D V Bishop on keeping an ongoing series fresh

How does a writer keep an ongoing series of novels fresh when their publisher is eager for a new book each year? I’ve been pondering this lately, despite the fact it’s early in my crime writing career to fret about such challenges. After all, the latest Cesare Aldo novel A Divine Fury (out June 20th) is only the fourth in my series of Renaissance Florence thrillers.

Compare that to other authors and you’ll see I am just getting started. Ian Rankin publishes his twenty-fifth Rebus novel later this year, while Donna Leon’s Commissario Brunetti mysteries set in Venice now number more than thirty. And then there are the many, many Maigret tales by the masterful Georges Simenon...

Nonetheless, when A Divine Fury comes out, I’ll be finishing a draft of my fifth Aldo noel, and be thinking ahead to number six. Publish a new book every year and they soon mount up, regardless of whether that book emerges in spring [the season for debuts and those building a readership], sets forth in summer [holiday reads and mid-list favourites], or arrives in autumn [home to bestsellers and old favourites].

Like many crime writers, I have a morbid dread of repeating myself. [I also have an abiding fear that my latest book will not be the equal of my last, but I suspect this is true of almost every author, regardless of genre.] There are only so many ways to solve a murder in 1539 when facial recognition, DNA, CCTV and fingerprints are still centuries in the future.

Still, a fear of repetition didn’t stop me from wanting to write a crime series. Why? Because it’s what I’ve always wanted to do. You could blame a childhood devouring the Famous Five, the Hardy Boys and other mysteries for younger readers. But I suspect the real culprit is the US cop drama Hill Street Blues which I grew up watching it in New Zealand.

I loved the show’s ongoing, character-led storylines and its then-unconventional approach to the police procedural. UK shows such as Bergerac and The Gentle Touch were no match for that. Even muscular series like The Professionals focused on standalone tales, whereas Hill Street Blues was far more novelistic.

That struck a chord with me, and inspired much of my own writing ever since. For example, I write a Warhammer fantasy novel called A Murder in Marienburg that was a thinly disguised homage to Hill Street Blues. Yes, the occasional elf wandered past in the background, but it was still a police procedural, albeit with spells and swords. 

Even when I was writing for the BBC medical drama series Doctors, I was still telling mystery stories, except they were solved by physicians rather than police. Finally, in 2017 I realised the stories I really wanted to tell were about crimes, the people who investigated them, and the consequences of transgressions against the law.

Keeping my Cesare Aldo historical thrillers fresh wasn’t a problem for the initial books; if anything, I worried about them being too varied. The first, City of Vengeance, is a conspiracy thriller in which all of Florence is under threat. By comparison, my second novel The Darkest Sin is a closed circle mystery set in a convent, making it a smaller scale story.

Happily, the story swerve didn’t alienate reader and The Darkest Sin went on to the CWA’s Historical Dagger. After that I decided each new Aldo novel should focus on a different kind of crime or employ a fresh sub-genre to keep myself and my readers on our toes. So, the third book, Ritual of Fire, features vendetta killings with each victim being burned alive.

Aldo book four, A Divine Fury, introduces a serial killer. Of course, nobody calls the killer that because such a description belongs to the 20th Century, not 1539. A Divine Fury also has exorcists, causing a dangerous collision of faith and fatalities. As Aldo tells his colleague Carlo Strocchi, investigating a murder that involves the church never ends well in Florence.

Looking ahead, next year’s book is an Ocean’s Eleven-esque caper in Renaissance Venice. After that Aldo is likely to face a Gothic mystery in book six. Sales shall determine whether he gets a seventh outing, but I’m open to suggestions for new sub-genres…

A Divine Fury by D V Bishop. (Pan Macmillian) Out Now

Florence. Autumn, 1539. A religious serial killer is haunting Florence and only Cesare Aldo can stop them. Cesare Aldo was once an officer for the city’s most feared criminal court. Following a period of exile, he is back – but demoted to night patrol, when only the drunk and the dangerous roam the streets. Chasing a suspect in the rain, Aldo discovers a horrifying scene beneath Michelangelo’s statue of David. Lifeless eyes gaze from the face of a man whose body has been posed as if crucified. It’s clear the killer had religious motives. When more bodies appear, Aldo believes an unholy murderer is stalking the citizens of Florence. Watching. Hunting. Waiting for the perfect moment to strike again . . .

