-Oliver Johnson, Lindsey's Editor

MARCUS DIDIUS FALCO

'My man would not have read the books about the modern fellows, he would not know the rules and therefore need not follow them'

Lindsey Davis' enduring and endearing Ancient Roman detective, Marcus Didius Falco (the Sherlock Holmes magazine's 1999 award for Best Comic Detective) emerged from The Course of Honour, a historical novel written in the mid 80s. Davis, a disaffected Civil Servant and former alumnus of Lady Margaret Hall, submitted it for the Georgette Heyer Prize, then administrated by Jill Black at the Bodley Head. Though Davis' book was the runner up and she didn't get a contract, Black wrote Davis an encouraging letter and this set in motion a train of events that has led to a critically acclaimed series of twelve novels.

A Course of Honour (the author's only non-Falco novel to date and finally published to critical acclaim in 1997) was an account of the Emperor Vespasian's love affair with a freed slave, Antonia Caenis, in the first century. Taking disappointment in her stride and braving what was a notoriously difficult area, ('It was madness to choose the Romans, of course, but I always liked a challenge.' Lindsey Davis Newsletter, Issue 1), Davis began to dwell on what it would have been like to he a 'gumshoe' detective in Ancient Rome, a place not unlike the boomtown West coast cities of Hammett and Chandler's fiction. 'My research into the Rome of the Caesars was what then gave me the idea, partly as a joke of course, to set a typical private eye figure like those of the modern genre among the graceful porticoes and dangerous back lanes of the Golden City two thousand years ago... Just like the classic gumshoes, an 'informer' (a delator) would have to be a street wise dodger living on his wits and by his fists. The living quarters of ancient Rome ... consisted of cramped teeming repetitious apartments where the poorest lived up the most flight of stairs. To this eyrie all kinds of characters could come in the traditional manner, bringing Falco dubious offers of poorly paid work. The vigiles, the night watch, could provide our hero with a Mend in officialdom, that indispensable old pal and contact whom all successful private eyes cultivate.' (From the author's introduction to the new edition of The Silver Pigs, 2000)

The result was The Silver Pigs, published in 1989. Ellis Peters, Rosemary Sutcliff and Antony Price gave the book generous prepublication quotes and the series was off to a flying start. Over the years the Falco books have inspired a whole new fashion for historical mysteries, but Davis' creation remains unique and the standard by which all the others are judged. This is perhaps not only down to the seamless assimilation of painstaking research into her work but also to the depth of characterization she has achieved with her hero.

Falco's character perhaps owes more to the modern gumshoe in the first novel, The Silver Pigs, than in any later one, and much of the humour in the work is down to the author's subtle inversion of the conventions of the private eye novel.

This is nowhere truer that in Davis' dealing with his sexual relationships: 'My man would not have read the books about the modern fellows, he would not know the rules and therefore need not follow them. For instance, although Falco likes women, nobody has told him he is supposed to love them and leave them...' (ibid). It is in The Silver Pigs, on a disastrous mission to Britain where he becomes a forced labourer in one the Empire's notorious silver mines, that Falco meets his long time partner, Helena Justina. Their relationship begins stormily. Helena is recently divorced, damaged by a terrible relationship with her former husband, whom it later transpires is a political conspirator. Falco's wisecracking ways are not well received and he realizes he has more than met his match. The feuding couple returns to Rome via Gaul and it is perhaps one of Davis' greatest feats that she manages to portray a subtle thaw in their relationship, so much so that by the time they reach the Eternal City they are an inseparable item, and remain so throughout the series.

Their partnership effectively establishes the domestic bedrock on which Falco's investigative business is founded. Wherever he wanders, he is often accompanied by Helena and, even when he is not, he, unlike the loners of the 40s novels, can return to a home. At first this is the traditional gumshoe loft in a rickety apartment in Fountain Court in the Aventine district, then a slightly grander apartment over a basket weaver's and on to a fully-fledged mansion on the Janiculan Hill, which Helena secretly acquires (A Virgin Too Many and Ode to a Banker). The couple's relationship is full of wit and gentle satire, which nevertheless veils a deep affection. Helena humanizes Falco's rough diamond. In her company the man who has had to kill for Rome, survived Queen Boudicca's rebellion in Britannia as a legionary and experienced many things that he would sooner forget becomes a self-deprecating softie. Further social comedy is provided by the fact that Helena is from an aristocratic family and Falco a plebeian one and it seems all of Rome, not least Helena's family, heartily disapprove of their cohabitation. The later books see the birth of their two daughters and Falco's elevation to the relative respectability of equestrian rank.

