So you want to write an ancient mystery: integrating with real history

You’ve got a choice!

You can choose to use only the setting: the customs, habits, clothing, food, mores, religion, ethics, technology and social structures of your chosen period.  This is the bare minimum, otherwise you’re not writing an historical mystery.

Or you can use the setting, plus use real people from history as major characters.

Or you can use the setting, plus use real people from history, plus use real events that happened.

PC Doherty is a good example of using only the setting.  With that approach he’s written ancient mystery series in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Mediaeval England, and Victorian England.  Basically, he’s done one of everything going.

If using only the historical setting seems like the easy option, keep in mind that the Sherlock Holmes stories, the greatest detective stories ever told, are a setting-only series.  Sherlock Holmes wasn’t, strictly speaking, an historical series when they were written, but they certainly are now, and even when Conan Doyle was scribbling away he was harking back to a recent but cleaner age (at least in his own mind).

Lindsey Davis is a good example of using historical people but avoiding real events.  In that case you’re overwhelmingly likely to use the real historical person as the patron in the standard model.  Vespasian gets the gig for Davis and Simon Scarrow.  Titus often gets a go too, and Julius Caesar and, not unsurprisingly, Cicero.

You might also use real people as lesser characters.  It’s quite common to give real people cameos, and the attraction is obvious: it’s always a bit of a thrill to see someone famous strut their hour upon your pages and then be heard no more, especially if the cameo is Shakespeare (who appears one way or another in an astonishing number of Elizabethan mysteries).  People like to see historical characters they recognise, and that alone is a good reason for including them.

I use Pericles as the patron for Nicolaos, and roughly 70% of all my characters were real people.  I suspect that’s an unusually high percentage, but I have the advantage that people like Aristophanes and Plato used people they actually knew in their work, so I steal from them mercilessly.

Steven Saylor has a reputation for being not only a tremendous writer of historical mysteries—maybe the best ever–but also for being the most historically accurate.  The reason is he not only uses the setting, and peoples his books with many historically real people, but in addition every single novel is based on a real historical event, usually a very famous one.  His subject is the Late Roman Republic, and how a small group of incredibly talented, incredibly powerful, and incredibly vicious people fought it out for domination of the world.  It’s powerful stuff.  The one thing you can be sure of in a Saylor novel is this: that if Saylor says it happened, then either it happened, or else you can’t prove it didn’t happen.  (That last clause is very important.)

I did the same thing with my own series.  The first book deals with the for-real assassination of the man who started democracy in Athens.  It’s mentioned in Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution.  They never caught the men behind the plot.  The moment I saw it, I knew it was the perfect basis for an historical mystery.  The following two books are also based on real events, and I’ll stick with the format as long as I can.

There’s a fascination with integrating fiction into real events which is hard to describe.  It’s a technical tour-de-force (says Gary modestly) also fraught with danger because you could either (a) make an outright historical error, so much easier the more tightly you interweave, or (b) get so caught up in the technical history that you forget to write a fun story.  So it’s more dangerous, but also immensely rewarding.   What helps you is that if you’ve chosen wisely, then the period and the real events are inherently fascinating to the readers.  At least, that’s my experience as a reader.

The basic rules:

• Don't break history.
  
  
• If it doesn't break history, then anything goes.  Pick whatever is most dramatic for your story.  This is the essential difference between history and historical fiction.  Historians have to go with whatever's most probable.  Novelists go with whatever's most exciting, no matter how unlikely.
  
  
• Mores, customs and societies might change, but people never do.
  
  
• Let the times, the society and the people speak for themselves.  Never, never, never coerce your own modern views on the past.  (Easier said than done!)
  
  

I don’t know that any of the three integrating choices is better than the others when it comes to writing a good story that people want to read, but I’ll tell you that going the whole hog for setting + real people + real events calls for a lot of reading.  Huge amounts of reading.  Vast amounts of reading.

This isn’t necessarily a negative if you like reading!

