St. George’s Day

St. George is England’s patron saint, and today is his Big Day, yet we English hardly notice the occasion, and certainly don’t celebrate it, unlike our neighbours in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, who mark their special saints’ days in style.

This lack of enthusiasm is said to be because of the English stiff-upper-lip culture of not getting too excited about things – which is rubbish, in my opinion. We can get excited about the Olympics, or a royal wedding, (or even football, they tell me…though this last leaves me cold, I have to confess.)

Well then, are we just too irreligious these days, or too lazy, to go bananas about a saint? Maybe we don’t think he’s good enough…though a knight who risked his life to rescue a damsel from a dragon seems pretty good to me.

Sadly, it’s too good to be true. The dragon-and-damsel part of George’s story is pure myth. The town terrorised by the evil dragon who demanded a human sacrifice every day…the king’s daughter due to be handed over to him…and George riding to the rescue, capturing the dragon and eventually killing it, having converted the whole town to Christianity…a great tale, but not the reason he was made a saint.

Mind you, his real life, what we know of it, had its own share of drama, and his courage and loyalty were outstanding. He was born in the third century of Christian parents in Cappadocia, (now part of Turkey but then a province of the Roman Empire.) He became a Roman army tribune, but when Emperor Diocletian began persecuting Christians, George resigned from the army in protest, and tore up Caesar’s order against the Christians. The Emperor was, not surprisingly, furious, and George was imprisoned and tortured, but refused to give up his Christian faith. He was executed, and his martyrdom led to his becoming a saint.

George was revered in Europe all through the Middle Ages, and miracles and myths gradually collected round him. Many people doubtless believed in dragons…but for the more sceptical, there was symbolism too, because the dragon was equated with the devil. Gradually George’s flag, the red cross on a white background, came to be regarded as an emblem of England, and by the time that he was made patron saint of the Order of the Garter by Edward 111 in the 1300s, the dragon-slaying exploit was the major part of his legend. He became truly part of English folklore…including giving his name and image to a good many “George and Dragon” pubs!

He’s still a powerful symbol in modern times. King George VI established the George Cross as a medal for “acts of the greatest heroism or of the most conspicuous courage in circumstances of extreme danger’, and its silver cross has the saint on it…slaying his dragon of course.

I’d say this is a patron saint to be proud of, whether in real life or in myth. But how can we English be persuaded to give him the kind of celebration he deserves on this day every year?

Another trio of great detectives

This is just a brief P.S. to my last post, which I ended by hoping there’d be more ebook collections of novels by different authors.

When I downloaded my copy of 3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES I saw a note at the end of it mentioning another of Head of Zeus’ compilations – this one called 3 GREAT HISTORICAL MYSTERIES. This one includes Bruce Macbain’s ROMAN GAMES, together with ONE FOR SORROW by M. E. Mayer, and WINE OF VIOLENCE by Priscilla Royal. I know all these books and they’re real page-turners, or whatever is the proper expression for paperless electronic volumes!

Isn’t it nice when you hope for something…and find it has happened?

The female of the species…

It is a truth universally acknowledged, (hey, good opening line, I just thought of it!) that female sleuths are at least as clever and ruthless as male ones. Because as we all know, the female of the species is more deadly than the male…another good saying I just dreamed up.

OK, I’ll stop plagiarising the words of my betters, and get to the point. Which is to tell you about a new book that I’m proud to be part of: 3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES. It’s an ebook bringing together a trio of magnificent sleuths all in one package.

There’s Cat DeLuca, the creation of K.J. Larsen, who runs a detective agency called Pants on Fire (fabulous name!) which claims that “We catch cheats and liars.” Her first adventure is LIAR, LIAR.

Then there’s Tai Randolph, created by Tina Whittle, who has just inherited a gunshop at the start of THE DANGEROUS EDGE OF THINGS. She thinks that’s her only problem…but she’s wrong. An uninvited corpse and a wayward brother are two of the others.

These formidable women both hale from the USA, like their authors. My Aurelia Marcella represents Britain – Roman Britain, to be specific. She wouldn’t have called herself a detective because they didn’t have such a job description then, but they had crimes to solve and people who took on the task of getting justice done, often quite reluctant amateurs like Aurelia, who’s an innkeeper most of the time.

