Glistening sweat and decaying fat. Sunrise. Cairo Martyr puffed lazily and turned his gaze north when he heard the distant drone of an airplane.

Whittemore, however, enjoys writing these stories that meander all over the place. In Jerusalem Poker, he turns to Joe’s life after Smyrna, when he, Cairo Martyr, and Munk Szondi play their epic poker game. They come together by chance, but as usual with the books, they’re connected in ways they couldn’t imagine. Cairo learned how to be a dragoman in Egypt under the tutelage of Menelik Ziwar, who was Strongbow’s best friend. Munk was descended from a Swiss explorer who settled in Hungary and married, but not before he had already gotten an obscure Albanian noblewoman pregnant, said child growing up to be Skanderbeg Wallenstein, forger of the Sinai Bible. The Swiss explorer later traveled through the Sudan and impregnated yet another woman, whose grandson was Cairo Martyr, making he and Munk distant cousins. Munk is friends with Maud, although he met her after she left Joe in Jerusalem. He also has a brief affair with the elderly grandmother of Nubar Wallenstein, who is the odd villain in the book, one who becomes obsessed with the poker game but remains largely ineffectual at destroying it. The three men spend their years becoming richer and richer but also destroying players they deem unworthy – men who buy and sell slaves, men who steal religious icons – until the game ends in 1933. It’s not quite as emotionally affecting as the first book, but Whittemore builds on the relationships established in Sinai Tapestry to add depth to the characters.

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I have. I’ve heard some fanciful reports on more than one occasion and some whimsical allegations too. But the truth is, he never existed. Couldn’t have, impossible on any account. No Englishman was ever that daft. A myth in the neighborhood pubs of the Holy Land, no more. Mad tales conjured up by the local Arabs when they’re high on their flying carpets, which is most of the time. Opium, it’s called. No offense meant to present company. It was during these early fall visits that I discovered that his Prentiss great-grandfather had been a Presbyterian minister who had made his way up the Hudson River by boat from New York to Troy and then over to Vermont by train and wagon in the 1860s. In the library of the white, rambling Victorian house in Dorset there were shelves of fading leather-bound volumes of popular romances written by his great-grandmother for shop girls, informing them how to improve themselves, dress, and find suitable husbands. I gathered she was the Danielle Steele of her day, and the family’s modest wealth was due to her literary efforts and not the generosity of the church’s congregation. We talked about the new novel. It was to be called Sister Sally and Billy the Kid and it was to be Ted’s first American novel. It was about an Italian in his twenties from the Chicago of the roaring Twenties. His older brother, a gangster, had helped him buy a flower shop. But there was a shoot-out, the older brother was dead, and Billy has to flee to the West Coast where he meets a faith healer not unlike Aimee Semple McPherson. The real-life McPherson disappeared for a month in 1926, and when she returned claimed she had been kidnapped. The stone house in which Billy and his faith healer spend their month of love (from the beginning it is clear that the idyll must be limited to one month) has a walled garden behind it full of lemon trees and singing birds. Although that house is in southern California, the garden bears a close resemblance to another garden in the Ethiopian compound in Jerusalem with a synagogue on one side and a Cistercian convent on the other. You might have played a few games that seem to last forever but perhaps only last a few hours in the evening. The Bird Cage Theatre in Arizona claims that it is the home of the longest ever game of poker.The poker game started in 1881 and lasted an incredible 8 years, five months and three days.