Find out more about D. V. Bishop at his website: https://dvbishop.com/ 

Subscribe to his weekly author newsletter here: https://dvbishop.substack.com/ 

When it comes to murder, it’s location, location, location - Tom Hindle

Tom Hindle, author of Murder on Lake Garda, chats about how location play such a vital role in a murder mystery

Tell us about how you landed on Murder on Lake Garda as the location for your new whodunnit. Was it somewhere you had always wanted to explore?

In a funny sort of way, it actually came to me. I was on holiday, visiting Lake Garda, and having climbed to the top of the watchtower in the breathtaking Castello Malcesine, I happened to look down on a wedding that was taking place in one of the castle courtyards. I can vividly remember taking it all in – the glamour of the ceremony, the magnificent architecture, the natural splendour of the lake – and being immediately convinced that I was looking at a phenomenal opening chapter to a murder mystery.

At the time, I had actually spent three months working on an altogether different mystery, which would have taken place at a funeral in rural Yorkshire. But I was so enamoured with the Lake Garda idea that within a few weeks I’d abandoned the Yorkshire novel completely and shifted all my focus onto writing the manuscript that would become Murder on Lake Garda. 

How important is location to a murder mystery?

It’s vital. Try to imagine Holmes without the gaslit streets of Victorian London or Miss Marple without a quaint country village – it’s a virtually impossible feat. Those locations are as important to the story as the characters that populate them.

I’m constantly trying to emulate that – or to achieve it, rather – in my own writing. Wherever possible, I try to ensure that the mysteries I’m constructing could only take place in those very specific locations. Likewise, I try to make sure that each detail, however small, is as heavily informed by the location as possible. 

For instance, in Murder on Lake Garda, one of our characters – a classic car dealer – lends his soon-to-be son-in-law his favourite car for the weekend of the wedding. In the very first draft, that car was an Aston Martin V8 Vantage; for my money, one of the most beautiful classic cars ever produced. But I quickly realised that, of course, the classic car speeding along beside a glittering Italian lake should in fact be a bright red vintage Ferrari. It’s a change that has absolutely no bearing on the plot, but it helps to achieve a certain tone and atmosphere. It draws the reader in and grounds them even further in that setting.

These are the kind of location-based influences that I’m constantly looking for opportunities to weave in. To that end, in Murder on Lake Garda you’ll also find a priceless Venetian dagger, a secret cove hidden beneath the castle, two members of the Italian mafia and a mysterious boat speeding away across the surface of the lake. Whether they contribute to the overall atmosphere or to the construction of the mystery itself, none would have been at home in either of my previous mysteries.

What advice would you give about choosing a location?

I’ve been thinking a lot, this past year, about the idea of a location being a character in its own right. For a long while, I had a sense of what that was about – an instinctive sort of feeling – but I struggled to articulate exactly what it meant for me as a writer. What it meant for the stories that I write. And the conclusion I’ve now reached is that: every character has to want something – has to be striving for something. So if we consider our location to be a character, and we follow that logic, what does your location want? Does it want to keep secrets? Does it want to welcome you in or does it want to be wild and to push back against human intrusion? Does it want to kill you, even? 

It isn’t always an easy question to answer. But whether I’m writing about a single room, a building, a city or even an entire country, I find thinking about a location in those terms to be incredibly useful.

We know you’re hard at work on a fourth mystery – where in the world are you taking us next?

