J M Alvey

A few friends and family have been curious about how long it’s taken for me to decide to write a historical mystery. They know full well that my enthusiasm for crime fiction, as well as for the ancient world, goes back decades.

It’s a good question, and I’ve realised that a lot of the answer has to do with research. I learned how to do serious research when I was writing essays as an undergraduate in the 1980s. We got a question from a tutor, along with a reading list, and headed for the Bodleian Library. We looked up those books and journals in the massive card index, flicking through the thousands of cards painstakingly written by generations of librarians. Making a note of the arcane numbers that would tell us where to find what we needed, we went searching the shelves. If we were lucky, the book was there. If we weren’t, there was a green slip with a note of a reading desk number, where the person reading it was sitting. If they’d already finished with the book, we could have it. If not, we went looking for the next one on our list. We soon grew to dread the weeks when it became obvious a whole lot of tutors had included the same book on different reading lists. I soon grew to seriously dislike those few students who would amass six or eight books at once, and insist they were using all of them simultaneously, rather than going through them one at a time, so everyone could get on with their reading.

All of that meant spending hours in the Bodleian. Don’t get me wrong; I loved it. But even living within reach of Oxford’s libraries, committing that amount of time at evenings and weekends really was a non-starter for years, when I had other work and family responsibilities. Besides, no matter how brilliant your idea for a historical mystery might be, no one’s going to give you a reading list to help you do the right research. And you really do need to do the research. Getting a seemingly insignificant detail wrong can throw a reader out of a book completely, while making a factual error can bring the central premise of a plot crashing down. It doesn’t happen often, thankfully, but I’ve come across too many instances in my own reading to be ready to risk it. So that doubles the research challenge, when you need to work out what you need to know, before you can even go searching for it.

So what changed? New technology arrived! Go into the Bodleian nowadays, and that great card index is long gone. Computer screens invite you to search the online catalogue, though you don’t often see people using them, because Wi-Fi means you can do that direct from your laptop. You can do it from home, before you even head for the library. More than that, you can search for the key words that help pinpoint what you need to read. Descriptions of books and papers generally indicate if they’ve got what you’re looking for, and equally usefully, if not. I’ll have my list of selected shelf references ready before I even set foot in the library these days. If the book’s not on the shelf? Increasingly, that’s no problem either, because there’s also an electronic version that I can access from my laptop or tablet.

That’s not all. Reading papers from learned journals frequently used to mean braving the Bodleian’s wheeled wooden library steps to get unwieldy volumes down from the reading room’s higher shelves. These days, so many publications, institutions and individual academics make their research available online through websites like JSTOR and Academia.edu. Once again, I can search for key words. I can download papers and read them at my own convenience. When I check a bibliography, and spot what looks like a potentially useful book for more detailed reading, I can look that up online as well, and see if it’s got what I need.

All of this has made getting up to date with current scholarship on Classical Athens possible. It would have been far, far more difficult ten, or even five, years ago. I’ve been able to discover all sorts of fascinating things that are just crying out to be used as a motive for murder. Equally important, I’ve been able to double-check the things that it seems we don’t yet know, so I can be confident (fingers crossed) that I’m free to invent something plausible.

Though rest assured, you need not worry that Shadows in Athens is going to feel like some textbook. The generous quotes from advance readers should make that quite clear. That’s because I’m still enjoying fast-paced, inventive and absorbing crime novels, ancient and modern, from a wide range of writers. That’s equally vital reading, because those books constantly remind me that it’s the people, the place and the plot that make a good crime novel. That’s what all this research must serve, first and last, and I’m not about to forget it.

This hasn’t been said to me (yet), but I’ve heard variations on this opinion from panels and in questions at literary festivals and in interviews. It often crops up when someone writing contemporary crime fiction has discussed the undeniable challenges of incorporating accurate forensic science without getting bogged down in pages of technical detail. It’s tempting to think that life would be so much simpler without fingerprints, DNA and the like.

Whose life? The murderer’s maybe, but not the writer’s. Whatever the investigative tools to hand, the same questions must be answered to solve a crime in any period: means, motive and opportunity. How, why and who? There’s a reason the ‘how’ comes first. As Lord Peter Wimsey says in ‘Busman’s Honeymoon’, when you know how, you know who.

Motive matters, of course it does, and we can thank Cicero for coining the phrase “cui bono?” ‒ who benefits? That hasn’t changed since antiquity and our historical detective can make good progress in narrowing the field of suspects by asking intelligent questions, making connections, and finding out who had good reason to want the victim dead.

The next step is checking for opportunity, by ruling potential killers in or out, by checking who’s got an alibi – more Latin! Though that has its challenges in days of whatever yore, without today’s CCTV and mobile phones, without Golden Age crime fiction’s useful train tickets and telegrams, and everything else in between. There are only so many convenient beggars or passers-by that a history mystery writer can expect to get away with as witnesses, whether they’re proving where the killer was, or if some hapless suspect needs to prove that’s where they weren’t. That’s before we get on to the problems of exactly when the killer or innocent suspect was seen. Sundials may be ancient technology which still works today, but they’re not exactly precise.

But unless a mystery novel’s protagonist can demonstrate how a murder was committed, and that the prime suspect must be the one who did it, all they have got is suspicion. Without fingerprints, who can tell who was the last to hold a knife or a sword? Without modern medicine, who’s to say whether someone died of appendicitis or poison? With no lab to offer chemical analysis of those peculiar smears on the corpse’s clothes, how to locate a crucial crime scene? What’s the history mystery writer to do?

The answer’s the same as it is for the contemporary crime writer. Research. We need to remember that pre-modern doesn’t mean the same as primitive. Start researching ancient medicine, arts, crafts, weapons and transport, and you soon learn that experts in their field had a detailed and sophisticated understanding of a whole lot of things. Things that can be used to pinpoint whodunnit, because the killer needed to know something specific to do whatever it was. Some crucial art or craft may lead to a physical characteristic or occupational injury of the sort we rarely see today, that condemns the guilty man – or woman. The more reading you do, the more possible plots and twists and turns appear.

At this point, the history mystery author faces the same challenge as the diligent contemporary crime writer. How not to bore your readers rigid with all the fascinating stuff you’ve just discovered. The temptation is the same, whether it’s the intricacies of modern mass spectrometry, or the multiple processes involved in tanning animal hides in a pre-industrial world.

Well, I can assure you that, while Philocles’ family business is indeed leather working, the amount of detail about that has been pared down in each successive draft of Shadows of Athens. As for anything else – no spoilers!