3 GREAT FEMALE DETECTIVES is an ebook recently published by Head of Zeus in London, and before that, the books have all been published in different versions by Poisoned Pen Press in the USA.

This new compendium – is that the word for a sort of jumbo anthology? – adds a new dimension to each of our mysteries. First, by putting them cheek-by-jowl it allows readers to, (as we used to say at school,) “compare and contrast.” The three sleuths are at first sight as unlike as chalk, cheese, and china oranges…but what’s revealed when you delve deeper? What makes a great female detective? Here’s a chance to find out.

Second, this sort of compilation makes it really easy to discover good books you haven’t read yet. I’m a case in point; I’m downloading a copy myself this weekend, because I haven’t (shame on me!) read either of the other two books in the ensemble, and I’m looking forward to them very much. I’ll be reading them on my Nexus tablet which runs Android software, but the book is available not just in the right format for that, but also versions for kindles and iPads and several others.

Isn’t there a mind-boggling choice of electronic formats these days? That’s my major criticism of ebooks: they’re convenient, not expensive…but not standardised. Let’s hope that sometime soon common sense will break through and their publishers will arrange matters so that any e-reader can read any e-book.

Meanwhile, let’s have more of these several-books-in-one releases. I think they are br

The cutting edge of history

I learned something about the Ancient Romans today that I didn’t know before.

Oh, big deal, you’re saying to me. There’s a lot you don’t know about the Ancient Romans, not to mention everything else. A decrease in your ignorance is hardly headline news.

True enough. But what I found out interested me so much that I’m going to share it. If you know it already, give yourself a pat on the back and a beaker of Aurelia’s favourite Gaulish Red wine. (Best to perform these actions in sequence, not simultaneously.)

It was the Romans who first used modern-type scissors.

That’s the sort where the two blades are joined at a central point, and when you open the handles right out they make an X-shape. They can be small and neat, or big and tough — which we tend to call shears, but it’s the same design. We don’t, alas, know the name of the genius responsible for it, but there’s enough evidence to show that scissors were around by 100 or so AD in the Roman world.

There are other, older sorts of scissors, U-shaped, where the handles are joined together by some springy metal and you squeeze them to make the blades cut. They sound like hard work, but work they do, and they go back even further into history, possibly to a couple of thousand years BC in some parts of the world. The Romans used those also, and so did the northern European Celts, which means the Ancient Brits could have had them.

They didn’t all stop using them in 100 AD, but some recognisably modern X-shaped scissors were available from that time, which is when my innkeeper Aurelia Marcella was doing her sleuthing. They probably weren’t all that common, because very few have turned up in the archaeological evidence so far, or illustrated in wall-paintings or mosaics.

But they were around. So it’s possible that Aurelia could have known about them, or maybe her lover Quintus, who travelled much more widely, would have known. And now that I know, watch out for a pair turning up in my next book. I’m working on it now and I know just the place.

That’s why I love research so much. You never can tell what little nugget you’re going to unearth next. Until this morning, there I was thinking scissors were invented in the Middle Ages and didn’t become popular till after the Industrial Revolution. That last bit at least is true: the introduction of hardened steel meant that craftsmen began specialising in “fine scissors” in the 1760s – quite late on, historically speaking – and that’s when they became a must in every household.

They say you learn something new every day, and that’ll do me for today: an interesting fact that I can use in the next book…it couldn’t be better! Mind you, when I do include scissors in Aurelia’s world, I must remember to add a line or two in the historical note at the end to reassure readers that yes, truly, a Roman of her day could have encountered such a useful item.

Useful in several ways. For instance someone could do a murder with it…

What’s in a name…February?

It’s the simple-sounding questions that often catch you out, isn’t it?

Such as when someone asks: “Why is February called February?”

“Named after a Roman god, I expect,” someone else answers.

Then they look at me. “Jane, you know about Roman stuff. Was February named after a Roman god?”

“Er…very likely. I don’t know which one though.”

“You don’t know? But you’re a historian!”

“And like all true historians,” I answer, “if I don’t know a thing, I at least know where to look it up.”

