Detectives Beyond Borders interviews yours truly

Detectives Beyond Borders is a web site dedicated to non-US mystery books. It's run by Peter Rozovsky, who's the book reviewer for the Philadelphia Inquirer and a copy editor of exceptionally high standards.

Detectives Beyond Borders interviewed me, Rebecca Cantrell and I.J. Parker on the mystery of writing historical mysteries. Peter was particularly interested in the "historical" part of historical mysteries, and a fun time I had answering the questions.

Boris Johnson's Ten Greatest Ancient Greeks

Boris Johnson -- his full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson -- is the Lord Mayor of London.  In addition to being something of a character, he also happens to be a classicist, and he's fluent in Latin and Greek.  It's such a rare thing to have a successful politician who knows anything about history, let alone someone who's an expert, that I thought this might be interesting.  He's written this article for the Daily Mail, in which he lists his Ten Greatest Ancient Greeks, complete with quotes in the original language.   Kudos too to the Daily Mail, for printing an article on ancient literature; something that would probably be anathema to most newspapers these days.

Hey, there's a dead guy in the living room

One of the more interesting blogs around that's dedicated to mysteries is a place called Hey, There's a Dead Guy in the Living Room. It's one of those shared blogs; in this case the contributors have ranged from specialist mystery bookstore owners to publicists to publishers to authors to literary agents. My own dear agent was a regular there a couple of years ago. So too is the very charming and terrifically nice Robin Agnew, who runs Aunt Agatha's.

Right now over at Dead Guy, Robin is holding a competition. Match the opening line to the correct book, for 15 different books, for a chance to win an advance copy of Death on Tour, by Janice Hamrick.

If you're a reader of this blog then you're starting with a natural advantage, because one of the 15 books used in the competition is mine.

A dictionary of Assyrian

Assyrian is a dead language. It was last spoken about 2,000 years ago, and you can't get much deader than that. But over the last ninety years (!) a dedicated group of scholars have been studying inscriptions and compiling the world's first ever dictionary of Assyrian. And now, at last, the dictionary has been finished.

You might not know a lot about the Assyrian family of languages, but you've probably seen a lot of it, because Assyrian is one of the major languages you're reading when you see cuneiform on a clay tablet. (Cuneiform was a remarkably successful writing system and quite a few languages were written in it.)

The title of the dictionary!

I've had recourse to the dictionary only once, when I was checking on the origin of apples. If Assyrian had a word for apple, then I knew I was safe placing them in Ionia in classical times.

Here, on the BBC, is Dr Irving Finkel giving his best shot at what Assyrian sounded like.

And here's the world's only dictionary of Assyrian!

Am I my brother's sister's wife's keeper...or something like that

I noticed an article in the sports pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, that mentioned among other things a current scandal in British football. That I noticed anything at all is a complete fluke since I never read the sports pages, but in a moment you'll see what it was that caught my eye.

It seems that a footballer by the name of Ryan Giggs has been discovered having an affair with his brother's wife. I'll leave the sordid details to others, because I have no idea. However this led to a question raised in the local paper, whether it was worse for a man to have an affair with his brother's wife, or with his wife's sister. You can always rely on Australian journalists to zero in on the Big Questions.

And here is the response from one reader, a gentleman by the name of Bruce Hyland. I'm copying this directly from the article, and I must say his response makes me proud to be a fellow Australian.

"The Greeks," he writes, "held that an offence against a blood relative was far more serious than an offence against a relative who was not blood-kin. Hence, Clytemnestra's murder of her husband, Agamemnon, was less heinous than Orestes' revenge killing of Clytemnestra, because Clytemnestra and Agamemnon were not blood relatives, whereas Orestes was Clytemnestra's [and Agamemnon's] son and, thus, the closest blood-kin. It follows that sleeping with one's brother's wife is beyond the pale, whereas sleeping with one's wife's sister may be regarded as a trivial peccadillo."

Geez, and people think Australian sports fans are ignorant buffoons. Mr Hyland, I salute you, sir.