Somewhere completely different! I don’t want to say too much about it just yet, as I think there’s still about a year to go before it hits shelves. But I will say that in order to research it, I went for a week last summer to Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic Circle. Staying in a town called Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost permanent settlement, I saw glaciers, whales, reindeer... I think that probably gives a good idea of the vibe. In any case, readers can expect a much frostier mystery than in Murder on Lake Garda.

Murder on Lake Garda is by Tom Hindle (Century) Out Now.

One happy couple. Two divided families. A wedding party to die for. On the private island of Castle Fiore - surrounded by the glittering waters of Lake Garda - the illustrious Heywood family gathers begrudgingly for their son Laurence's wedding to Italian influencer Eva Bianchi. But as the ceremony begins, a blood-curdling scream brings the proceedings to a devastating halt. With the wedding guests trapped as they await the police, old secrets come to light and family rivalries threaten to bubble over. Everyone is desperate to know...Who is the killer? And can they be found before they strike again?

Tom Hindle can be found on X @TomHindle3

Queen of Crime Fiction Donna Leon Returns

Trace Elements

An evening with Donna Leon 

Thursday 2nd April, 6.30pm

Donna Leon, who was named by The Times as one of the 50 Greatest Crime Writers, returns with her latest book,Trace Elements - the twenty-ninth instalment in the highly acclaimed, internationally bestselling Commissario Guido Brunetti series of books, where a woman's cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region. 

Once again, Donna's memorable characters and storytelling skills engage our sensibilities as to the differences between guilt and responsibility.

Donna will be in conversation with Jim Kelly, author of The Mathematical Bridge. 

Tickets are £7 in advance and can be bought here.

Trace Elements by Donna Leon Published by Cornerstone. Out 5 March 2020.

A woman's cryptic dying words in a Venetian hospice lead Guido Brunetti to uncover a threat to the entire region in Donna Leon's haunting twenty-ninth Brunetti novel.  When Dottoressa Donato calls the Questura to report that a dying patient at the hospice Fatebenefratelli wants to speak to the police, Commissario Guido Brunetti and his colleague, Claudia Griffoni, waste no time in responding.  'They killed him. It was bad money. I told him no', Benedetta Toso gasps the words about her recently-deceased husband, Vittorio Fadalto. Even though he is not sure she can hear him Brunetti softly promises he and Griffoni will look into what initially appears to be a private family tragedy. They discover that Fadalto worked in the field collecting samples of contamination for a company that measures the cleanliness of Venice's water supply and that he had died in a mysterious motorcycle accident. Distracted briefly by Vice Questore Patta's obsession with youth crime in Venice, Brunetti is bolstered once more by the remarkable research skills of Patta's secretary, Signora Elettra Zorzi.  Piecing together the tangled threads, in time Brunetti comes to realize the perilous meaning in the woman's accusation and the threat it reveals to the health of the entire region. But justice in this case proves to be ambiguous, as Brunetti is reminded it can be when, seeking solace, he reads Aeschylus's classic play The Eumenides.

BAD TURN: Charlie Fox is on the loose in Europe by Zoë Sharp

One of the things I’ve always enjoyed about writing the Charlie Fox books is that they are not tied to one location. A part of me can see the attraction of a familiar locale and I know it might be a good idea to do this. After all, tours of Rebus’s Edinburgh, Morse’s Oxford, or Aimée Leduc’s Paris are undoubtedly popular.

But every time I sit down to write the next instalment in this series, deciding where she’s going to be heading off to is one of the things that keeps me hooked. The very nature of Charlie’s job in close protection means she has to be minutely aware of her surroundings. I take it as a challenge to try to weave in as much of the ever-changing dynamic between Charlie and her environment as I can into the fabric of the story.

For BAD TURN, number 13 in the series, I wanted a real European setting. I took Charlie to a bodyguard training school in Germany for one of the early books, HARD KNOCKS, and on a bikers’ fast trip around Ireland in ROAD KILL, but this time out I decided it was high time she made a return to mainland Europe.

