Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery) Read online

  Personally, in this book Falco is as settled as he has ever been, making him all the more vulnerable to the crippling financial risks involved in making a false allegation or even abandoning a case. He and Helena have their house at the foot of the Aventine; he and the Camillus brothers are working together as Falco and Associates – a little-known firm of private informers who specialised in background investigations of the family type (bridegrooms, widows, and other cheating, lying, money-grubbing swine just like your own relatives). [AC] Falco is trying to train the brothers, who generally disagree with one another over anything that matters. The position is complicated when Honorius, a Grishamite young lawyer, temporarily joins them, a cause of distrust and friction until he allows himself to be bought off. This is the book where Camillus Aelianus acquires an interest in law. It causes him to be parcelled off to Athens, if only because the more the brothers are involved in a story, the more Helena gets shoved aside.

  So many touchy lawyers complained about their treatment that I had to add a disclaimer for the paperback version!

  Scandal Takes a Holiday

  First published 2004

  This had two main starting points. First was the wonderful archaeological site at Ostia Antica, which Richard and I loved on our annual trips to Rome. Our visit for this particular book coincided with the state funeral for nineteen Italian military personnel who had been killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq. We saw the gun-carriage cortège from our hotel and after such a close connection with Italy and Rome for so many years, I was extremely moved. It still makes an odd, unexpected memory of my writing life.

  Ostia had been discovered when Fiumicino airport was built; the remains were silted up by the Tiber as the coastline shifted, which preserved the archaeology. We always thought Ostia better than Pompeii. Not so dramatic a history, perhaps, but a less crowded site, while many ancient buildings survive to first-storey level, so you can wander about feeling you are in real ancient streets.

  Much was built by Domitian and Hadrian, but I could create a picture of life there under Vespasian. Future imperial redevelopment even suggested the theme of ambitious building contractors; records exist of this ancient trade union, with their aggressive ‘booted ranks’ and traceable links to tame town councillors. Falco and I are preoccupied with civic corruption. I explored the abuse of local power, embroidering it with fancy details such as the fake vigiles office; I must have read one of those perennial news items about bogus policemen. Some of the buildings I used are real: the builder’s house, the gatehouse, the cistern where the final body is discovered, and of course the vigiles’ station-house which you can wander round and envisage in great detail. It is set slightly back from the main route into the heart of the site, and was a late discovery for us. We also took photos of temples Falco is forced to visit. The same happy day, we explored the sanctuary of Cybele and the necropolis where the lively funeral takes place.

  Hercules Invictus

  ‘And by the way – nice arse!’

  Temple of Augustus, Ostia

  Entrance to underground Chamber

  Statue of Cybele, Ostia

  Helena Justina’s father always sent along his secretary in time to bury himself in his copy over breakfast. This, I was sure, had nothing to do with Decimus Camillus wanting to avoid conversation with his noble wife as he blearily ate his nice white morning rolls. [STH]

  The second feature I was eager to develop was the Daily Gazette; I had frequently mentioned it and people often queried the reference. Sadly, we don’t have relics of the Forum inscriptions, but the Acta Diurna’s flavour comes from a passage in Petronius’ Satyricon. The ghastly nouveau riche freedman Trimalchio shows off throughout a dinner party, telling his hapless guests more than they want to know about his own wealth: What really interrupted was his accountant, who sounded as though he was reading out a copy of the Gazette: 26 July: Births on the estate at Cumae: male 30, female 40. Wheat threshed and stored: 500,000 pecks. Oxen broken in: 500 … The official edicts were read out and the wills of certain gamekeepers. In specific codicils they said they were leaving Trimalchio nothing. Then the names of some bailiffs; the divorce of a freedwoman, the wife of a watchman, on the grounds of adultery with a bath-attendant; the demotion of a hall-porter to a job at Baiae; the prosecution of a steward; and the result of an action between some bedroom attendants. This suggests the Acta Diurna, which was established to record the doings of the Senate, included official decrees plus a court circular about the imperial family, a tally of births and deaths in Rome, equivalents of the finance pages in a good daily newspaper (money paid into the Treasury, corn supply statistics, progress on major public buildings), and general daily news: prodigies and marvels, fires, funerals and marriage notices, sacrifices, public games (the sports pages) – and a scandal column. No commentator says that Vespasian tried to manipulate news coverage to make his regime look good – but I bet he did!

  As always, I enjoyed ‘police procedure’ at the outstation, concentrating on rivalries between cohorts and between the vigiles and the navy. Pirates, still a problem on the high seas, were good to include; they allowed me to touch on Rome’s recent past, to mention dangers to trade, and to introduce poignant personal relationships. I liked the elderly pirate who wanted a ghost writer for his memoirs!

  We see the Camilli together at unusually close quarters, especially enjoying a barbecue before seeing off Aulus on his ship. Julia Justa perhaps tipples too much hot toddy while shopping with Helena; we see Helena at ease with her mother. Decimus lets himself enjoy his tiny granddaughters touchingly: Once they were let out of their town house on a spree, they knew how to throw themselves into a country feast. We could have been at an olive harvest. We were loud, we ate heartily, we laughed and talked until it grew so dark we had to light oil lamps and start batting at insects. [STH]

  Just a nice reminder that these books are about traditional Mediterranean life.

