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

  We don’t know if Civilis lived or died, but I decided he might have been persuaded to live under house arrest, like another rebel, Classicus, who lived in Trier. Civilis claimed a friendly relationship with Vespasian, so must have been a candidate for pardon. Xanthus is all my own (you guessed!). You may think I must have invented him specifically to deal with Civilis. I can’t fully remember, but I am fairly sure that the idea of controlling the rebel through barbering came as a lastminute flash. That’s writing!

  The much-loved Little Mess Tin Song perhaps owes something to Rosemary Sutcliff.

  But the girl I kissed at Clusium

  Kissed and left at Clusium,

  The girl I kissed at Clusium

  I remember best of all.

  A long march, a long march, and twenty years behind,

  But the girl I kissed at Clusium comes easy to my mind.

  Poseidon’s Gold

  First published 1993

  By the fifth story I realised that what readers wanted, and what I enjoyed writing, was picaresque Roman soap opera.

  The rampant Didii came about to overturn the stereotype that ‘gumshoe’ detectives are solitary men without families or true friends; so I conceived Falco as a member of a huge, raucous Italian clan who push him about. In The Silver Pigs, he enumerates his siblings and their offspring, but they are merely numbers. Moving on, I needed to colour in individuals: give them names and personal characteristics, show why Falco moans about them. This was the book where I accepted that as my main responsibility.

  It hinges on Festus. The crux is ambiguity about whether Falco’s dead brother was a national hero or a trickster. This puts Falco in the classic position of the investigator who comes under suspicion of murder; he is even arrested by his best friend Petronius. While he works to exonerate himself, his mother hires him to clear his brother’s name. Later his father hires him as well. A typical Falco quandary. Even if he settles one question, he will still be in trouble …

  I really tore into this, and in the course of the story I introduced his Didius relatives in detail. Falco is forced to work with his father too; he discovers he quite enjoys being one of the fighting ‘Didius boys’. Eventually he unbends sufficiently to ask Pa for a loan in order to achieve the middle rank. His hopes to settle down with Helena go wrong of course. He and Pa are bankrupted – until twists and turns in the plot, of which I am proud, rescue the situation.

  The theme of family runs throughout the whole series, but is very strong here. It suits a Roman setting, and suits my satirical bent. The more we learn about Falco’s chaotic background, the more ironic is the struggle of Marcus and Helena to set up their own household, fondly believing – as we all do – that their family will be liberal, sensible and different. They will not make the mistakes of the past – mistakes which we see in lurid colour as Falco investigates exactly what did occur on his brother’s last night in Rome. As he tentatively explores his childhood, we go right back to his primary school – which doesn’t happen in much detective fiction.

  References to army life in the Judaean desert remind us of the Empire at large, while obsessed art dealers and their murky world of import/export stand for peacetime preoccupations. Arising very slowly from a giant hole in the Forum, we see the Flavian Amphitheatre – that symbol of Flavian regeneration. Falco scoffs, but we know it will be Rome’s most iconic emblem. Building it are the Jewish prisoners taken at the Fall of Jerusalem. They give us one of my cross-genre jokes, pleading with Falco to accept Harrison Ford’s job in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He turns it down. He says it needs a real hero.

  The book’s conclusion tackles the vexed issue of whether Falco and Helena are married/can legally get married/will ever be married. Readers seemed obsessed by the question. By now I had looked into Roman Law, where marriage is defined as two people agreeing to live together. My passage about Marcus and Helena is three pages long, yet many readers miss this, or perhaps they want doubt to linger …

  Soldiers with Jewish treasures, on the Arch of Titus

  What is marriage but the voluntary union of two souls? asks Helena. Ceremony is irrelevant … I gave you my heart a long time ago, so I may as well add my pledge.

  She turned towards me, grasping my right hand in hers. Her left hand lay upon my shoulder, as always with that plain band of British silver that she wore on her third finger to mark her love for me. Helena made a good stab at adoring submissiveness, though I am not sure whether I quite pulled off the frozen look of caution which is often seen in married men on tombstones. But there we were, on that April night on the Embankment, with nobody to see us, yet the whole city assembled around us, had we wanted the presence of witnesses. We were standing in the formal Roman matrimonial pose. And whatever communing in silence entails, we were doing it … [PG]

  Of course I knew I had to do somebody’s wedding. So two books later, Lenia and Smaractus copped the grand treatment.