Status report: Gary’s a busy boy

When I gave up real work to spend all my time writing, lots of people asked me if this was a good idea, because the temptation to slack off at home while no one’s watching would be overpowering.  (The implication is people only work when in an office because the boss is watching…)

There’s no way I’d give up what I’m doing for anything, but as a community service warning to anyone who thinks writing is the easy lifestyle option, here’s the reality: In terms of hours spent at it, I am “working” (if you can call something as much fun as writing work) at least 30% harder than I ever have before.  And that’s from someone who used to work at Microsoft.  Far from slacking off at home, the waiting laptop and the knowledge that there’s always a book due and huge amounts of ancillary stuff sucks me into the office every spare moment.

There’s work going on with three books simultaneously.

Everything’s on track for the first book’s release in October.  We’ve designed bookmarks for promotion, and they actually look rather cool.  I still need to design postcards to send out to places likely to place lots of orders, such as libraries (I know a few libraries have already ordered it!).  I’m feeling guilty about the postcards because I could have done them weeks ago and I still haven’t done it.  Naughty Gary.  Now that I’ve posted about it here, I have no choice but to get it done.  Once they’re designed I need to arrange for printing.  I’ll be at Bouchercon (a mystery fan conference) this year, and straight after I’ll do a book tour.  The tour events still need to be booked.  Once booked, flights and accommodation have to be booked.  The schedule needs to be physically possible.  Luckily for me the Goddess of Punctuation is also a talented amateur travel agent.  The flap copy remains to be written (that’s the book description you read on the back cover).  I told Editor Kathleen I’d write a first pass for her to turn into something proper.  It’s drafted but I’m not happy with it (yet) so I need to rework it.  A big difference between working in an office for someone else and running your own small business (which is what writing is, really), is that it’s not enough to do the job; you have to do the job really well.

I’ll receive the editorial letter for the second book some time in the next two weeks.  The editorial letter is an actual letter written by Editor Kathleen to me, in which she strives to tell me what a great book I’ve written while at the same time telling me how it could be better.  Actually, Kathleen’s extremely good at this.  As soon as that letter arrives, I drop everything else (see above and below) and I work on book 2.  I have about 4 weeks to fix everything.  I only get one shot at fixing, there’s no such thing as two editorial passes.  (The book will still come back to me later for copyedits and final review, but by that time the text is supposed to be locked in and we’re only correcting errors.)

I’m really looking forward to flying down to Melbourne for the day to say hello to Editor Belinda and meet the gang at Penguin HQ.  I still haven’t done it despite my best intentions.  Naughty Gary.  I’ll get there real soon now. 

Editor Kathleen is sure to ask for an author note for the second book.  So I started writing it.  The first draft peaked at 30 pages, which is a trifle over the top.  I currently have it edited back to 21 and it needs to shrink even more.  For comparison, the author note in the first book was 8 pages.  The problem is, there’s so much real history entwined into the plot and I want to call it out in the note.  Clearly I need a lot more discipline. 

I’m onto the second draft of book 3.  I called time on the first draft at 78K, which is too short, but 70% of the draft is pure dialogue, and books normally come with other bits, such as for example description and action.  By the time I’ve filled in the missing bits we’ll be at my normal length.  So far every book I’ve done has been a different process.  The first I wrote too much and then did lots of cutting.  The second I wrote to exact length and then did a lot of rewrites.  With the third I’ve written under and will approach my target from below.  Maybe eventually I’ll end up with a consistent process.

So you want to write an ancient mystery: pick your time and place

When in Rome, do as the Romans do...murder someone.

If you're reading an ancient mystery at the moment, then odds are it's set in Rome or Roman Britain.

Steven Saylor and John Roberts both write in exactly the same years of Late Republican Rome. Not only that, they use the same historical characters and sometimes even the same events. Both have a novel centred around the Catiline Conspiracy. This has its cool aspects. You can read side by side Saylor's Catilina's Riddle, and Robert's SPQR 2: The Catiline Conspiracy, and get totally different viewpoints from two great writers of exactly the same historical event.

I happen to know (because John told me...how's that for a name drop?) that Saylor and Roberts have a gentleman's agreement not to read each other's books. I can't imagine anyone confusing the voice of Saylor for Roberts, or vice versa, but I suppose they're being understandably cautious.

Caroline Lawrence, Lindsey Davis and Simon Scarrow all write in the period of Vespasian and Titus. In fact Vespasian and Titus appear in all three series.

This means five of the biggest names in historical mysteries are focussed on two precise periods, separated by less than 120 years, whose total duration is less than 40 years, even though there are 3,000 years of ancient history to choose from. This is remarkable.