  See Delphi and Die

  First published 2005

  Devotees of physical culture have to put up with a lot of nuisances. There are the exercises in the first place, the toil involved in which drains the vitality and renders it unfit for concentration or the more demanding sort of studies. Next there is the heavy feeding, which dulls mental acuteness. Then there is the taking on as coaches of the worst brand of slave, persons who divide their time between putting on lotion and putting down liquor, whose idea of a well spent day consists of getting up a good sweat and then replacing the fluid lost with plenty of drink …

  SENECA

  2004 was the Athens Olympics, and in April that year the Classical Association’s Annual Conference had the ancient Games as a theme. I generally attend that conference and sometimes pick up ideas. Now I decided to ‘do’ Greece and athletics for the next Falco novel. Personally I shrink from sport; to coincide with the modern Games there were a lot of new books on the subject, handily. Only after I became fixed on the idea did I work out that AD76 was not the right year. However, I convinced myself I could make a joke of this. From what I learned of the hazards, it would be much more feasible for Falco, Helena and their party to move around Olympia if there were no crowds – and much more hygienic!

  My second theme would be travel. I had enjoyed organised tours of ancient monuments since long before I began writing. I could tell of many a terrifying coach journey on mountain roads, deadly moussakas, and over-friendly hotel porters in fleapits provided by the ‘low-end’ kind of holiday company. The Romans invented heritage touring, carving their names on ancient temple pillars as they took advantage of their own roads and the comparative safety of the seas under the Pax Romana. They must have had entrepreneurs to facilitate journeys; so was born the Seven Sights Travel company, an operation to avoid unless you are a novelist wanting colourful material.

  I have fond memories of the in situ research. Time was short; I can’t remember why. Richard and I both loved Greece, though oddly we had never been there together; this year we went twice. I
t was almost the last time we were able to travel abroad because he became ill not long afterwards; my memories are poignant. First I arranged a very brief escorted trip to take in Athens and Corinth. Our hired car reached Olympia after midnight (it’s quite remote even now), after travelling through a storm that showed just why Zeus was the god of thunder; I am still sorry I didn’t manage to fit in a version of the incident when we gratefully took to our room: the hotel had kindly supplied a big tray of cold food. Tired and starving, we fell on it, but just as I was about to plunge in a fork, the electricity failed and we were in complete darkness …

  Things were better in the morning, though at the ancient site I was disappointed to find that because of the coming modern Games, the museum had been stripped of ancient athletic equipment. It was neither the first time nor the last that I was thwarted by a closed museum. It just gave us an excuse to fix a second trip to Athens, to see the special exhibition. Even that was due to close shortly … With only days to go before my deadline, we slipped in just in time. There I saw the special jumping weight in the form of a wild boar that was my murder weapon. It was in a case, so my photo isn’t good.

  As darkness fell, all the hills around us were lit by ever more intense bursts of sheet and forked lightning … A long, heavy rainfall then lasted all night, until any among us who believed in divinities must have believed that our presence had angered the all-knowing gods. [SDD]

  Boar jumping weights (poor quality photo as in an exhibition case)

  I did acquire interest in ancient sports, and particularly enjoyed a television documentary where modern students recreated ancient athletics, finding with computerised reconstruction that there was little difference between what could be achieved then and now in jumping, running and discus. The novel’s scene where the wrestling champion, Milo of Dodona, nearly kills first Cornelius and then Falco was picked up by reviewers as particularly terrifying.

  There are two unexplained deaths in the book; one drew on several real cases in my lifetime where daughters had died mysteriously abroad, with the local authorities slow to investigate; dogged fathers kept up the pressure to discover the truth, often for years. In my version, the death is an accident. I wanted to show how difficult it must have been two thousand years ago to decide the facts, especially after time had passed.

  The murder is one of a series linked horrifically to certain Greek legends. The outcome is signalled all the way through the book, but for reasons I still don’t entirely understand, some readers felt I had not resolved the mystery. Strangely, I think part of the problem was the print layout; the story ended at the bottom of a page and people expected more overleaf … Rereading it now, I explained very clearly what had happened, who was responsible, and of course where the latest corpse was. By Helena’s anguished cry after she sees that Nux has discovered the missing body, it ought to be no surprise at all, merely an unusually dramatic way to end a book. And really gruesome!

  Caryatids on the Erechtheion, the Acropolis, Athens

  I kissed Helena beside the caryatid porch of the Erechtheion. Informers are not complete worms. I enjoyed the day too. [SDD]

  There is a strong theme of exploring famous sites, a keen hobby of Helena’s, which Falco loyally tries to further whenever his investigations allow. I took special delight in discussing the people on the tour, which is like any disparate group in transit: the ones you avoid with good reason – and the others you think you don’t care for, but come to like unexpectedly. Against the enjoyable background of family travel, a bonus is seeing Aelianus at the university in Athens, as he tries to be studious despite the efforts of his partygoing tutor. Minas of Karystos is based on what was said of academics at the time.