  Last Act in Palmyra

  First published 1994

  Being brought up in Birmingham, I was extremely fortunate. I loved the theatre and we were surrounded by the best: the Birmingham Repertory Theatre was a world leader, a magnet for aspiring young actors. As season-ticket holders, my friend Rosalie and I saw many who went on to be very famous, headed up by Derek Jacobi, Ian Richardson, Brian Cox, Julie Christie … We saw David Warner’s nose broken on stage in a play called Little Malcolm and His Struggle against the Eunuchs. We saw Jacobi’s Troilus several times, as he was young, blond and spoke verse extremely well. The actors were all really hoping to be recruited for the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, which was but a twenty-minute drive from my house; with my parents, I went to almost every production in the Sixties, including the memorable Hollow Crown history series, then later the legendary Peter Brook Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Birmingham, too, we had the Crescent where amateurs/semi-professionals often did avant-garde plays; the Belgrade at Coventry and the Nottingham Playhouse were also within reach. I went to a school where Shakespeare was specially studied under a fine team of women led by the redoubtable Kate Flint. I also studied plays in Latin and Greek.

  So, I was thinking about a novel set in the Roman theatre, when my university friend Helen, an intrepid traveller, uttered the fateful words, I’ve always wanted to go to Syria. I am not intrepid, but a very worried little traveller, therefore I seized the chance to visit a country I might not even have been allowed to see when I was a civil servant, with a fearless companion and on an organised tour with an expert to explain the archaeological sites.

  I was determined not to write about Petra; it seemed a cliché. That lasted only until Day 1 of the tour and our walk up to the High Place. The first scene was born, giving rise to the theme of ‘water’. I had written the Heliodorus drowning and its immediate discovery by Falco and Helena; having read the draft, Richard was struck by one of those middle-of-the-night blinding insights authors can do without: Drowned people sink straight to the bottom – that’s why they are not noticed in swimming pools! A rapid check of The Crime Writers’ Practical Handbook (which I am not supposed to tell you exists, in case you get hold of it to plan murders) confirmed this, while also providing useful technical information about froth, etc. Hence the slightly unconvincing ‘buoyed up by inflated goatskin tangled in cloak’ feature …

  The Decapolis offered a challenge: could I take my characters to all the ten towns? Some lists give different sets of ten, while not all towns can be located with certainty, yet I was undeterred. There is, perhaps, a superfluity of towns, but attagirl!

  By now my work was well enough known for us to meet fellow-travellers who had read the books; when our Syrian guide heard, he took to buying an extra ticket ‘for Falco’ at archaeological sites. There, I faced a tricky dilemma: the stone-built Roman theatres, which were absolutely marvellous, often date from too late a period. I couldn’t use them as they stand today; nor will they ever be dug up to see what lies underneath them. (I dread thermal imaging, I’m afra
id …) Anyway, I claimed they have all replaced wooden theatres that previously stood on the same spots. This is a reasonable guess. I am writing fiction; it is my right – perhaps my duty – to invent.

  The theatrical ‘stuff’ needs no comment. I revelled in it, particularly revisiting Aristophanes’ The Birds, which I had studied at school as part of an ill-advised foray into ancient Greek. I read the whole play again, safely in translation; there, I rediscovered the informer, who flies about Greek islands delivering subpoenas. This enabled the joyful joke when Falco has to act the part: Just be yourself, Falco! The play, Tranio tells Falco and Helena, only won second prize in the festival for which it was written, being beaten by The Revellers, now lost; perhaps I take a sidelong glance there to myself as three-times runner-up for the Georgette Heyer Prize.

