The first historical mystery I read was Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth. I’d say it qualifies, as Marcus Flavius Aquila tries to discover his father’s lost legion’s fate. Along with Sutcliffe’s other novels, it fired my fascination with history, and ancient history in particular. People’s worlds and lives were so different to our own, and yet people themselves were and are wholly recognisable in things like everyday letters, from cuneiform tablets onwards. We know how it feels to succeed, or to fail, when we see these things on papyrus or parchment. We sympathise with the sting of injustice, and share gratitude for a loyal friend. Other aspects of ancient lives are incomprehensible, such as the unquestioning acceptance of slavery. These tensions intrigue me to this day.
In my teens, historical mystery fiction taught me to look very carefully at whose version of the ‘truth’ I was reading, and to consider what might lie behind that. In Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, Alan Grant’s bed-ridden investigation into the deaths of the Princes in the Tower is transformed by his realisation that the sainted Sir Thomas More was a child at the time of events he’s supposedly recalling. More’s whole testimony is hearsay and, Grant concludes, it’s driven by a particular agenda. I applied what Alan Grant taught me to my history lessons, and to reading crime fiction, thereafter.
When I discovered Peter Lovesey’s Sergeant Cribb novels, I found facets of Victorian life that we never came across at school. This started me reading social history, alongside the details of politics, battles and dates that I needed to revise for exams. The other fascination of this series was realising how integral the particular time, place and social attitudes were to each book. These specific circumstances created these crimes and it’s as a man convincingly of that era, that Cribb uncovers the truth. This has coloured my choices in historical mysteries ever since, and is one reason why I’m currently enjoying Andrew Taylor’s Marwood and Lovett books so much, where the crimes, the settings and the resolutions are inextricably interlinked.
I continued to read crime fiction through university, though I confess I was reluctant when an enthusiastic friend, and fellow Classics graduate, first tried to lend me The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis. I’d pretty much stopped reading any historical fiction set in the Ancient World. After four years of study, these books either bored me rigid with pages of detail that I already knew, on Rome’s cursus honorem for instance, or infuriated me by presenting as uncontested fact something that was highly debatable. The chances were I’d spent a week reading contradictory accounts and interpretations on that very topic, before trying to beat my essay notes into submission with only Alan Grant to guide me. This doesn’t mean these were bad books, but however good they might be, they weren’t for me.
I’m glad my friend persevered. I’ve been reading the Falco books ever since, and wait impatiently for each Flavia Alba story. Davis does her research and equally crucially, she understands that what goes onto the page is only what’s needed for the story, to illuminate character, means, motive and opportunity. As a result, her light touch brings ancient Rome to vivid and convincing life in a way that seemingly endless pages of detailed description can paradoxically fail to do. That was a touchstone for me as I considered writing my own historical crime novels.
Though I was never tempted to write stories set in Rome. As well as history, I studied Classical literature at school and university. That taught me how human nature fascinated the Greeks of 5th Century Athens. Tragedies from The Oresteia to Oedipus Rex explore what drives men and women to kill, as well as testing the eternal tension between justice and revenge. Euripides’ Trojan Women looks at war from the victims’ perspective. Aristophanes’ comedies use humour to examine how far people will go in pursuit of love, lust and money. Herodotus and Thucydides consider the nature of political power, and democracy’s vulnerability to demagogues and oligarchs. With so many of these ideas underpinning contemporary crime fiction, I decided this time and place was an ideal fit for a history mystery. When any successful detective must be an astute observer of human nature, who better than a playwright to shed light on a murder in the shadows of Athens? I began writing...
Shadows of Athens by J M Alvey (Orion Publishing Company) £8.99
443 BC, and, after decades of war with Persia, peace has finally come to Athens. The city is being rebuilt, and commerce and culture are flourishing. Aspiring playwright Philocles has come home to find a man with his throat cut slumped against his front gate. Is it just a robbery gone wrong? But, if so, why didn't the thieves take the dead man's valuables? With the play that could make his name just days away, he must find out who this man is, why he has been murdered - and why the corpse was left in his doorway. But Philocles soon realises he has been caught up in something far bigger, and there are those who don't want him looking any further . . .
More information about J M Alvey can be found on her website. You can also follow her on Twitter @AlveyAuthor and also on Facebook.
