Dreaming of a white…November?

Our first real snowfall has come early this year. We’re used to a few flurries in November, a brief whiteness that doesn’t last a morning. But this is the real Deep and Crisp and Even, all over East Yorkshire. As usual with snow,  it’s good and bad, depending on where you are.

Today it’s been good; we’ve had bright sunshine in between the snowfalls, so our garden and the trees behind us have looked like a Christmas card. The roads have been decidedly iffy, but we’re lucky that we haven’t had to struggle to get anywhere – being retired, there’s no boss on the phone demanding to know where we are, and why can’t we fight our way through snow and ice to get into work.

It’s still good now, well after midnight so I can’t see out to tell whether it’s snowing or not. As the song says, “Our hearts are warm, our bellies are full, and we are felling fine.” (Carousel, I think.) I’m listening to radio commentary on the England v Australia cricket match going on right now in Queensland, where they presumably have no snow – I assume somebody would have mentioned it if they had. It’s the first Ashes test match of this winter, and we have to stop the Aussies regaining the said Ashes…well if you follow cricket you’ll know why that matters, and if not, never mind. Take it from me that it does!

Nothing remarkable about this, you’re probably saying. If a crazy Brit wants to spend half the night listening to cricket, it’s no big surprise. But sometimes I find myself pausing a minute to remember just how amazing the world is nowadays. Here I’m sitting in my office in Yorkshire, listening to a radio broadcast from the other side of the world. I’m hearing the commentary, the shouts of the crowd and sometimes even the voices of the players…all in real time. The commentators, when there are gaps in play, read out emails they’re receiving from other cricket fans in different countries, and many of them like me are burning midnight oil.

And simultaneously I’m using a computer (which is about a zillion times more powerful than the computers used for the Apollo moon landings) and writing a blog-post which I’ll send off into cyberspace. Then anyone, in any corner of the world, can read it and comment if they like, even people in Queensland in between the drama of the cricket.

I’m connected to the whole wide world, in two quite different and important ways. Even now, when it’s snowing! Though the roads may get blocked, I don’t have to be cut off from what’s happening everywhere else.

Mostly we all take modern communications entirely for granted…but now and then I try to consider not only what I’m doing, but how I’m doing it. And it’s great, isn’t it?

The little things in life

I like to day-dream now and then. Who doesn’t?

One of my favourite dreams is travelling back in time to visit different periods of history. Just to observe, I promise; I wouldn’t want to change past events, I’d be too scared of unintended consequences. Remember that Ray Bradbury story, “A Sound of Thunder”, about some time-tourists who journeyed back to the age of the dinosaurs, just after a presidential election when a fascist candidate had been defeated? Somebody accidentally trod on a butterfly back there, and when he returned to the present, that one action had altered the whole election and the fascist had won.

So if I go time-travelling, say to Roman Britain around 100 AD, I’ll look but not meddle. I’ll blend in with the local population, so I can experience how they lived without attracting attention. All I need is the necessary language skills (colloquial Latin, and some of the native Britons’ lingo too,) and the right clothes, and plenty of money. Easy peasy in a day-dream.

I’ll drive around in my carriage and stay at an inn near York, the sort of place my sleuth Aurelia Marcella runs when she’s not solving mysteries. There’ll be reasonable food and wine, a clean bed, and access to a hot bath. I’ll mingle with the other guests, listening to their talk, absorbing the atmosphere.

I wonder what I’d miss from my 21st-century existence? Perhaps the big, uncomfortable issues would trouble me most: like living under a dictatorship, and having virtually no rights because I’m a woman.

Actually no. As an outsider who’s pledged not to try to change things, I’m betting those huge problems wouldn’t be foremost in my mind. It would be the little things I’d miss, the small personal items I take for granted every day in 2010.

I mentioned in a recent post how awful it would be not to have waterproof boots. I believe I could live without modern transport, in fact a slower lifestyle has definite attractions, but if I had to walk far with cold wet feet I’d be longing for my wellingtons. I’d also miss paper handkerchiefs, especially if the old wives’ tales proved right and my wet feet brought on a cold. I’ve been around long enough to remember the days when soggy cotton hankies had to be washed out – yuk! – and paper tissues are one of the great boons of modern life.

Then there’s loo paper, another modern boon. The Roman solution to toilet hygiene, a sponge on a stick, may have been state-of-the-art for them, but it doesn’t appeal to me at all.