I’d driven down to the southern area of France just before starting BAD TURN, and the scarcity of both people and other vehicles once we got away from the cities really set my imagination going. Tailing someone without other traffic to use as cover, for example, would present its own difficulties for Charlie.

The open agricultural land around the Midi-Pyrénées, with its open fields of sunflowers and occasional stunning pieces of modern architecture like the Millau Bridge, took my breath away.

There seemed to be a lot of half-derelict farmhouses that made my DIY fingers twitch to get stuck into them but provided ideal places of cover and concealment, as did the swathes of woodland.

But when I visited several of the magnificent local chateaux, including castles that had been in the same family line for a thousand years, I knew I’d found one of my main locations for the book. I borrowed aspects of a couple of them and created the Chateau de Bourdillon, complete with French aristocrat in residence. The fact he happened to have a somewhat unusual occupation was beside the point…

And then, of course, there was Italy. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in Tuscany and Umbria and couldn’t resist BAD TURN visiting some areas that were very familiar to me, as well as others where I had to wing it a little more.

I borrowed the small island of Isole Minore on Lake Trasimeno, for example. In reality, the island is state owned and uninhabited but when you create your own version of the world, you are allowed to bend the rules. I made it the home of a wealthy Italian with a particular wish for privacy. I placed on the island a combination of abandoned monasteries and palaces for him to be restoring. Of course, there would be more reconstruction work to be done after Charlie left than there was when she arrived…

With her love of big motorcycles, Charlie’s no stranger to high-speed chases but I thought I’d take a different tack this time. It didn’t mean I couldn’t have some fun—as well as adding tension—by putting her in a small and somewhat underpowered vehicle like a Fiat Cinquecento. (And if you’re a fan of Fiat 500s, you’d better read that bit with your eyes closed. Let’s just say it doesn’t end well for that poor little car.)

Reintroducing Charlie to a European setting for BAD TURN was quite a ride and I’m already planning book #14. Where will she be next time around? Well, having spent a number of books working overseas, I think she might be ready to return home to the UK. The only question is, will the UK be ready for Charlie Fox?

Bad Turn by Zoë Sharp

Charlie has quit her job in close protection, been turned out of her apartment, and is apparently out of luck.  House-sitting in rural New Jersey has to be the pits—TV and TV dinners. A far cry from Iraq... Bulgaria... Afghanistan. Unlucky or not, she happens to be around at the right time to foil a violent kidnap attempt on Helena, wife of billionaire arms dealer, Eric Kincaid.  Kincaid offers her a job looking after Helena. The rumours about Kincaid’s business empire say he’s gone over to the dark side, but Charlie is in no position to be fussy. And protecting people against those who want to do them harm is what she’s good at. But when the threats against the Kincaids escalate, and then follow the couple over to Europe, Charlie’s really going to have to up her game. It’s time to take the fight to the enemy.  Charlie’s at her best putting an end to trouble. Now she must learn to strike first. And hope that the Kincaids don’t discover the secret she’s been keeping from them, right from the start.

Read the first three chapters of BAD TURN

https://www.zoesharp.com/books/bad-turn-opening-chapters/

BAD TURN is published in ebook, mass-market paperback, hardcover and Large Print editions on September 27 2019. For more information visit www.ZoeSharp.com

6th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association

Captivating Criminality 6: Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions - 12-15 June 2019

G. d’Annunzio University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy

Call for Papers

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its sixth conference, which will be held in Italy. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous five successful conferences, Metamorphoses of Crime: Facts and Fictions will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre incorporates elements of real-life cases and, in turn, influences society by conveying thought-provoking ideas of deviance, criminal activity, investigation and punishment.

