Two good reads: the perfect cold cure

I’ve always preferred the ODYSSEY to the ILIAD. Homer’s account of the end of the Trojan War is too slow and rambling for my taste, whereas Odysseus’ post-war adventures on his way home to Ithaca are faster and much more entertaining, even though his tale is a myth. Or is it?

I’ve been watching some daytime tv this last week – something I almost never do, but I’ve had a summer cold which I couldn’t shake off, and it made me feel very washed-out. Among the documentaries I’d have missed if I’d been at my desk was an interesting speculation on one of the history channels about whether any of the events in the Odyssey could be remotely based on fact.

Take the one-eyed cannibal giant Cyclops, for instance. There’s a disease named Cyclopia apparently (called after him, presumably;) if a pregnant woman is exposed to certain poisonous substances her child can be born with one central eye. Did this give Homer, whoever he was (or they were,) the idea for his fearsome giants? Or, another suggestion: could some Greek traveller have encountered the skull of an elephant, which apparently has a large central cavity and small inconspicuous eye sockets…and got the wrong idea?

Then consider the siren songs which lured sailors to their deaths. There’s an island (can’t remember its name, blame my woolly memory on my cold,) containing deep caves which magnify any sound made in them to a level which would have been remarkable in ancient times. And the almost-melodic call of the monk seal, if made within the caves, might it have been heard by mariners sailing past, and mistaken for a human song?

Being no expert on Bronze Age Greece, I’ve no idea whether these ideas are new, or even seriously likely. But Greeks were brave and widely-travelled sailors in ancient times. I went back and re-read the Odyssey with enjoyment.

Then I remembered an even more fascinating book about a later Greek seafarer, Pythias from Marseilles, who was undoubtedly fact, not fiction. “THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE OF PYTHIAS THE GREEK,” by Professor Barry Cunliffe, tells how this remarkable sailor travelled out of the Mediterranean and along the Atlantic seaboard. He visited and wrote about Brittany, the British Isles (even as far north as Orkney,) and the eastern coasts of the North Sea. And all this in an age when Greeks knew virtually nothing about the Ocean except (a) they thought it surrounded the inhabited world, and (b) they were afraid of it.

Pytheas’ account of his explorations, “On The Ocean,” published about 320 BC, is now lost. Only fragments remain, quoted in other Greek scholars’ works, and Cunliffe has used them, with very many other sources, to bring us a picture of Pytheas’ life, times, and above all, travels. What sort of boat would he have sailed? How would ha have navigated in unfamiliar waters? What did he make of the peoples he met along the way? It’s all here, and it’s fascinating.

Cunliffe makes the point that while many of Pythias’ readers must have regarded his stories with disbelief, others thought him a true pioneer and a scientist, and so do scholars of today; they place Pythias alongside Captain Cook and Christopher Columbus, not alongside Odysseus.

Next time you need to take your mind off a summer cold, or even a winter one, these two very different heroes do the job perfectly.

Poisoning People

Poison can be a brilliant murder weapon. I’m speaking as a mystery writer, of course, though I suppose it’s true in real life too …but no, I’ll stick to fiction. In my mysteries, villains have made good use of poison. Or should that be bad use? Efficient use, that covers it.

It’s such a flexible tool. You can arrange for your victim to die quickly or slowly, immediately or later, in agony or asleep. The murderer doesn’t have to be physically strong, or even necessarily very bright, if she or he can pay a knowledgeable poisoner to concoct the fatal does.

And if you write about the ancient past, as I do, before modern forensics or any ideas of chemical analysis, you can even get away without being very specific about the exact nature of the deadly substance. But if you can identify it, or at least drop a hint or two, so much the better.

So I was delighted when recently Richard and I visited the gardens at Alnwick, Northumberland, and found that alongside the fountains and cascades and the decorative trees and flowers, there was a dedicated Poison Garden. It’s behind locked gates, and you have to go round it on a guided tour. Just as well, given the number and variety of lethal vegetation there.

There were far more plants than we recognised, but many of them were what you’d expect. Hemlock, (which killed Socrates,) and wormwood, (major ingredient of absinthe,) and also deadly nightshade, (which still injures and even kills people who think its attractive berries are edible,) were all present.

But as we walked round with our guide, we got a bit of a shock when we realised that several of the plants on show are growing in our own garden now…because, I hasten to explain, they have good qualities as well as bad. Monkshood, for instance, with its decorative blue flowers: actually having read an excellent Brother Cadfael mystery based around this plant, I did know it was dangerous, and ours is positioned well back in a wide border, out of reach unless you are seriously determined. But we’ve got foxgloves…well only one this year, self-seeded, but we’ve let it grow, and will certainly treat it with caution from now on. The leaves of our laurel hedge aren’t safe, and neither are the tobacco plants, which we like because of the wonderful sweet scent their flowers give off in the evening.

As to fruit and vegetables…we grow rhubarb, though we wouldn’t dream of eating the leaves, which are the deadly part. Come to think of it, the leaves of our potato plants are poisonous too, I believe, but that wouldn’t have worried the Romans. They had more than enough lethal plant material without needing anything from the New World.