And two more things I’d struggle to do without: my daily fixes of tea and coffee. There’d be plenty of wine, of course, from all over the Empire, which I could drink warmed, cooled, or spiced; there’d even be beer, which the Romans from Italy considered a barbarian drink, but many of their soldiers, being of barbarian origin, enjoyed it. And if I were feeling really thirsty, I could always risk drinking the water, though that might be considered eccentric, and I did say I wouldn’t want to attract attention. But still…

Already I’m feeling an irresistible urge to return to reality and put on the kettle. End of day-dream for now, and back to a brew-up, followed by reading and writing about the past. That’s time-travel of a kind, isn’t it?

Roman Games

A warm welcome to Bruce Macbain from Massachusetts, and to his new mystery, ROMAN GAMES. It came out last month, published by Poisoned Pen Press, in hardback, trade paperback, and large print. It’s set in the Roman Empire, and mixes historical fact with fiction, because  the sleuth is senator Plinius Secundus, better known to history as Pliny the Younger.

Bruce makes no secret of his lifelong fascination with the classical world, but when considering  what  draws him to write about Imperial Rome, he makes an interesting link between ancient and modern events…

What is it that attracts us to the Romans? For the British (or the Italians or the French) it may simply be the omnipresence of Roman ruins wherever one looks. But for Americans like me, I think it is the sneaking feeling that, for better or worse, we are the Romans. We feel a thrill of recognition at their political backstabbing, arrogant imperialism, and gross over-consumption. The Romans were not an easy people to like. The Greeks hated them. They found them to be humorless, arrogant, cruel, corrupt, and utterly lacking in artistic taste. It’s hard to argue with that verdict. That said, there are a few individual Romans—and Pliny the Younger is certainly one—who come across as genial, tolerant, and intellectually curious. The kind of person you would actually like to have had dinner with.

Which brings me to my novel.

The action in Roman Games takes place in Rome during a sweltering September in AD 96 when the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom and suspicion falls on his household slaves. The despotic emperor Domitian orders Pliny to investigate. However, the festival of the Roman Games (Ludi Romani) has just begun and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can’t identify the murderer in that time, Verpa’s entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena.

As the story opens, Pliny is a respectable young senator and lawyer and a dutiful servant of the regime. His career is progressing nicely and he has a charming young wife who is about to present him with an heir. But what happens to him in the ensuing two weeks turns his comfortable world upside down and forces him to face up to a painful question: Can a good man serve an evil master and still keep his hands clean? In this sense, I think Pliny’s dilemma is also a very modern one.

Pliny teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses. Martial is the polar opposite of Pliny—ribald where Pliny is strait-laced, worldly in matters that are beyond Pliny’s ken. Pooling their talents, they unravel a plot that involves Jewish and Christian “atheists,” exotic Egyptian cultists, and a missing horoscope that forecasts the emperor’s death.

Like all historical novels, Roman Games is a blend of fact and fiction. Pliny and Martial are real characters. I chose them because I’m fond of them and used to teach them in university. They are great fun to read. Both men certainly had their flaws. Martial’s epigrams range from cruel satires on his contemporaries to sycophantic appeals for patronage. Pliny’s hundreds of letters show him occasionally as vain, smug, and pompous. But he passionately loved his wife, was generous to his servants and dependents, and, if not heroic himself, could at least admire heroism in others.

It seems to be a growing trend—this co-opting of real historical characters as fictional sleuths, with greater or less plausibility. Jane Austen, Ulysses S. Grant, and Oliver Wendell Holmes come to mind as recent examples. (I fully expect any day now to read about house-bound Emily Dickinson cracking cases.) Using real characters in your story can be tricky, of course. Would he or she really have behaved as you describe? We can only try our best not to betray our historical characters while still allowing ourselves a bit of wiggle room. It is, after all, fiction.

Find out more about Bruce Macbain and his work, including the next Plinius Secundus mystery, at www.brucemacbain.com

Meet Bruce Macbain here tomorrow

I’m delighted to announce that American author Bruce Macbain will be my guest here tomorrow. He’ll be telling us about his debut mystery novel, ROMAN GAMES, which is just out.