  This is the novel where I clarified for myself my views on putting my heroine in danger. Yes, Helena is bitten by the scorpion, but I loathe ‘woman in peril’ suspense. For one thing, it is usually the character’s own damn fault for going alone to the haunted house or the villain’s lair. And why does she always drop the torch/mobile phone/map and never take a good packed lunch? … I had doubts about that scorpion, but Helena is soon rescued and saved by Thalia, riding out of the desert with her vial of mithridatium. I was given practical details from the father of a bookshop manager; Bill Tyson had been bitten by a scorpion in North Africa during the war and agreed to tell me about it.

  INFORMER: Now if you can fit me out with a nice light pair of wings I can summon the islanders to court, give evidence against them on the mainland, and fly back to the islands –

  PEISTHETAERUS: So that the case will be all settled and the fine imposed before the defendant can even arrive –

  INFORMER: You’ve got it exactly.

  PEISTHETAERUS: And while he’s still on his way to Athens you’re already back on the island, distraining his goods. [Both laugh heartily at the idea.]

  INFORMER: [through his laughter] I shall have to whiz back and forth like a top!

  PEISTHETAERUS: [through his laughter] Like a top – that gives me an idea. Yes, I think I’ve got a pair of wings here that’ll set you spinning all right. [He takes a whip from the basket.]

  INFORMER: But that’s a whip you’ve got there!

  PEISTHETAERUS: Yes. For a whipping top. I’ll give you wings! [He whips the ground close to the INFORMER’s ankles.]

  INFORMER: O! O! Help! [He leaps away, and continues to skip and revolve as PEISTHETAERUS chases him round the stage, aiming whip strokes at his ankles.]

  PEISTHETAERUS: Bzz! Bzz! I’ll make you whiz, you nasty little twister, you! Go on! Fly! Right away from here! And I hope this’ll teach you a lesson. [Exit INFORMER.]

  ARISTOPHANES

  Production: the Chremes and Phrygia Touring Company

  Played at Scythopolis and Hippos, July AD 72

  With Philocrates as Peisthetaerus

  And introducing Falco as the Informer

  A collection of jokes serves as the McGuffin; such collections were real. I don’t see myself as a teller of jokes, so to illustrate the clowns I had to rely on what English students call ‘close allusion’. The punnet joke affectionately recalls Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough who, in a sketch in a museum, gaze at a statue we can’t see frontally, and comment, You don’t get many of those to a punnet! My editor asked his friend Dave for help, whence evolved the camel joke.

  The camel joke

  In the interests of research, I asked Oliver to ask his friend Dave to repeat the original joke for this Companion. Sadly, neither my editor nor his pal can remember, so they looked up ‘camel jokes’ on the Internet (thinking to bluff me?). The first results were unsuitable. Reminded that I had adapted their Wild West setting for ancient Syria, they then found two versions of what appears to be the generic joke.

  Oliver thinks the original included some reward for making the animals talk and as an editor he notes: The joke lies somewhat in the TACTILE relationship between the farmer and the animals. Dave has a different technical approach: The Internet is quite interesting as a sort of reverse oral-formulaic medium. So when jokes and stories got handed down orally they were gradually refined, but when a joke does the rounds on the Internet it goes the other way and gets watered down, over-complexified and festooned with superfluous comments.

  Well folks, you see how thoroughly we go into things. So, it’s either a farmer and a ventriloquist or a rancher and a cowboy, and the best hybrid goes:

  COWBOY: Hey, cool dog! May I speak to him?

  RANCHER: This dog don’t talk!

  COWBOY: We’ll see. Hey, dog, how does your owner treat you?

  DOG: Real good. He throws a stick for me, scratches my belly, and I just love him.

  [RANCHER looks dumbfounded.]

  COWBOY: Mind if I talk to your horse?

  RANCHER: Horses don’t talk.

  COWBOY: You’d be surprised what he might tell you. Say, horse, how does he treat you?

  HORSE: Pretty good. He rides me regularly, brushes me down, and keeps me warm in the barn. I love him.

  [RANCHER is totally amazed.]

  COWBOY: Mind if I talk to your sheep about you?

  RANCHER [stuttering anxiously]: Th-th-them sheep ain’t nothing but liars!

  This rebounded on Oliver unfairly when I received a complaint that my writing had deteriorated until my books could no longer be recommended to members of a church circle; that was ascribed to me being badly influenced by some sensation-seeking editor.