A combination of books and the Internet gave me the answers, mostly from an essay by Plutarch, the Greek-born Roman writer who lived from 46 to 120 AD. All the Roman months, which gave us our familiar month-names, were either called after a deity – like January from Janus, June from Juno – or else, more boringly, named just for their numerical position in the calendar. September was the seventh month, October was number eight, and so on. Those numbers are out of sync now, but they made sense in the very early days, and I do mean early: the Romans dated the foundation of Rome to 753 BC. Back then they started their year in March, and their ancient calendar covered only 304 days, ten months. They knew a year was longer than that, they just didn’t bother to include the winter days as part of the sequence. Confusing? It must have been.

Eventually (still well inside the BC time zone) they realised how much better a twelve-month calendar would be, and tacked January and February onto the end of their existing one, using up the spare winter days. Only later still did things get switched round so that January became the first month of the new year. But the number-names were set in stone by then. Whoever said the Romans were logical?

When February was the last month of the year it acquired several festivals concerning the dead and ancestors, and on Feb 15^th a religious purification ritual called “februa”. Plutarch says that’s how the month got its name.

But that’s not quite the end of the story. “Februa” was almost certainly linked to a deity, (though Plutarch doesn’t say so,) called Februus, god of ritual purification and of the underworld. He was very ancient, but never made it into the Roman Pantheon Top Twenty in his own right; he got amalgamated with another and better-known underworld god, Pluto. However, it’s not a bad form of immortality to give your name to a month, even a gloomy one like February.

By the way if anyone asks me where March’s name originated, that’s much simpler. It comes from Mars, of course, god of war, and the Romans’ favourite chocolate-bar…

My Next Big Thing

I’m delighted to pick up the baton from Ruth Downie in this cyber-relay called My Next Big Thing. It’s for authors to answer a set of questions devised by…I don’t know actually who devised them originally, but they’re good questions. Ruth gave good answers last week at http://rsdownie.co.uk/2012/12/11/my-next-big-thing/

Now for my two penn’orth:

What is the working title of your book?
At present it’s called BLOOD ON THE ROAD. I’m not totally sure about that title, (sounds too much like a motorway accident!) but the book isn’t finished yet, and something better will occur to me as I go on writing.

Where did the idea for the book come from?
It’s the fifth in a series about Roman innkeeper Aurelia Marcella  She runs an inn on the road to York in the Roman province of Britannia, at the end of the first century AD, which is not all that long after the Romans invaded Britain. So native hostility to the conquerors is still sharp. Aurelia prefers peace with both settlers and native tribes, but she keeps getting drawn into solving crimes, often at considerable risk. So far her adventures have been in what we’d call Yorkshire, but then at the end of Book 4 (DANGER IN THE WIND) a perfect reason emerged to send her off to London, and it’s working out beautifully. I’m having such fun researching Londinium and trying to see it through the eyes of a country innkeeper.

What genre does your book fall under?
Historical mystery.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
Having a film made from one of my books is a fascinating thought, but I’ve one small qualm. Until that fairly unlikely event, I and all my readers can have our own idea of Aurelia, Lucius, Quintus, and the rest. Once movie images arrive, they restrict people’s imaginations a bit…hey, what am I saying? I’d be over the moon, of course I would, so if any movie moguls are reading this, feel free to get in touch!

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
Plans for a happy Roman wedding are wrecked when the bridegroom vanishes and his bride-to-be is threatened with death if she looks for him, but Aurelia must look, because he is her brother.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?
It’ll be published by Poisoned Pen Press in the USA and by Head of Zeus in the UK and Commonwealth.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?
There are quite a few authors writing mysteries set in Roman times, which is great. But we’re all different, so comparisons are difficult and I’m not sure how useful. Google “Roman historical mysteries”, we’re all there for you to try!

Who or what inspired you to write this book?
You could say it was a natural development, being part of a series. But what made me choose my particular period? I’ve had a lifelong interest in Roman history, since living in York as a child, and then as a teenager read “I CLAUDIUS” by Robert Graves, a truly brilliant book. They say “write about what interests you,” so I do.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
It’s told from the point of view of a woman, which is very unusual for Roman-era mysteries. I wanted to look at Roman society through feminine eyes because it was in legal terms very male-dominated, but I knew that, as in so many other eras of history, smart women like Aurelia could learn to work the system and live their lives more or less as they liked.