I always love hearing from writers about their new books, and I’m especially pleased to welcome Bruce, because (as you’ll have guessed from the title) his book is set in the Roman Empire. Which means we have several things in common…

Like me, he came late to mystery writing, but has been fascinated by ancient history for years, starting when a youngster through reading and going to movies. (He says he’s seen Quo Vadis seven times, which I can well believe as it’s a brilliant film, and also claims this as a world record…not so sure about that one <g>.) He must be at least as hooked as I am on the classical world, because in addition to setting his mystery – the first of a series – in the late first century AD, he’s spent much of his life teaching Classical Studies at university. He has, he told me, “published a few impenetrable scholarly monographs.” I’m certain the only impenetrable thing about ROMAN GAMES will be the twists and turns of the plot.

So, he’s a real historian, and his book contains real historical people as well as fictional ones, which adds to the fascination for me. But more about that tomorrow.

N or M – two mysteries in one

I’ve just read and thoroughly enjoyed a classic Agatha Christie novel, N or M.

After a trying few days last week I felt in need of a comfort read, and for me that usually means a mystery. Why it should be comforting to read about murder and other crimes I don’t know, but perhaps it’s reassuring to enjoy stories where Justice and Good triumph…there are times in Real Life when one has cause to doubt that they always will.

Anyhow, N or M hit the spot. It’s a cosy mystery, a page-turner with a good plot and two likeable sleuths, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford. They have rather more get-up-and-go than Poirot or Miss Marple, and they even get their hands dirty, or at least suffer the occasional bang on the head.

Well, the merits of vintage Christie don’t need any endorsement from the likes of me, but I found the book especially interesting because of its publication date and its setting. It takes place in the spring of 1940, at the beginning of World War 2. Europe was being overrun, and fears of invasion were rife in Britain. There’s mention in the story of the Local Defence Volunteers, which dates the manuscript; their name was changed to the Home Guard in July 1940, because Churchill thought Home Guard was a more inspiring name, and he was right.

The story is very much concerned with the “Fifth Column” of spies and traitors who could be anywhere and everywhere, undermining the war effort. Tommy and Tuppence have to find and unmask the enemy within.

Espionage, treachery, the possibility of making peace with Hitler – these would have been hot topics when the book was written, and when it was published in 1941. Yes, 1941, the year when Britain stood alone against the Nazis, and nobody can have been 100% certain we would win. But the determination and patriotism that colour the story have the ring of truth even after 70 years.

Now here’s something for trivia buffs everywhere. A minor but fascinating mystery about this book is the origin of its title. I knew it’s a phrase from the Christian prayer book, in fact from the catechism. 70 years ago it must have been familiar enough to readers for Christie to use it as a kind of pun without having to explain it. But what does it mean?

The catechism is a series of questions asked of people about to be confirmed into the church. It starts with the basic “What is your name?” and the answer in the prayer book is given as “N or M,” meaning the person inserts their own “name or names”. In the original Latin this would have read “nomen vel nomina”. Yet an entry in the prayer book reading “N or N” is hardly an option.

The standard abbreviation for “nomina” was NN. Write this as lower-case nn, and you begin to see matters more clearly. In old printed books nn looked very like m, and came to be mis-read and rendered as m. It didn’t matter. Everybody realised that “N or M” meant “name or names” – the obvious answer to the question that preceded it. They didn’t need to know how the phrase came about.

OK, as I said, that’s a piece of trivia, the sort of thing I happen to find intriguing, and I’ll ignore any cries of “Who cares?”  Don’t mind me, just read the book, if you haven’t already. It’s a cracker.

Raise your glass to the Romans

I’ve been upset by a four-letter word over-used in the media. Nothing rude, I promise; the word is “even”.

Recently there was a flutter of interest in the papers here over archaeologists’ findings about how the ancient Romans made glassware. The summary of their researches is interesting, because that the Romans produced many different glass objects, from functional items like windows to decorative beads and bowls and exquisite cups – it was the Romans who invented the technique of glass-blowing.

And the investigators found evidence that craftsmen in Britain used recycled glass along with brand-new material. The media pounced on this as if it was breaking news: “EVEN the Romans,” the headlines proclaimed gleefully, “were into re-cycling.”

Which is what Basil Fawlty would undoubtedly call “a statement of the bleeding obvious.” Glass-makers throughout the ages have always re-used old glass when they could. If you mix old glass in with new, you don’t need such a high temperature to melt it ready for working with.