  Since Greece had been a major donor to Roman civilisation, a rival power that Rome had brutally destroyed, I portrayed many a moment of unease. I reprised my fascination with empire and its administration (there is yet another young high-flyer, covering up for the governor, though we are allowed to end up liking this one). It was a pleasure to revisit the country itself and the culture I had studied, albeit it ham-fistedly, when I was at school.

  Ironically, I didn’t see Delphi – though I had been there before.

  Cleonymus had spotted the stone money box for donations; he dropped a silver coin in the slot. ‘Show willing.’ [SDD]

  Saturnalia

  First published 2007

  It is the month of December, and yet the whole city is in a sweat! Festivity at state expense is given unrestricted licence. Everywhere there echoes the noise of preparations on a massive scale … The man who said that December used to be a month but is now a year was not far off the mark.

  SENECA

  Family feast

  I have to admit, Christmas was an unhappy time in my family. For some years I have spent it much more cheerily with friends in Wiltshire and London, but I knew enough about seasonal tensions to write this book about festivities among the Didii from the heart! Even the great ridiculous set piece of the Fourth Cohort’s Saturnalia drinks party is resonant of office parties long ago – though I never went to any that were subsidised as gloriously as this one is by Marcus Rubella.

  The plot links back to The Iron Hand of Mars, of course. From the moment I discovered that Rutilius Gallicus captured Veleda, I had been mulling over how Justinus could meet up again with his lost love. In the meantime I had given him a wife I am fond of, as he may be himself. There can be no possibility of a happy resolution for anyone. Good stuff! I adore a challenge like this, needing to keep true to my romantic spirit yet to impose an unsentimental story where weedy authors (and some of my readers) just hanker for a happy ending. The Falco novels may be historical but they have never been simplistic costume dramas. The demands of history meant Veleda must either be executed or sent to a temple exile – and I don’t mess with events.

  One thing that made the situation easier was that I realised she might no longer be a girl. I think myself perpetually thirty-five, but somewhere during my writing career I had passed the menopause and acquired arthritis; I easily reasoned that a young man in his twenties, a decent man with a wife to whom he was loyal and a new baby he adored, would start to see Veleda in a new light. Veleda was going to lose Quintus. Readers have asked why she doesn’t fight back. As I see it, she is a woman who from the start recognises total defeat, both political and personal.

  Themes revolve around Saturnalia, that time of enforced jollity and upset, over-indulgence and overexcited children. Saturnalia flavours every scene and unwinds through innumerable official and family feasts: the good, the bad and the ugly of celebration and catering, with a constant risk of fire.

  Then comes medicine. Medicine was enthralling to cover in detail, even though for me it was not the best time to be satirical, because Richard had just narrowly escaped death; gratitude to medical science might have been more seemly. But we were sardonic. I decided that the various ancient medical systems would be represented by individual doctors. Clearly one of the motley group must be murdered; I could pick him out at some point, like selecting a Saturnalia magic bean. Once again, the primary death occurs accidentally – though since I had once had a narrow brush with an ENT surgeon who wanted to remove a gland just because it was a cordon bleu operation, I don’t stint my disapproval of the treatment involved. The medical background enabled me to discuss how in the Roman world post-mortems were illegal – making a crime novel set in that period very different from a plot about modern policing.

  Scene of prisoners in a Triumph

  While Falco hunts for Veleda, who has gone missing due to several kinds of official incompetence, the two themes combine in one particular very dark scene. As with Christmas now, Saturnalia then would have been a disastrous time for anyone outside normal society. So I devised a meeting with runaway slaves. Their lives as fugitives are desperate – desperate even without being preyed on by a killer whose madness takes the form of believing it his role to remove perceived ‘filth’ from the streets. Falco
, ever compassionate, encounters the down-and-out slaves with dark introspection. His mood becomes so black, I had to lighten it with a comic ghost and witches. Falco’s gloom over the runaways is heightened because domestic needs have forced him to own slaves himself, with predictably complex results.

  There was one very happy piece of research; Richard and I went to Italy for the last time together. Through the kindness of Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, then Director of the British School at Rome, we spent a wonderful day at Lake Nemi where I have Veleda seek refuge at the Sanctuary of Diana. There we also saw the brutalist museum Mussolini built for the enormous raised ships that Caligula had had on the lake. They were sunk by the Romans, to efface memories of Caligula’s extravagance, so in theory Falco could have nothing to do with them when he and Helena visit the shrine. But it was too good to miss. Falco is told about the sunken boats (using what we know from archaeology), before the scene at the lakeside becomes an atmospheric meeting place with the prophetess.

  Fire-damaged remains of one of Caligula’s boats, museum at Nemi

  View of Lake Nemi from the modern road above

  Mr Mischief, in his element

  The day after we visited Nemi, Andrew took us down to Herculaneum where an Amazon’s head had emerged from the mud at the site of the unexcavated basilica. We had a chance to talk to conservators, something that does not happen when I creep around sites incognito. Richard, whose background was in historic building conservation, strode around Herculaneum for three hours entranced, though he had barely recovered from surgery and it was pouring with rain. For us it was the last of so many enthralling visits to such wonderful sites, our gift from Falco and Helena over those long years.