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Content (Issue 7)
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Olympic Endeavours The first foreign country I visited without my parents was Greece. A friend and I went on a school trip - all the more exotic because it was not our school; we took up some spare places in somebody else's group. It is hard to remember now that overseas travel used to be a rare event. Having my own passport was a thrill (I was young enough and daft enough to think I could now run away from home more effectively.) Before we went, our own Latin teacher gave us a wealth of background material on the sites we were to visit and she even had us round to her house where she showed us how to cook moussaka. It is to this intrepid woman that I have dedicated See Delphi and Die. Elys Varney, as she became when she married and left us for her new life in Lincoln (we were outraged at being abandoned!), was young, keen, approachable and loved her subject. She struggled with me, I'm afraid, but her lessons in both Latin and Greek nonetheless left me enthused with the thrill of the classics. Most importantly, at a time when it was viewed as a curious subject, she introduced me to archaeology, which is the fundamental building block of all my Roman novels. Greek baffled me in many ways. I never mastered the language, yet as I started to read up for the new Falco, many of those long-ago lessons came back to me. I still heard in my head Elys telling us the story of Procne, the nightingale. I am sure she must have told us about Pelops too, though with no intention of encouraging my subsequent gory use of that curious myth. (I won't give too much away... ) I have always known that Falco had to go to Greece on one of his regular overseas adventures, and I always supposed it would be a big, complicated book. The Romans clearly had ambiguous feelings about the country they had supplanted as lords of the Mediterranean, a culture that was hugely important to their own, yet whose artistic and philosophical achievement they often pretended to despise. I would be showing a very particular aspect of the ancient world - one great civilisation as viewed askance by another. My eventual inspiration came at the Classical Association conference in 2004. It took as a theme that year's topical subject of the Olympic Games. This, I decided, would be my own main subject, though coupled with something much less serious: the Romans as cultural tourists. Ancient travel would take me right back to that very first visit of my own in the school party - though I would have to invent the Roman equivalent of traipsing for three days by train, sleeping on the luggage rack and tying up the carriage door with string to keep out marauding gigolos. Luckily, ancient authors have left us with plenty of unhappy travel diaries to give me ideas. People always wonder how I do my research, and 2004 was a bumper year for assistance. To compliment the modern Games, which were so co-incidentally in Athens, we had a plethora of documentaries on TV. Film directors had cottoned on to the public's hunger for antiquity and there was much scientific research being done into ancient athletics, through both archaeology and sport. Every time I switched on I was greeted by beautifully oiled muscular actors with long crimped locks a-flying, as they imitated discusthrowers, long-jumpers and runners. Sometimes they were even authentically naked, though in soft focus... Naturally each series had a book written by its consultant academic. I lapped it all up. Then disaster! I had already started. Then I experienced a niggle about the timeline. I had convinced myself I had taken Falco and his companions into AD77, and after much searching with the aid of an expert, I had worked out that that was an Olympic year in Roman times (Nero had messed everything up by changing the traditional cycle so he could compete, if "compete" is the word for his crazy antics). I was already half way through my book when I double-checked, and suddenly remembered we were only in AD76... I did consult my editor about whether to dump the entire synopsis and work-in-progress, but time was against me. I am a last minute sprinter myself, racing to meet my deadline; anyway, a research trip to Olympia had already entranced me once again. I wanted to do Greece. I was ready for it. Falco was jolly well going there, come what may. A solution was easy, in fact: knowing that the ancient Olympics were crowded and truly horrid, I reckoned it would be easier for my travellers to visit when the site was empty. Besides, it was all too likely that the nightmare tour company they were investigating, Seven Sights Travel (you may yet see these shysters pilloried on Watchdog), would want to take its customers out of season and on the cheap... Not so easy to combat was the fact that when I visited Olympia, the glorious site had been equipped with a wonderful new museum - which strangely contained very little about athletics. Oops again! All the sports equipment I wanted to see was in a special temporary exhibition, to complement the modern Games - in Athens. I would have to go back to Greece again (I always say it is best to do two site visits, one when I have finished the book and know what I actually need to see). Unfortunately the Athens exhibition was due to end on the very day of my deadline... Of course I went to Athens anyway. Just for a couple of days. We walked up the Parthenon, like Falco and Helena. For once it was even the right time of year for the story, so I could do accurate weather. And yes, the exhibition was worthwhile. For one thing, in almost the last case we looked at, I found my murder weapon.
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