Before then there are many adventures, each involving murder or abduction. The gentle pastiche of 40s gumshoe novels in The Silver Pigs becomes less marked as the series progresses, the scene constantly shifting from the capital to obscure corners of the Empire. The series begins in AD 70. Shadows in Bronze (1990) sees Falco wrapping up the loose ends of the political conspiracy that threatened the Empire in The Silver Pigs. Venus in Copper (1991) involves his first private case, a fortune-hunting redhead menacing some nouveaux riches on the Pincian Hill. In The Iron Hand of Mars (1992) he travels to Germany to sort out Legionary difficulties and woad-covered druids. Poseidon's Gold (1993): the legacy of Falco's heroic (or perhaps not-so-heroic) brother, Festus killed in action in Judea haunts Falco's family. Falco ends up prime suspect when an extortioner is murdered. In Last Act in Palmyra (1994) we see Falco's budding literary ambitions for the first time as he joins a theatrical troupe in the Middle East after fleeing a death sentence imposed by his great enemy Anacrites. Time to Depart, (1995) is the nearest novel to a police procedural in the entire canon. The evil Balbinus is exiled from Rome, but shortly after he leaves, persons unknown reactivate his criminal rackets. A Dying Light in Corduba (1996): a murder of an influential merchant leads Falco to investigate the Baetican olive oil cartel. His first child is born as they return to Rome. There follow the three 'partner' novels in which Falco for the first time employs sidekicks: these are, respectively. his old 'police' friend Petronius Longus, now in disgrace from the force having got too near Balbinus' daughter in Time to Depart; his enemy, the Chief Spy, Anacrites, who his mother foists on him and Camillus Aelianus, one of Helena's haughty brothers. Three Hands in the Fountain (1997): during the celebrations for his newborn child, Falco discovers gruesome human remains in the local water supply. Body parts are cropping up all over Rome's complex aqueduct system: a serial killer is loose. Two for the Lions (1998): ingeniously the first victim is a man-eating lion. Falco investigates the gladiatorial scene and embarks for North Africa where he loses one of his noxious brothers-in-law in the Arena. Incongruously he is forced into partnership with his archenemy Anacrites on the Great Census of AD 74. One Virgin too Many (1999): now relatively wealthy Falco is elevated to equestrian status and is named Procurator of the Sacred Poultry, his introduction to Rome's strange religious cults. A young girl, a candidate to be made a Vestal Virgin, disappears and is possibly murdered. Ode to a Banker (2000) sees Falco's literary ambitions rise to the fore again, this time in an ill-attended poetry reading. His would-be patron ends up dead shortly afterwards. The forthcoming A Body In the Bath House (June, 2001) takes Falco back to Britannia, to what we now know as Fishbourne Palace, then under construction. Murder and malpractice and building site politics keep Falco busy.

Though he inhabits a world nearly two thousand years old, critics have consistently praised Falco and the vast set of characters surrounding him as being entirely alive, more so than characters in novels with 'modern' settings. Outside his relationship with Helena there is Falco's extended family consisting of sisters and hopeless brothers-in-law; the greatest comic creation of them all, Ma, whose matriarchal shadow casts a guilty pall over nearly every one of our hero's actions; there is Falco's raffish auctioneer father who deserted his mother when Falco was seven but who plays an ever-increasing role in the complex family politics of the later books, and a set of eccentric country relatives from the Campania. Outside the family there is Petronius Longus; Anacrites; Falco's sometime employer, the Emperor Vespasian himself and his sons Titus and Dornitian; Helena's parents and their two sons, who become Falco's partners in the later books. All play integral parts in the plots and family drama that seamlessly interweave the novels.

As an investigator, Falco relies primarily on intuition, his charm and good looks (particularly with impressionable barmaids, snake charmers, Virgins and assassins) and the good sense of others (not least Helena) to crack his cases. Readers of conventional crime novels may sometimes be exasperated that investigative strands remain unexplored, and witnesses disappear from the scene before Falco can interview them. However, his clear-up rate is first class. Being from plebeian stock, he is a trenchant Republican even though the Emperor Vespasian often employs him. It is perhaps because Vespasian was a self-made man from relatively humble origins, and completely unlike Claudius and Nero who preceded him, that he hires Falco, usually at deleterious rates, to do the Imperial bidding. like many great fictive heroes his hatred of injustice and hypocrisy forge a universal bond with his latter day readers and make him one of the most endearing of investigators in his age or ours.

This article first appeared in Issue 42 of Sherlock Holmes, The Detective Magazine. For subscriptions and advertising, contact PO Box 1 00, Chichester, West Sussex P018 8HD.