It's probably no accident that these two periods bracket the the end of the Roman Republic, to the end of the first Roman dynasty, the Julio-Claudian line founded by Julius Caesar and Augustus. In between, David Wishart has his Marcus Corvinus working crime in the reign of Tiberius, Robert Harris has a thriller in Pompeii, and PC Doherty has Roman mysteries and also wrote Domina, the best novel of Agrippina, the mother of Nero, which you're ever likely to read. There are lots of other mysteries set in the time of the Julio-Claudians, but I'd go mad if I tried to list them all, and I don't know them as well as these authors.

If your ancient mystery isn't set in Rome, then chances are very good it's in Roman Britain. Kelli Stanley, Ruth Downie, Rosemary Rowe and Jane Finnis for starters. Roman Britain is huge for mysterious deaths. (And I can only assume the surviving characters all settled in what later became Midsomer County, where their descendants carry on their homicidal habits to this day).

I think it'd be fair to say that Rome + Roman Britain covers 80% or more of all ancient mysteries, and I'm being deliberately conservative because I don't have exact numbers. I suspect the true percentage is 95%+.

If you're not in Rome or Roman Britain, then you might be in Ancient Egypt with PC Doherty, who has a successful Egyptian mystery series starring Amerokte, the Chief Judge of the Temple of Ma'at, or Anton Gill's Huy the Scribe.

After Egypt comes Ancient Greece with Margaret Doody's Stephanos at work during the rise of Macedon, and PC Doherty (again...the man's amazing) with his mysteries set in the time of Alexander.

It's astonishing how concentrated the historical mysteries are. Why these particular periods? The same question applies to later times: Mediaeval mysteries occur mostly in the abbeys and palaces of Britain. Victorian mysteries are mostly in London.

Where are the mysteries of, for example, Carthage? Or Phoenicea? Or India? Robert Hans Van Gulik wrote an excellent series of mysteries set in mediaeval China, starring Judge Dee. Technically mediaeval because the stories are 7th century, but they actually have an ancient feel to them because we tend to associate all things Mediaeval with the Church and Europe, which is a cultural bias. Yet his fine series seems to be sady under-appreciated. I think it's because English readers in the western world have trouble seeing what Mediaeval China means to them.

I've pondered long and hard about this. I think authors are writing, and people are reading, the periods which people can easily see had a major influence on their modern lives. This explains why Roman Britain is huge but not, for example, Roman Hungary. Many historical readers live in the UK, or are descended from there. When they read a mystery of Roman Britain, they read about their ancestors. The doings of the Roman Empire affects us to this day. When we read of Rome, even if we're not Italian, we can say to themselves, "Yes, the past was like this, and that's why my modern world is as it is." Every popular period for historical mysteries has a foundation point for some major aspect of modern western life.

If I have this right then the Golden Age of Athens should be screaming out for a mystery series. It's when western civilisation was founded, after all. I will be testing this theory in October when The Pericles Commission goes on sale. I'm confident I have it right.

Conclusion: You can't go wrong if you set your ancient mystery in Rome or Roman Britain, but for all our sakes, I beg you consider the other 3,000 years of ancient history and a whole globe of cultures. Go out of your way to show the reader why they should care not just about the story and the characters, but also the time they live in.

So you want to write an ancient mystery...

Historical mysteries are a sub-genre. There's at least one historical mystery for almost every time and place you care to name, but readers very clearly have their favourite periods. Mediaeval mysteries are huge, thanks I'm sure to the early excellence of Ellis Peters. The Victorian period is big, and so too are Ancients. Mediaeval, Victorian and Ancient mysteries have such a focus from readers and authors that each could fairly be called a distinct sub-sub-genre.

This is the first in a series of blog posts in which I'll point out some of the elements unique, or at least common, to my own little piece of the world: Ancient Mysteries. This is all very much Gary's view, so your mileage will definitely vary, but I at least have the advantage of having read some of what's out there, and I dare say a bit more than most.

I'll begin with some posts about existing ancient mystery authors, because the most important advice I can give you is this: read the authors who've gone before. If you're interested in ancient mysteries then you really want to rush out and read every author I mention.

