London's Curse

Book excerpt: Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, London was gripped by the supposed curse of Tutankhamun, whose tomb in the Luxor sands was uncovered in February 1923 by the British archaeologist Howard Carter. The site was plundered, and over the next few years more than twenty of those involved in the exhumation or in handling the contents of the tomb perished in strange and often terrifying circumstances, prompting the myth of the 'Curse of Tutankhamun'. Nowhere - particularly London's West End - appeared to be safe for those who had provoked the ire of the Egyptian death gods. A blend of meticulous research and educated conjecture, historian and screenwriter Mark Beynon turns armchair detective as he uncovers a wealth of hitherto unpublished material that lays bare the truth behind these fatalities. Could ' London's Curse' be attributed to the work of a macabre mastermind? It soon becomes apparent that these deaths were not only linked by the ominous presence of Tutankhamun himself, but also by a murderer hell-bent on retribution and dubbed by the press as 'The Wickedest Man in the World'.