Since its inception, the genre has drawn inspiration from sensational crime reports. In early nineteenth-century Britain, for example, Newgate novels largely drew on the biographies of famous bandits, while penny dreadfuls popularized the exploits of criminals and detectives to appeal the taste for horror and transgression of their target audience. In similar ways, notorious cases widely reported in the mid-Victorian press, such as the Road Murder (1860) or the Madeleine Smith trial (1857), exerted a significant influence on the imagination of mid- to late-Victorian novelists, including early practitioners of the sensation genre who laid the premises for the creation of detective fiction. In other cases, criminal actions were triggered by literary texts or turned into appealing fictions by journalists. Suffice it to consider the sensation created by Jack the Ripper’s murders in late-Victorian Britain or the twentieth-century recent cases of murders committed by imitators of criminals and serial killers featured in novels like A ClockWork Orange (1962), The Collector (1963), Rage (1977), and American Psycho (1991). In more recent times, the interaction between reality and other media (TV series, films, computer games, websites, chats, etc.) has raised the question of how crime continues to glamorize perturbing, blood-chilling stories of law-breaking and law-enforcement.

In addition to exploring these complex relations between facts and fictions, the conference will focus on the metamorphoses of crime across media, as well as cultural and critical boundaries. Speakers are invited to explore the crossing of forms and themes, and to ascertain the extent to which canonized definitions suit the extreme volatility of a genre that challenges categorization. From an ideological viewpoint, moreover, crime fiction has proved to be highly metamorphic, as it has been variously used to challenge, reinforce or simply interrogate ideas of ‘law and order’. The enduring appeal of the genre is also due to its openness to historical and cultural movements – such as feminism, gender studies, queer politics, postmodernism – as well as to concepts drawn from specific fields of knowledge, such as sociology and psychology. Similarly relevant to the ‘metamorphoses of crime’ are cultural exchanges among remote areas of the world, which add new perspectives to the genre’s representation of customs and ethnical issues.

Scholars, practitioners and fans of crime writing are invited to participate in this conference that will address these key elements of crime fiction and real crime, from the early modern to the present day. Topics may include, but are not restricted to:

• True Crime, Fictional Crime

• Crime Reports and the Press

• Real and Imagined Deviance

• Adaptation and Interpretation

• Crime Fiction and Form

• Generic Crossings

• Crime and Gothic

• The Detective, Then and Now

• The Anti-Hero

• Geographies of Crime

• Real and Symbolic Boundaries

• Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity

• The Ideology of Law and Order: Tradition and Innovation

• Gender and Crime

• Women and Crime: Victims and Perpetrators

• Crime and Queer Theory

• Film Adaptations

• TV series

• Technology

• The Media and Detection

• Sociology of Crime

• The Psychological

• Early Forms of Crime Writing

• Eighteenth-Century Crime

• Victorian Crime Fiction

• The Golden Age

• Hardboiled Fiction

• Contemporary Crime Fiction

• Postcolonial Crime and Detection

Plenary speakers will be Eric Peter Sandberg (City University of Hong Kong) and Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna).

Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Mariaconcetta Costantini and Dr Fiona Peters to the following email account: captivatingcriminality6@unich.it by 15th February 2019.

The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length.

Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome.

BOOK REVIEW: THE COLD SUMMER, by Gianrico Carofiglio

THE COLD SUMMER

by Gianrico Carofiglio

Bitter Lemon Press, £8.99 , Sept 13th 2018

Reviewer: Michael Jecks

This is not the first book I have read by Gianrico Carofiglio. Some years ago I picked up another of his novels, intrigued by the promise of a story deeply informed by the writer’s experiences.

Why? Because Gianrico Carofiglio is no ordinary crime writer. He is a man who spent most of his working life as a prosecutor specializing in organised crime. In 2007 he was appointed as advisor to the Italian government’s anti-Mafia committee, and the following year he became a Senator.

So not a run-of-the-mill writer, then. And when you read his books, you can feel the depth of his knowledge, but also the deep humanity of the writer.

