From Childhood Stories to Crime Thrillers: A journey with Mirna El Mahdy

There is something strangely reassuring about spending time surrounded by people who think about murder for a living. A visit to the Emirates Literature Festival offered exactly that experience. I walked into the event as someone who reads crime fiction with an almost suspicious level of enthusiasm. I left with a stack of books heavy enough to test airline baggage limits and the quiet satisfaction of having spent hours talking to the people who actually create the fictional crimes I enjoy so much.

Crime writers make unusually compelling conversationalists. Their minds move easily between psychology, research and imagination, often with the calm precision of investigators reconstructing a case. At the festival I met four authors whose works explore the darker corners of human behaviour. This series for Friday follows those encounters, each conversation offering a glimpse into how crime writers think about justice, fear and the strange logic of human motives. Among them was Egyptian writer Mirna El Mahdy, whose thrillers combine psychological tension with the rhythms of everyday life in Cairo.

El Mahdy arrived at crime fiction through a path that began in languages rather than murder. She studied at the College of Foreign Languages and initially worked in translation. The work paid the bills. It never sparked the imagination. “Medical translation especially was not really my thing,” she says with a laugh.

The origins of her storytelling go back to childhood afternoons spent inventing elaborate worlds while doodling. Her mother recognised something in those stories before El Mahdy fully understood it herself. “I used to say I had a fish friend who took me to the ocean where there were mermaids,” she recalls. “I was always inventing these big stories while drawing.”

Her mother began writing down those stories and encouraged her to share them with the family. “She said, ‘What if we forget about drawing and start telling your stories instead?’” El Mahdy explains. “During family gatherings I would sit and tell everyone my stories. It was really magical.”

Another turning point came when her mother began reading J.K. Rowling aloud to her. The experience left a lasting impression. “I loved the idea that people could immerse themselves in another world just by holding a piece of paper in their hands,” she says. “Not by watching something visual. I thought, I want to write something like that.”

She began entering writing competitions at school and won several international contests organised through French and Canadian institutions. Her first book was published when she was just twenty-one. Today she writes full time, producing thrillers that blend psychological tension with social observation.

Her best-known work includes the Noah Al-Alfy Investigations series, built around a detective whose intuition often guides him beyond what others believe. Even the name carries symbolism. “Noah is the equivalent of the prophet Nuh,” El Mahdy explains. “In the story he senses things that other people don’t believe.” The surname has its own meaning. “Alfy means millennium,” she says. “Someone who lives forever. I hope my character will live forever too.”

Unlike the classic Western detective figure, her protagonist is intentionally grounded in everyday Egyptian life. “In the Arab world we first saw crime fiction through Western stories,” she says. “A detective wearing a hat, holding a pipe, walking in the rain. But it doesn’t really rain like that in Egypt.”

Her response was to create a character who feels unmistakably local. “I wanted to write about an ordinary Egyptian man who eats from a street cart and then goes to solve crimes.”

The city itself plays a central role in her books. Cairo’s deep history shapes the atmosphere of the stories. “The civilisation and the pharaohs are deeply rooted in us,” she says. “Even if we don’t study history formally, we feel connected to it.”

Readers outside Egypt have responded strongly to that sense of place. Some have even visited the locations mentioned in her novels. “They go to the buildings and take pictures,” she says with amusement. “The places almost become characters.”

That realism comes from meticulous research. “I’m a huge nerd,” she admits.

She visits locations personally and speaks to the people who know them best. “I talk to the valet, the guard, the neighbours. I read about the place and investigate everything. When readers move through the story, it feels like they are actually visiting the building.”

Her literary influences stretch beyond Egypt. The first crime novel she encountered was by Belgian writer Georges Simenon. “We studied him in school,” she says.

Later she discovered authors such as Jean-Christophe Grangé, while the humour of Arsène Lupin added another dimension to her reading. French literature shaped her interest in sociology and psychology, while Latin American writers such as Gabriel García Márquez deepened her curiosity about human behaviour and communities.

Those influences appear in her work, where the mystery often sits alongside the emotional and social forces surrounding it. “Crime novels give you something life does not guarantee,” she says. “Justice.”

Readers know the mystery will eventually be solved. “That sense of justice is powerful.”

El Mahdy describes herself as a “night creature” who does most of her writing after dark. She begins her day by reading or watching interviews with other writers. “It helps me get into the zone,” she says.

She also carries a notebook everywhere. “I don’t trust devices. They can disappear in a minute.”

Ideas can come from anywhere. “I might look at a restaurant and think someone could get poisoned there,” she says with a grin.

Her novel My Psychopathic Friend explores the unsettling intimacy between people capable of harm. She believes readers are drawn to such stories because they offer perspective. “We have a saying in Egypt,” she says. “When you see someone else’s trouble, your own trouble feels lighter.”

Her writing also reflects the anxieties of her generation. “The world keeps changing,” she says. “Revolutions, systems, currency, everything.”

Creating fictional worlds offers a sense of stability. “I create characters that feel stable to me. Writing gives you control over something when the world feels unpredictable.”

Her novel My Grandmother’s Guide to Killing Bastards tackled sexual abuse against minors, including boys, a topic that initially shocked some readers. “Some people thought the book was repulsive,” she says. “Others thought it was courageous.”

Later real-life events echoed the themes in the novel, prompting readers to return to it with a different perspective. The book was eventually longlisted for the Katara Literary Prize. Despite the darkness in her stories, El Mahdy herself projects a calm and thoughtful presence. She laughs when people comment on the contrast. “People often tell me I look too cute to write bloody stories,” she says.

Her answer is delivered with perfect timing. “That’s exactly how predators work.”

There is another irony. The writer who imagines violent crimes has a severe fear of blood. “If I see even a drop, I might faint,” she admits.

Writing crime fiction became a strange form of therapy. “I never fully overcame the fear,” she says. “But I managed to make money from it.”

For someone who spends so much time imagining fictional danger, her ideal evening remains peaceful: music, candles, chocolate and quiet time. The stillness suits a writer who prefers the calm of night, when the world falls silent and imagination has space to work.

Listening to her describe that process, I felt something familiar to many crime readers. The curiosity that pulls us into fictional mysteries also draws us toward the people who create them.

Behind every fictional crime stands a storyteller trying to understand human behaviour and restore a sense of order that real life does not always provide.

For readers like me, that makes the conversation almost as addictive as the books.