Why is Ancient Rome is such a good setting good for historical mysteries? When tackled by would-be authors I always advise, perhaps mischievously, that they should choose an original background, one nobody has used else so far; that was what I, in my innocence, did. When I want to be really wicked to wannabes, I do suggest, ‘Consider the Hittites’.
So why not them? I think, because most of us don’t feel confident we know where, when or how these Hittites lived, what they looked like, or why they were significant. How did they behave? Weren’t they warlike? (That would not bode well for ‘cosies’.) If you enjoy the books, can you go on holiday there? Well, yes you can, but seeing the sights and sites of the Hittites may not be at the top of many lists.
In my experience, readers want somewhere attractive, where they know a little, so they feel safe, yet they would welcome more about it. This immediately gives the Romans a headstart: even though they flourished 2000 years ago, we know about those people and their world, firstly because they left us written texts in a language we can decipher, texts that discuss their history, social aspirations, and behaviour good and bad. Bad is good for mysteries! For them, Rome was Top City and they intended people in future to know. You have to apply filters because their surviving works are the produce of elite male authors, often with bias. Histories etc are generally intended to sneer at whoever was beaten in the battles, imperial family sagas or court cases under discussion. Love poets are rarely reliable, though Ovid is marvellous on practical ways to attract new lovers, even warning that the wrong hair dye may cause a girl’s hair to fall out. Satirists, my favourite, tell stupendously brazen lies, but they are just trying to earn a crust, as of course am I. It makes them a colourful read, which helps no end. I am not joking there, because I strongly believe if an author is having fun with their research, it will come through to engage and entertain readers. That has always been so, but never more than during the pandemic lockdown.
For Rome we also have an archaeological heritage that really counts. For my readers in Britain and Europe, the Romans were ‘ours’ – a formative part of domestic history. It’s all the better in Britain because under Queen Boudicca we came very close to kicking them out, so we can hold up our heads and mutter ‘it’s not the winning, it’s the taking part’ – after which we study Roman Britain as if it were just one more phase of the Bronze Age and nothing to do with invading colonialists.
The main archaeological bonus, unlike anything from other periods, is that in AD/CE79 Mount Vesuvius unexpectedly exploded. In the Bay of Naples area, we have an exceptional time capsule of daily life, right down to what happened to be cooking on stoves. We can imagine what it was like to live there at all levels of society. In Roman mysteries, events can always occur in the famous monuments with their glittering white columns, but Naples is an even better resource when you are placing witnesses and suspects who will after all, spend most of their time in houses, at the baths or in shops or bars. Bars were everywhere because only the rich had their own kitchens. Wonderfully, we know how these fastfood places worked, what they sold, even how much it cost: “wine one as (small change), best wine two, or Falernian four”. Sleeping with the waitress or buying hay for your mule would be. We know all this from a written bill – and bills are the kind of evidence detectives can find.
Rome had a codified legal system from earliest times, which is good. As ever, lawyers did well. If our detective solves a crime which goes to the special murder court, it will be 250 denarii for an advocate opening a case, and 1000 denarii for pleading it – at a time when a sewer-cleaner earned 25 denarii a day. I have never found details of what an informer, or private detective, might charge, but you can work it from the prices of staples – which for the glum ’tec means, the cost of enough wine to forget the proverbial misery of his or her investigative life. A detective who isn’t moaning about this misery isn’t worth writing or reading about.
For historical mysteries we need crimes. What is the earliest anecdote about ancient Rome? Romulus murdering his twin brother. A ‘domestic’. Quickly followed, let us not forget, by the rape of the Sabine women. Romulus actually peopled his new city by making it a haven for runaways and criminals—giving it a lively character from the off. Textbooks imply Roman society was tightly structured; you were a citizen or a slave and, if a citizen, you were patrician, plebian or that curiosity in between where better jobs and most trade occurred. Textbooks sometimes fail to stress that it was perfectly possibly with energy and talent to move between these social layers; an extreme example is Narcissus, under the Emperor Claudius, who was born a slave but rose to run the Empire and to become astonishingly rich. It seems likely that Narcissus became so rich from accepting bribes. More good news for the crimewriter: where people can upgrade themselves legitimately, there are bound to be others using illegitimate methods. And if you accept that human nature never changes, there will always be material because there will always be greed and jealousy, political, personal, financial and sexual.
It is revealing that they had a special court for murder cases. This had evolved in a period when gangsters and hooligans ruled the streets; from dealing with thugs who carried knives it went on to specialize also in poisonings. Rome had a nervous view of any kind of drug, allied to its loathing of magic. Possessing someone’s horoscope implied a sinister interest in when and how they might die… Most murders are family affairs, of course, and the Romans were keen on family.
While there was leniency for accidental killing, ‘going equipped’, ie carrying a dangerous weapon, implied forethought and intent. There would be urgency to avoid detection because intentional murder carried the death sentence. At one end of society this could be the slow way as a slave in the mines or the faster way facing wild beasts in the arena; at a more elite level the criminal might be allowed to commit suicide, the ‘honourable’ exit, or else be given ‘time to depart’. That meant grabbing as much money as possible then racing into exile because, for a Roman, being forced to live outside the empire was considered as awful as death itself. If you had enough money, you could probably put up with it; it would only be like fleeing today to somewhere that has no extradition treaty with your own country.
So the main question we’re left with is did they have private eyes? Of course they did, those excellent Romans knew what society needs! The basic delator must have developed from a court hack delivering subpoenas to something more like an ambulance-chaser: working for lawyers who specialised in personal attacks for monetary gain, or eventually even prosecuting victims. Bad emperors used them and took a huge cut of the proceeds, good ones claimed they didn’t. This meant ‘informers’ became despised creatures, which is good news for writing mysteries because they can be viewed by us as classic down-at-heel gumshoes. They struggle to find answers in their work, they struggle financially even when they find cases to investigate. They are outside the law-and-order framework so must find ways to work with the official ‘police’ (the vigiles and other, generally crude, paramilitary forces). Personally, I’ve always loved that interplay.
I hope I’ve said enough to show why Rome works so well. Best of all, in my opinion is that this great ancient city was full of not only striding highways but evil alleys and that mesh of unlit, untidy, ordinary roads where all kinds of colourful characters perambulated. Mean streets, down which my hero (Falco) or heroine (Flavia Albia) must go. They must, because Rome was a city that prided itself upon ideals, so it must have produced what the mystery-writer needs: investigators with idealism, tenacity and guts, who were in Chandler’s immortal words not mean themselves, and neither tarnished nor afraid.
***