This story takes the reader back to the 1990s when there was a spate of chilling attacks on the justice system in Italy. Giovanni Falcone, his wife and several police officers were murdered by a massive bomb; a couple of months later, Paolo Borsellino and five more police were killed when a car bomb was set off as they passed. Falcone and Borsellino were enthusiastic anti-Mafia prosecutors, and posed a significant threat to the Sicilian families. The public outcry at these two atrocities was immediate - and the crackdown in their aftermath effective. Those responsible were identified, arrested, prosecuted, and convicted.

However, the Mafia violence was not unique to Sicily. There were gang wars between other Mafia gangs up and down Italy. This book takes the reader to Apulia, where the fighting was as brutal as anywhere.

I began reading this book immediately after reading a very different story indeed, and I read the first page with a real sense of gratitude. Whereas the previous book had been more of a character study set in a vaguely criminal environment, there were many aspect that I could simply not come to terms with. Within three pages of THE COLD SUMMER I felt I had been wrapped in a comfort blanket. This was a crime book written by a man who knew his subject and how to plot a story. I knew who the main character was, I was fully convinced by the way he was depicted, and I was very content with his behaviour. It’s an excellent beginning to a crime story - I recommend it.

To summarise: Pietro Fenoglio is a local officer in the Carabinieri. He has recently been left by his wife, and is trying to come to terms with his new status as a single man, while hoping she will return to him. But there is a brutal turf war being fought in the area around Bari, and he is soon thrown into the midst of the fighting as a Mafia boss’s son is kidnapped.

The thought of an ordinary criminal risking his life by kidnapping a Mafiosi’s son is hard to accept. This must be a symptom of the gang war. Surely only a suicidal gangster would try to take on one of the most senior Mafiosi in the area? Rumours abound, and Fenoglio begins to have an idea who is responsible.

But then the man suspected of the kidnapping surrenders himself. The boy is found dead, but the suspect denies killing him. The police are forced into an investigation in which those investigating are forced to look at their own attitudes and behaviours. In a morally confusing world, the police have to look at their own motives, their own actions.

The story is split into three “Acts”. The first is the setup of the story, the kidnap, the search for the killer; second comes a part in which we are brought into the interrogation of the suspect, with the interview transcripts interspersed with the continuing story; finally the story returns to a straightforward linear path, hurtling towards the resolution.

This is not like a Michael Connelly, or Harlan Coben. There are not the sudden imaginative twists and turns that you expect from an American master; however, this story is convincing at a much deeper level. It feels less like a story constructed by an author, and more like an autobiographical narration, a man speaking of his memories of a time in the recent past, speaking about his own experiences of such investigations, and who has had to confront his own demons in the battle against organised crime. Carofiglio doesn’t resort to devious plot twists to establish his characters and storyline - he doesn’t need to. His knowledge of his subject is deep enough to imbue his writing with conviction.

I would highly recommend this book.

Domenic Stansberry on the Inspiration behind his new novel: The White Devil

John Webster’s The White Devil is not widely read in the U. S, nor is it often taught in the universities here. I discovered it through a newspaper review of theatrical production that was a sensation in New York. I could not make the trip to see it, but I read the play. Then read it again.

 It wasn’t till later I learned the roots of the story: how Webster had drawn his tale from the real life events surrounding a murderous love triangle that dominated the scandal sheets of the later Renaissance.  

I love Webster’s play. I love his dark vision. I love the startling modern feel, his portrayal of pervasive corruption, the forbidden sensuality, the erotic undertone.   I am especially drawn to the female character, Vittoria. Not because she is good—              because she isn’t.  She is an unfaithful wife, seduced by the promise of wealth, who plays willing inspiration to the murderous impulses of an unscrupulous lover. Vittoria is the moral center of the play, not because she seeks forgiveness, but rather because refuses to do so:  she will not to fall to her knees before authorities looking not for justice but a scapegoat: a way to hide their own corruption.

Though it would be severely anachronistic, it is tempting to label The White Devil as a prototypical noir tale, and to think of Vittoria as embodiment of a of noir heroine. 