  Some time towards the end of writing the manuscript, my mother died unexpectedly. I don’t think you can tell exactly where I was in the story when it happened. I managed to finish the book only two weeks late on my deadline, which in one way seemed cold, but was what she would have told me to do.

  Time to Depart

  First published 1995

  By the time I reached this, the eighth book, I had learned that the vigiles were established by the Emperor Augustus to prevent and douse the fires that always threatened Rome. This was news to me. No matter. Fiction is bluff. I could put it right. I would write not just a ‘police procedural’, but perhaps the first and only ‘fire brigade procedural’. Excellent!

  Falco will always take the lead in this series, but now I experimented with a station-house story. I like modern ensemble mysteries, set in metropolitan police stations, Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct stories being favourites. (Perhaps my deaf baby is a vague nod to the deaf man.)

  The setting works for ancient Rome, with a little imagination. We know just enough about the vigiles’ structure; so we have the downtrodden cohorts doing a dangerous job, insufficiently appreciated. They moan about the work, the conditions, the public, and their superiors, who are seen as idle, inept and disloyal. The men pride themselves on their efficiency. We don’t know much about crime investigation procedures, though I presume these were rough and ready; the Fourth Cohort have a man whose designated job is beating up suspects until they talk. When an old lady reports the loss of her bedspread, the complaint Fusculus takes down is based on a real ancient text.

  My starting point is a genuine Roman phenomenon. This is what makes a true historical novel, not just a novel in fancy dress. Capital crimes in Rome were punished by execution: the nobility died by the sword, preferably at their own hands, which was cheap and could have legal advantages for their heirs. Lower orders were sent to the arena; in the Roman ideal of liberty, to be sent to the beasts was so degrading that even if a free citizen had committed a terrible crime, he was allowed an alternative: the time to depart of my title. He was ‘deprived of fire and salt’, life’s staples, but could leave the Empire. He was supposed never to come back, the ancient equivalent of exile on the Costa del Crime. I have given Balbinus a typical crook’s yearning to return, if possible to continue his life of crime.

  Evidence for organised crime in the ancient world is sparse. It must have existed, as it does in other societies where there are brothels, where gambling is il
legal, where small businesses can be made vulnerable, where large amounts of money can be made by the unscrupulous from the frightened. So long as there are accountants there will always be bent ones; where there are doctors, there must be doctors whose diagnosis can be bought; whenever a force of law and order exists, officers will be bought off by those they are supposed to apprehend. This seems cynical but it is reality, particularly in large cities where much can happen out of sight and where if commerce is flourishing the potential profits are so great.

  However, it is axiomatic in crime fiction that there also exist incorruptible men who will struggle to eliminate the filth. That is such novels’ purpose, even though realistic ones say the cleansing can never work permanently: there will always be a Florius, newly arising. But for us, there is solace and relief when we read about men like Falco and Petronius, tirelessly attempting to do right even when wrong is so widely accepted and seems impossible to combat. If we thought they could never win, it would be too depressing. They represent a glimmer of encouragement, not just for their society but for ours.

  A Dying Light in Corduba

  First published 1996

  A Dying Light in Corduba is a compliment to my readers and my publisher in Spain. Edhasa, based in Barcelona, are a highly unusual company: they specialise in historical novels – something I have never come across anywhere else. They were the first publisher who ever invited me to promote my work abroad, which I have done regularly ever since, making very dear friends of my Spanish literary agent and everyone at Edhasa, while gaining a great love for that country.

  Hispania came early into the Roman Empire and was vital to the careers of many famous Romans. It was time for Falco to visit and I wanted my plot to relate to Spain in his period. Unfortunately for Edhasa, that meant olive oil – which was produced in the south. From the moment I set the first scene at the banquet for the Society of Olive Oil Producers of Baetica, I knew I must compensate my dear publishers, who live in the Catalan north. That is why poor Helena Justina is forced to drive two hundred miles at the end of her pregnancy: so Julia Junilla Laeitana can be born in the city for which I had gained such great affection.