They mostly grew plants for food, or for curing people’s ills, or for decoration. Like all ancient civilisations they had a good knowledge of the plant kingdom, based on practical experience.  But even their most skilled herbalists and doctors, while they  knew a lot about what effect a given leaf or root would have, didn’t understand why. Theories ranged from attempts at science through to magic and mysticism, which gives a mystery writer marvellous scope for invention, not to mention misdirection.

I enjoyed my time in the Alnwick Poison Garden, and I did mention to our guide that I write mystery fiction. I thought I’d better. I wanted to be sure he understood what lay behind the questions I was asking about his plants!

Money, money, money – a Roman Mystery

An amazing large pot of Roman coins has been found in Somerset by a man with a metal detector. I mean literally a pot, a clay jar about two feet in depth and eighteen inches across, buried underground…and filled with about fifty-two thousand coins.

The man who found them, David Crisp, is an experienced metal detector user; when he realised what he’d discovered he called in help from archaeologists, avoiding the all-too-common mistake of wrecking the site with over-enthusiastic digging. He is reported to be astonished and delighted, and he deserves to be. Because though most of the coins are small, low-value bronze ones, there are (to use the technical term) a heck of a lot of them, and this is a fascinating find. And of course a mystery too: who left those coins there, and why?

The hoard dates from the late 200s, and many of the coins are unusual because they were minted actually in Britain, under a rebel Emperor, Carausius, who for a few years ruled over Britain and northern France. He was a successful general, who used his position as commander of the North Sea Fleet to get rich by capturing pirates, then declared himself Emperor, refusing the control of Rome. (His enemies said that he let the pirates raid ashore, and only pounced on them as they set off for home laden with loot, but this may have been propaganda, because his strong fleet prevented the “real” Emperor from defeating him in battle.)

Eventually he was murdered, and soon after, Britannia was recaptured for the Empire. But Carausius’ coins remained, and they were propaganda too. They show that he was no barbarian rebel wanting to oust the Romans; quite the reverse. He proclaimed that he intended to restore the Empire’s past glory. Britannia had come a long way since the revolt of Boudicca.

Were these thousands of coins literally somebody’s buried treasure, hidden for safety because of a local threat, meant to be recovered…and never retrieved? Historians who have examined them think not. If you were hiding your life savings, you’d stash them away in nice valuable and portable gold or silver, not a huge mass of small coins which you couldn’t even carry unaided; the total weight of the find is reported to be 25 stone.

The consensus, as reported by the media, is that the coins could have been religious donations, small contributions dropped into the pot (or a sacred spring maybe, and collected later) by visitors, perhaps to the shrine of a native god or goddess.

But from what I’ve read about the Roman Empire’s economy in the late 200s, it may not be quite that straightforward. Don’t panic, I’m not about to start spouting theories about third-century economics. I’m not qualified (though when has that ever stopped a pundit?) But an added complication in this case is that Carausius, however successful, was a usurper, not a proper Emperor. When his successor got Britannia back into the Imperial fold, there was a major reform of the currency, and Carausius’ coins, it seems, were at best discredited and worthless, at worst outlawed. Maybe whoever was in charge of that jar in Somerset never bothered to return for it because after a while many of the coins  weren’t worth having anyway!

There’s to be a BBC-2 tv programme about the Somerset excavation, part of an archaeology series called Digging for Britain, broadcast this August. I’m really looking forward to having at least part of this mystery solved.

The spies are back out in the cold

What’s the most amazing news of the week? The World Cup? The global economic mess? No.

The Russians have been caught spying in the United States again. They’ve been sneakily infiltrating themselves into US society, masquerading as Uncle Sam’s sons and daughters…and all the time they’ve been collecting information to send back to Uncle Ivan. And one of them apparently has a false British passport, so Uncle John Bull may even be involved too.

In other words, the cold war is back! And speaking as a lover of mysteries, it’s wonderful news!

I should disapprove heartily, of course, and I do, I truly do, as a citizen of what we used to call the Free World. (See, I can even remember the jargon from fifty years ago.) But when I put on my mystery reader’s hat, I immediately want to give three rousing cheers.

Some of the very best mysteries over the last five decades have been written with Cold War settings. I loved them when they came out, and I still do. Len Deighton, John le Carré, even Ian Fleming used the background of USSR v The West with tremendous skill, and their stories were all the more compelling because they purported to be set in the present time. And their sleuths were household names: Harry Palmer, George Smiley, Bernard Samson, even the irrepressible .007. Ah, just thinking about them recalls my lost youth!

But then the world moved on. Communism crumbled, the Berlin Wall came down, the USSR broke up. At the time I didn’t realise there would be a down-side, but it gradually dawned on me that there was, as regards a certain sub-genre of mystery fiction at least. One had to think of Cold War mysteries as period pieces that sprang out of a bygone age, vanished never to return.. Authors could and did still use the Cold War as a background, but however beautifully crafted the tales, they had to be written as historicals, not as contemporary stories. And for me, because I remembered the Cold War well, that diminished them.

But this week, things are changing yet again. Now, if Reds really are lurking under the beds, then Cold War spy stories will become contemporary, and fashionable once more. Authors will be falling over themselves to contribute to the latest trend. If this new generation of spies is really going back out into the cold, I’m hoping they’ll be followed there by a new generation of fictional spies, and that the 21st-century variants of Palmer, Smiley, Samson and Bond will be as great as the old ones.