In Britannia there was a pressing economic reason too. In the Roman Empire there were glass-workers everywhere, but the raw glass was produced only in a handful of places, where the sand, one of its basic ingredients, was suitable. In Britain it had to be imported, so naturally the craftsmen here would supplement the expensive imported supply with old material available locally.

Well all right, let’s try to be fair to the media. Perhaps the average press-person isn’t  familiar with glass manufacturing techniques. But he and she should know this more general truth: the Romans could have taught today’s greener-than-green brigade a thing or two about husbanding the world’s resources rather than wasting them. So indeed could any of the settled, organised cultures that have emerged on this planet up till the 20th century. They all re-cycled materials when they could, from necessity and from thriftiness.

Only from the mid-1900s did we so-called progressive, civilised people lose the habit, becoming hooked on a throwaway society. We bought clothes and shoes designed for one season only, to be discarded before they wore out. We replaced watches and mobile phones at a whim, whether or not they needed renewing. We packaged everything in disposable plastic.

There’s an old story that the first makers of nylon stockings could have produced them in a durable fabric which would last for a very long time, but they didn’t, because if stockings never laddered, there would be no repeat purchases. I suspect this may be an urban myth, but it captures the spirit of the times.

Like everyone else, I embraced the throwaway society for a while. It made a pleasing change from the austerity of the 1940s, when “waste not, want not” was still current thinking. I can remember when rag-and-bone men were a common sight; when we carried home our shopping in hessian bags or baskets; and when we bought drinks in bottles we could return the empty containers to the shop and get a penny or two for them – a better alternative than smashing them in the streets.

Now, after two generations of wastefulness, it’s good that we’ve started to acquire less wasteful habits again. I’m happy to re-cycle glassware, newspapers, plastic and tins, and put food remains on the compost heap.

But however clever we think we are today, it wasn’t we who invented re-cycling…and I’d like “EVEN” journalists to remember that.

Mystery of the dodgy denarius

Apologies for going AWOL lately, but now I’m back. And I believe I’ve solved the mystery of the forged Roman silver denarius found recently in Brighton, southern England.

You’ve probably seen a news item about it: a silver denarius, forged by a Roman only a few decades after the original would have been made. And it’s a bad fake, including a spelling mistake and giving the Emperor Augustus the wrong title.

It was meant to counterfeit a silver denarius struck to mark the Battle of Actium in 31 BC, which was as important in Roman history as the Battle of Hastings was in ours. At Actium Antony and Cleopatra, that famous (or notorious) pair of love-birds, fought  Octavian Caesar for control of Rome in a sea battle. If they’d won…well who knows? But they didn’t, they were soundly thrashed.

The victorious Octavian went on to become the Emperor Augustus, the first real Roman Emperor. He was careful not to be seen as a king or tyrant, but he was in effect a dictator, and among his many powers was the ability to pass on his Imperial throne to a non-elected successor…and the Roman Empire was born.

So Actium was an event well worth marking by issuing a coin, and the coin was thought to be well worth forging later. And though it wasn’t a good copy, the forger might well have got away with it; there were many examples of forged money in Roman Britain, especially in the 50s AD, the decade after the conquest, when for ten years no silver coins were minted at all. People are surprisingly unobservant about cash; and especially in somewhere like Britannia, where many people couldn’t read, a mis-spelling or such could have passed unobserved on a silver coin.

And here we come to the mystery: why did he forge the coin out of solid silver? It would hardly differ in value from the raw silver it was made of, so his work, even if perfect, wouldn’t have given him any profit. Why not make a copper or bronze denarius look-alike and add a thin silver coating, so an inferior piece of cash would look like something more valuable?

Here’s what I think may have happened.

The Roman government tightly controlled the production of precious metals, including the silver mines of Britannia. So if an individual of low status like a native Briton came by a silver ingot, it had probably fallen off the back of a wagon, so to speak. He’d be in trouble if he tried trading it or spending it as it stood. But if he or a friend could make coins out of it he could spend them, and if challenged, he’d claim he earned them. So though the forger doesn’t deserve top marks for his workmanship, perhaps  he does deserve credit for a nice little  scam. If I’m right and that’s what he was up to, I hope he got away with it.

Needless to say, this dodgy denarius has aroused rather more interest among archaeologists and coin collectors than a genuine coin would. The Romans themselves might have thought that a mystery too.