You can now find a range of Twitch streamers streaming their live poker matches, truly taking poker into modern times. The four books which make up the Jerusalem Quartet are among the richest and most profound in imaginative literature… . A superlative body of work. —Jeff VanderMeer IN THE FIRST LIGHT of an early summer day a naked Junker baron and his naked wife both elderly, both heavily overweight and sweating, stood on top of the Great Pyramid waiting for the sunrise. Scraps from a magical book that’s always being written? Or was written once? Or will be written someday?” one of the main themes of the quartet are fathers and sons […] they’re definitely male-centric […] Whittemore also loves describing the places where the action is set”In the early nineteenth century, Skanderberg Wallenstein, a fanatical Albanian monk and linguist, unearths in a monastery in Jerusalem the oldest Bible in the world and discovers that it denies every religious truth ever held by anyone. Fearful of the consequences of its dissemination, Wallenstein forges an original Bible that will justify faith and buries the real Sinai Bible in Jerusalem. His actions set into motion a bawdy, brilliant, and undeniably epic adventure that spans a century and entwines the destinies of four extraordinary men in the shifting sands of the Holy Land: Plantagenet Strongbow, an English-born adventurer who becomes a Muslim holy man and finally, on the eve of World War 1, the secret ruler of the Ottoman Empire; his son Stern, a visionary who dedicates his life to establishing an inclusive homeland in the Middle East for Jews, Muslims, and Christians; Haj Harun, a 3000-year-old warrior and antiquities dealer; and O'Sullivan Beare, an exiled Irish freedom fighter and gunrunner." Cairo Martyr got to his feet not believing what he saw. The nearly invisible man and woman still stood on the summit with their arms outstretched, but now they were headless, cleanly decapitated by the slashing lowest wing of the triplane. The hulking bodies lingered a few seconds longer, then slowly toppled over and disappeared down the far side of the pyramid. Now what’s this twist? thought O’Sullivan Beare. What’s going on around here? More confusion and things seem to be spinning out of control already. That item’s not English for sure, not French or German or anything natural. And armed with a bow no less, just in case a spot of archery practice turns up while he’s out for a stroll on a dreadful winter afternoon. Some bloody devious article up to no good in the Holy Land, that’s certain. By God, it’s pranks for sure and somebody’s bent on something. The World Series of Poker was shown on TV in 1973. It was celebrated in a big way as it was the first-ever televised poker event.Showing poker on TV further pushed poker into the spotlight and increased its popularity once again.

Spy and be spied upon…” It sounds almost like a proverb. Concerning himself with the clandestine activities of mankind Edward Whittemore boldly combines tragedy, mythology and buffoonery… So it strikes me there are no commonplace people in the crowd, said Joe, and no innocents in the game of life really. We all seem to be double and triple agents with unknown sources and unsuspected lines of control, reporting a little here and a little there as we try to manage our secret networks of feeling and doing, our own little complex networks of life..." (Chp 18, 'Crypt/Mirror', 336-7) Edward Whittemore was such a writer! IMO, the Jerusalem Quartet (of which Sinai Tapestry is the first volume) is one of the great literary works of the twentieth century. Practically no-one has read it. Here's Jeff Vandermeer's recommendation. Jerusalem Poker is the second volume of the Jerusalem Quartet, which begins with Sinai Tapestry and continues with Nile Shadows and Jericho Mosaic. Sinai Tapestry is the first book in the Jerusalem Quartet, a series written over a decade in the late '70s and '80s. The series garnered much critical acclaim, but little publishing success, which is a shame because I think this is one of the best books I have ever read. I would like to say the same about the rest of the series, but I haven't read them yet. I definitely will be though.But before the final hand is played to determine the destiny of the Holy City, a dangerous new player enters the picture: Nubar Wallenstein, an Albanian alchemist determined to achieve immortality, and heir to the world’s largest oil syndicate. He finances a vast network of spies dedicated to destroying the players, and his aim is to win complete power over Jerusalem./divDIV

A fascinating mélange of fact and fiction focusing on the Middle East in general and Jerusalem in particular. As jumbled as a Finnegans Wake. It never sold well perhaps because it’s not that good. But it has the bones of greatness. Imaginative. The novel spans centuries, and The Quartet adds the remaining decades. The characters are not just larger than life but above it and beyond it. It's not a typical fantasy. It takes place in our historical world and it doesn't ask for the willing suspension of disbelief. It forces it upon you. There's no magic in the accepted sense, unless the edges of reality can be called magic, and all of the events and characters are possible, if highly implausible. I've never laughed so hard while being educated in arcane history.

It was during this time that Whittemore began working on the novels for which he is probably best known. These constitute the Jerusalem Quartet. His earlier book, Quin's Shanghai Circus (1974), contains the seeds of his series. [2] Out of print for many years, all five books were reissued in 2002 by Old Earth Books. The Old Earth Books editions are now out of print, but Open Road Media announced plans to publish eBook editions of all five novels in July 2013. An author of extraordinary talents, albeit one who eludes comparison with other writers… . The milieu is one which readers of espionage novels may think themselves familiar, and yet it’s totally transformed—by the writer’s wild humour, his mystical bent, and his bicameral perception of history and time. — Harper’s on Jerusalem Poker