical sites around the Galilee, also known as Lake Kinneret, including the Mount of the Beatitudes, Capernaum, and churches dedicated to various incidents such as the multiplication of loaves and fishes. We visited the attractive Kibbutz Ein Gev and traveled up the steep slopes of the Golan Heights to an old attillery emplacement looking down over the kibbutz where Syrian gunners fired on the Israeli settlers.

Our tour began to wind down with a visit to Mount Carmel, where Elijah vanquished the priests of Baal. Then we headed for Israel’s third largest metropolitan area, Haifa. The hillside Baha’i Shrine and Gardens provided a striking panorama, as did a view of the Haifa port. Afterward, we headed south along the Mediterranean to the historic city of Caesarea, built by King Herod.

At the outdoor Roman Theater, our guide stood on the stage and showed how a normal voice could be heard all around the seating area. We also checked out the ruins of Herod’s hippodrome, which had seating for 20,000 people. Then we toured the remains of the king’s port, now part of the Crusader city. Just beyond this stood a Roman aqueduct built in the A.D. 100’s. It had steps leading up so we could walk along a section of the monstrous project.

After overnighting in a seaside hotel at Netanya, we headed into Tel Aviv, the country’s commercial center. Our final stop was the old port city of Jaffa on Tel Aviv’s south side. Old Jaffa had a special attraction for me, with its warren of stairstep streets through the reconstructed ruins of Turkish palaces, flanked by pastel colored artist’s studios, galleries, and outdoor cafes.

In fact, the experience led me to open the first chapter in Secret of the Scroll, my initial Greg McKenzie mystery, in Old Jaffa.

On our flight home from Amman, I read in the Royal Jordanian magazine about an archeological dig at Bethany in Jordan, the area where John the Baptist preached. It mentioned finding caves that had been occupied by monks in the early centuries. I thought what if someone found an ancient scroll in one of those caves. After I got home, it quickly developed into a plot. Happily, I had my videos to help out.

I used much of my travel experience to tell the story, sending Greg and Jill McKenzie on an identical trip. Many of the locations appear just as they did to me. It was a classic example of using your travels to create a mystery. You can get a feel for it by reading the opening chapters at my website.