Tag time
Now I’m going to tag my good friend Rebecca Jenkins, another writer of historical crime fiction, and a fellow member of the Mystery Makers group. Her novels set in Regency England involve Raif Jarrett, adventurer, spy, soldier, and artist…a fascinating mixture of a sleuth. Rebecca’s Next Big Thing will be posted soon at http://www.rebeccajenkins.com/Rebeccas_blog

Seeing the Romans from space

I recently watched a fascinating BBC television programme about archaeology from space. No, it didn’t show archaeologists in spacesuits whizzing round in orbit collecting up bits of junk that have fallen off rockets or been jettisoned by astronauts. It was about using space satellites to look for traces of the Roman Empire that can’t be seen from the earth below.

ROME’S LOST EMPIRE was presented by historian Dan Snow and based on the work of Dr. Sarah Parcak from the University of Alabama. She’s been analysing images and photographs sent back to earth from orbiting satellites, which can examine the surface of our planet in considerable detail. They can do this not just visually, but using infra-red wavelengths as well, which are invisible to human eyes but enormously useful sources of information. She produces maps that make clear differences in the surface that you can’t distinguish from down here.

Each feature of our planet – sand, rock, vegetation, buildings – has a different “signature” in the data from space, and not just when they’re on the surface. The images can show buried remains too, such as sites of forts or farms from Roman times, even when they are now hidden below ground level.

Dr. Parcak has worked for some years finding hitherto unknown ruins in Ancient Egypt. Dan Snow’s programme got her to focus on the Roman Empire. She analysed maps of various parts of the Empire looking for sites that might be interesting archaeologically, and with modern global positioning techniques she could pinpoint them to within a meter or two. Then she and Snow and other experts visited these interesting places, and discovered remains on the ground that corresponded with the images from space…the “lost” sites that had either not been known at all by today’s scholars, or had been known about in theory but never found before.

Snow and Parcak looked at Portus, the vast ancient port west of Rome where warships and trading vessels anchored. The coastline has receded over time, and much of Portus is built over now, but the space images found an important ship canal leading directly to Rome and bypassing the longer route via the Tiber. They also discovered the site of what was almost certainly the enormous Portus lighthouse, which in its day was on a par with the great Alexandrian Pharos, rated one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

After other successful finds in Romania and Jordan, they focused on north Africa, examining the 1500-mile long frontier line between the prosperous and fertile Roman settlements and the nomadic barbarians in the desert nearby. How did the Romans protect their farmlands? Guided by the space images, Parcak located sites of a string of forts, which had been suspected but never found till now. The programme included delighted comments from Professor David Mattingly, who has spent years looking for traces of them, but needed Parcak’s new technology to find their exact whereabouts.

I hope this programme will be repeated soon, and I’m also hoping that a book will follow, or at least articles telling us more. Meanwhile, take a look at Sarah Parcak’s website, http://www.sarahparcak.com/index2.php#/home/ which covers her satellite-based findings in Egypt. It makes fascinating reading.

Presenting Mary Reed

Mary and her husband Eric Mayer write the popular John the Lord Chamberlain mysteries, set in sixth-century Constantinople, a city of extremes: wealth and corruption, beauty and violence. Originally published  in the USA by Poisoned Pen Press, John’s adventures are launched today in Britain, which gives Mary a special pleasure because she was born in England, where she first got her interest in  ancient history…

My family once lived in a long-gone street running into Scotswood Road in the north-eastern city of Newcastle-on-Tyne. I sometimes walked to grammar school rather than taking the bus, cutting through a street near my destination to take another glance at a startling sight in the middle of a heavily industrialised city: the remains of a Roman era temple.

To be sure, there isn’t much left of it. Dedicated to the god Antenociticus, built around 180 AD, and destroyed by fire about sixteen years later — it’s amazing what archaeologists can deduce from small amounts of evidence! — it consists of a low portion of its walls outlining what appears to be a very small space. The passerby will observe casts of two pillar altars and the head of a statue, the originals being held in a Newcastle museum. Imagine doing the washing up and looking out the kitchen window at the temple, a silent reminder of Roman rule!

One year our class went on a day trip to Hadrian’s Wall, out on the Northumbrian moors. Standing on the broad top of the structure that had once marked the edge of the empire, with a cold wind howling round our knees it was easy to imagine how far from home those patroling there must have felt, especially during the grey misty winters. To add to the jollity of our visit it rained that day something shocking. We got soaked.

