Why do you work in passions, lies, devices full of treachery, love-magics, murder in the home?
Euripides, Helen, 1103–4
Not long ago I wrote a story called ‘Murder Myth-Begotten’, in which two modern-day, would-be matricides (any resemblance to Orestes and Electra being entirely intentional) try to persuade their vulgar, anti-intellectual mother (more like Medea than Clytaemnestra) to read the Classics. ‘They’re not dry at all,’ insists the snooty daughter. ‘You’re always reading those tawdry murder mysteries and awful true-crime books. Well, the Greek tragedies are full of murders. That’s what they’re all about. Lurid, shocking stuff!’
That may be simplifying things a bit, but it’s no coincidence that the Oxford don who spends his day lecturing about Euripides may curl up at night with Colin Dexter, or that the insatiable reader of Agatha Christie may just as avidly devour I, Claudius. The inspirational link between the ancient world and the modern mystery story – the happy circumstance which has produced the stories in this volume – is hardly surprising. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King can be read as a stunning whodunnit (in more ways than one!); Cicero’s defense orations tell stories as seamy and gripping as today’s courtroom thrillers; Polyaenus gives us the nuts and bolts of Classical espionage, revealing how ancient spymasters concealed their secret messages; and for surefire page-turners, full of sex, murder, politics and poison, Plutarch and Suetonius set the standards. It seems to me only reasonable (indeed, irresistible) to draw upon these sources not only for themes and inspiration, but more directly, recasting their stories for modern readers in the form of the modern murder mystery.
Reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose first convinced me that the combination of historical and mystery fiction could be sublime; reading Cicero’s defense of Sextus Roscius, a man accused of murdering his father, inspired me to try my own hand at the game with my first novel, Roman Blood. I originally intended to make Cicero himself the narrator, but the more I got to know him, the less I savored the idea of spending twenty-four hours a day with such a prig – and so my detective-hero, Gordianus the Finder, came into being. Reading between the lines of Cicero’s oration, researching the era, placing the trial in its political context, and walking with Gordianus down the mean streets of Rome, circa 80 BC, I stumbled upon an insidious conspiracy that spanned all levels of society and ultimately reached to the highest circles of power. Snooping through the musty stacks of the San Francisco Public Library and rushing home to pound the keys of my Macintosh, I often felt as exhilarated and edgy as a hero in a John Grisham thriller, carrying dangerous (albeit 2,000-year-old) secrets in my head.
And there you have the great pleasure of writing the historical mystery: the detective work. You begin with a crime. You research (investigate) the long-ago scene, interrogate the long-dead witnesses, evaluate the suspects and their motives. One clue leads to another. You backtrack; in a book opened by chance, you come across a name that’s vaguely familiar and suddenly realize how it fits in, and with a thrill you discover a whole new set of suspicious circumstances. You start to get so close to the truth that you can almost taste it . . .
All historical researchers know this excitement of discovering the past, but for the researcher with the goal of constructing a murder mystery, the game is especially complex and rewarding. This is because of the built-in Aristotelian closure of the genre: the murder mystery, by definition, must have a beginning, middle, and end. The research – the detective work – is never an end in itself, but a search for the unique resolution that will restore order and meaning to a universe thrown out of kilter by crime.
Such a pursuit would have been understood intuitively, I think, by our old friends, the ancient Greeks and Romans. They knew what hubris was and where it inevitably led. They understood the agency of Nemesis. Yet they realized, too, that guilt and innocence are seldom simple matters, and they doggedly explored, in their laws as in their stories, all the possible, mysterious permutations of justice, retribution and revenge.