Within ancient mysteries the big two are Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis. I'm fairly sure the sales records and general popularity would back me up on that. Saylor seems to be better known in the US (he's American). Davis appears to be better known in the UK (she's British). To these two I'll add John Maddox Roberts. These three were the first major ancient mystery authors.

I've read all three for many years, but when I began to write an ancient mystery myself, I studied all three very closely. What did they have in common? How were they different? What worked? What didn't work?

Two common things really stand out. Firstly, they all write Roman mysteries! In fact Rome became so popular with later authors that it's almost a sub-sub-sub-genre. (I'll stop with the subs now).

But the common point I'll concentrate on here is this: they all use fundamentally the same hero/heroine/patron character model.

Steven Saylor's hero is Gordianus the Finder, the only honest man in Rome. His wife is a rather strong willed slave named Bethesda. Gordianus finds himself working for an advocate by the name of Cicero.

Lindsey Davis' hero is Marcus Didius Falco, the most hard done by gumshoe in ancient Rome. He runs into a strong-willed aristocratic lady called Helena Justina. Falco finds himself working for the upstart new Emperor Vespasian.

John Robert's hero is Decius Caecilius Metellus, an aristocratic, young, insatiably curious troublemaker. He marries eventually a lady called Julia, who happens to be a relative of Julius Caesar.

Are you seeing a pattern here? The male hero. The strong female assisting. The patron.

People read historical mysteries as much for the joy of exploring the exotic time and place as for the mystery. For the ancient past in particular, so remote and exotic to us today, you can't get a complete experience without both the male and the female view of ancient life. Also it's the nature of the ancient times that men generally had greater social freedom. So a male lead with a strong female is not only the path of least resistance, but the one which fits most naturally into what readers will likely enjoy. The patron is a natural component too: someone to deliver a diverse range of missions, give entrée to high places and explain background which a highly placed man of the times would know and which the reader needs. (Patrons in ancient mysteries tend to be the princes of exposition).

I think of this as the Standard Model for ancient mysteries.

Different authors give different weight to the character types, but certainly the Standard Model prevails across many authors. Perhaps even most. For example Rosemary Rowe's excellent mysteries in Roman Britain feature a Celtic freedman called Libertus, his wife Gwellia, and a magistrate Marcus Septimus.

Which isn't to say everyone follows the model. Jane Finnis has her clever heroine Aurelia Marcella running an inn on her own in Roman Britain, plus doing the investigations. (Jane, by the way, is only partially sighted, and has to work with a high contrast screen and an automatic reader, but still manages to write in such a technically difficult field. When I learned that I swore I'd never again whine about my own writing problems.) Though he eventually marries, Margaret Doody's Stephanos is essentially an all-male affair, with Aristotle providing the brains. Caroline Lawrence has for her children's and YA Roman mysteries a girl called Flavia Gemina and her friends. The series opens with Flavia as a young girl and ends with her marriage. Caroline might actually be the most successful ancient mystery author ever, considering the number of her books in school libraries and the highly successful TV series made of them. She totally owns the entire field of YA ancient mysteries. (Which would make her a sub-sub-sub-sub-...no, I must stop this).

So my view is: the Standard Model evolved independently with many authors for a good reason. You don't have to use it, but you'd want to at least consider it.

I've been careful as I can to avoid dropping spoilers in this and subsequent posts to avoid damaging the fun for anyone who hasn't read the stories yet. Please avoid spoilers if possible in any comments you make too please!

Write something that people want to buy

I've had a couple of variations of this conversation recently, so I thought I'd make a general comment...

I reckon literary agents get very hard done by, especially when it comes to harsh comments about what they choose to represent, or not, as the case may be.

Ability to sell an author's book to the publisher is a huge issue! People forget that agents have mortgages to pay and children to feed. They'll be homeless with hungry children crying for food if they don't sell their clients' books.

Certainly we must all write the book that's in us -- we could hardly write someone else's book -- but it has to be within the envelope of what other people want to read, which is what the big stores will stock, which is what the stores will order from the publishers, which is what the publishers will buy from the agents, which is what the agents will offer to represent.

If I were a literary agent, I'd be a whole lot more ruthless and demanding than the bunch doing the job now. (And the Publishing Gods preserve me from such a fate.)

If you were an agent, and your next meal depended on selling the books you chose to represent, then what would you do?