I do most of my serious writing on a small, narrow desk facing the wall. I have a habit of tacking things onto that wall, news clippings, index cards with hand scrawled quotations, odd pages torn from magazines, photos, some of which stay up for years, yellowing, and which often (not always) find their way into my fiction in some form or the other.

 My first attempts —absurd in retrospect—at retelling The White Devil were historical fiction. I sketched out two timelines on colored paper, pinning them on that wall: one drawn from Webster’s play, the other from the historical events surrounding the real-life murders.  I likewise taped up Renaissance portraits of the real life principles—and later a magnificent photo of Geraldine McEwan, in the 1969 National Theater Production, in what is often referred to as the best dramatic staging of the play on a set designed by Fellini’s frequent collaborator, Piero Gherardi.

All this was marvelous stuff, but it only led me deeper off the path, into an impenetrable thicket.

Why retell a story that had already been so well rendered?

The answer, as it turned out, was already on my wall: a clipping I had torn from the San Francisco Chronicle—the story of Amanda Fox, an American exchange student sentenced to 25 years for brutally murdering her Italian roommate. It was a sensational case that caught the fervid imagination of the tabloids, never mind the conviction was eventually overturned.   The picture of Fox was black and white, a mug shot of a woman in her twenties, grainy, out of focus but nonetheless compelling, seductive and innocent all at once, oddly similar to the photos of McEwan in the stage role of Vittoria.

More so than the question of guilt and innocence, what struck me was the public howl surrounding Fox’s case. It so resembled the howl, more than four centuries earlier, which had enveloped Vittoria Accorombona. This led me to a realization that my story should not be set in the Renaissance, but in the here and now: in contemporary time. Likewise, my Vittoria was not Italian. She was American, AKA Vicky Wilson, an aspiring actress, an ex-patriot mingling with her scheming brother among the Roman glitterati.

I also realized that to tell this story I must—like any good crime novelist— visit the scene of the crime. So I wandered the streets of Rome, seeking out the places where Vicki might go, crashing parties at private palazzos (or trying to), ending each evening in the Campo De Fiori where, or so I imagined, my American Vicki now lived, in a tiny apartment, in a building many centuries old that had likewise been inhabited once upon by the real Vittoria and her cuckolded husband.

One evening in the Campo, I noticed a young couple, man and woman, who very much resembled each other, and might have been mistaken for brother and sister except for the overt way they fondled one another. As it turned out, they were Americans, and their conversation at the table behind me revolved around where they might go once they were done with Italy.

This didn’t strike me as significant at the time, but later made me realise that my American heroine—once under the gun, sought after by the Italian authorities for crimes real or imagined—would not seek refuge in Padua, as the original Vittoria had. No, she would head abroad, across the ocean—to the states maybe, to the coast—and then further on, to some foreign clime, in attempt to escape extradition.  I allowed myself to enter a story written some four hundred years ago, itself a transfiguration of underlying events, based in turn on source material questionably rendered, yet somehow informing the current moment, the yellow clippings, the old pictures, the fading type on the wall.

The White Devil by Domenic Stansberry (published by Orion) Out now,

In the hot, shadowy streets of Rome, Vicki Wilson’s lovers keep turning up dead. Vittoria, as she's known in Italy, is a small-time actress who left behind a dark past in her native Texas and followed her fading writer husband to the Eternal City. Guided by her controlling, obsessive brother Johnny, Vittoria soon enters the upper circles of Roman society, becoming a paparazzi darling and mingling with shady cardinals and corrupt senators. Among them is Paolo Orsini, who quickly falls prey to Vittoria's charms. Too bad he's married; too bad his wife, an aging film icon, is murdered.  From the ravishing beauty of Rome - a city of dark secrets held within the frescoed walls of glamorous palazzos - to the pristine beaches of Malibu and the dangerous alleys of a mysterious South American city, Vittoria finds herself at the heart of a lethal chase, spiralling dangerously out of control...