However, our venture into the Byzantine period came about through an editor living in southern England. After my co-author and I married, we had some modest publishing success with short stories. One afternoon we had a call from Mike Ashley, who asked us if we thought we could write a short story in about three weeks for an anthology of historical whodunnits he was editing. Naturally we said yes. Eric is interested in Byzantine history and therefore had a number of books we could consult, so Justinian’s reign became our setting, and from there we progressed to John’s occupation, Lord Chamberlain, and his condition — he’s a eunuch, historically correct for holders of high office in certain eras. We also made him a secret worshipper of Mithra in an officially Christian court. Mithraism’s requirements added depth to his character, not to mention dramatic tension. As for Constantinople and the imperial court, it was a perfect place for back-stabbings, often literally and not always in the foul alleys outside the palace walls.

Two or three short stories about John subsequently appeared and then came One For Sorrow, John’s first novel-length adventure. There are nine of them to date. The latest entry, Nine For The Devil, appeared in March 2012. They’ve all been published in the US by Poisoned Pen Press, and now the revised edition of One For Sorrow is issued by Head of Zeus, publisher of the series in the UK.

There is a connection to Bretania in One For Sorrow, since one of its main characters is Thomas, a British knight who claims to be in Constantinople seeking the Holy Grail. The soothsayer Ahasuerus and two ladies from Crete stir up events and old memories for John, who must establish if and how these various visitors link to the death of his old friend Leukos, Keeper of the Plate.

It happens that in his youth John fought as a mercenary in Bretania. We haven’t sent him back there yet, but perhaps one day he will stand on the Wall and look north into savage parts.

ONE FOR SORROW is published on December 1st by Head of Zeus, London, under the pen-name M. E. Mayer. Find out more about both authors and their books at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/

Meet Mary Reed here tomorrow

I’m delighted that tomorrow I’ll be welcoming Mary Reed as my blog guest. She’s a friend, and she writes terrific historical mysteries…who could ask for more?

Mary and her husband Eric Mayer write the John Lord Chamberlain mystery series set in ancient Constantinople, and they are about to be published in the UK, having been available in the USA till now. The UK publishers have amalgamated their two names into M. E. Mayer…no, I don’t know why either!…but the  books’ titles are unchanged, and the first, ONE FOR SORROW, comes out tomorrow. The publishers are Head of Zeus, London, the same firm that has just launched my Aurelia Marcella series here.

Mary now lives in Pennsylvania, USA, but she was born and brought up in the UK. And the unusual Roman ruin pictured here is one of the things that got her interested in ancient history when she was a schoolgirl.

Where is it? Wait and see…you’ll find out tomorrow.

Have mystery, will travel

We launched SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT last week as planned. It was an excellent party.

It was a truly dark and stormy night, but that didn’t deter nearly thirty guests from coming along to Waterstones in York to share my celebration.

Among them were two people from Head of Zeus, the publishers hosting the party, an assortment of other mystery enthusiasts…and as I promised,  two real-live Roman soldiers. They were brilliant…good company, very knowledgeable about their period and their armour and equipment, and of course by far the best-looking men in the room – well I’ve said before I’m a sucker for guys in military uniforms! Victor and Germanus belong to the Comitatus Late Roman History e-enactment group. Check out their website at www.comitatus.net. Next year I hope Aurelia the innkeeper will be  joining in some of their events.

But till then, I shan’t be resting on my laurels. Apart from having my next book to write – Aurelia number 5, which still hasn’t even a working title – I hope to be busy with a new project, the Mystery Makers. I’ve got together with two other authors who have published historical whodunits, and we’ve formed a triple-act, and aim to strut our stuff around the north of England. We sing, we dance, we…OK, you don’t believe me, so I’ll be serious. We all love writing mysteries, and discussing our own and other writers’ work, and we are available to give talks, panels, and workshops to writers’ and readers’ groups, and in libraries, in bookshops, at conferences, in fact anywhere where mystery lovers meet. The pub? Well, why not?

The other Mystery Makers are two very good friends of mine, Dolores Gordon-Smith and Rebecca Jenkins. Our books cover a wide spectrum of history: I’m earliest with the Romans, then comes Rebecca in the Regency period, and Dolores is the most modern, if you can use that word to describe her chosen time, the 1920s.

I’ll post more about us soon, but meanwhile take a look at our new website, www.mysterymakers.co.uk. And get in contact if you’d enjoy hearing three hist-myst enthusiasts talking the hind legs off several donkeys.