Falco: The Official Companion (A Marcus Didius Falco Mystery)

by Lindsey Davis

  In modern detective writing the ‘gritty’ protagonist is frequently a depressed alcoholic chain-smoker, with a failed marriage and disastrous parental relationships, at odds with the boss and unable to handle subordinates. I could not have spent twenty years with that; Falco scoffs: I had met informers who implied that to succeed they needed not just sore feet, a hangover, a sorry love life and some progressive disease, but a dour, depressing outlook too. I disagree. The work provides enough misery. Being happy gives a boost that can help solve cases. Confidence counts. [LAP] However, he never forgets the downside: Bratta showed his teeth. They were a sorry set. Too much bad food munched at cheap food stalls while he was watching people and places. The usual. He was one of us all right. [AC]

  As time went by I gained enough confidence to make fun of the genre. There are occasions, usually when Falco addresses us directly, when he and I mock traditional crime novel clichés. I had made him drunk. Now I had to sober him up again. That’s because the theory is wrong. When you bring a witness to the point of passing out, he does not know he is supposed to tell you all before he quits – he just goes ahead and drifts into oblivion … [JM] Eventually we reach the double-take, where our hero, loosely undercover as a playwright, acts in a play as himself: My role was tiresome. I played the informer. In this otherwise witty satire, my character creeps in after the ghastly poet, the twisting fortune-teller, the rebellious youth and the cranky philosopher, grumbles Falco (incidentally listing the kind of cast I am prone to using). Once they have come to Cloud-cuckoo-land and all been seen off by the Athenians, an informer tries his luck. Like mine, his luck is in short supply, to the delight of the audience. [LAP]

  The Workload

  Many of the murders and frauds Falco has to investigate are unusual, as is common in mystery novels. Regarding murders, he is always conscious that most unnatural deaths occur for trivial reasons amongst close acquaintances. In Nemesis, where he will be thinking about families and crime, he asks very early in the book: Why are more kitchen cleavers not sunk between the fat shoulders of appalling uncles who get the slaves pregnant? Or that sneaky sister who shamelessly grabs the most desirable bedroom, with its glimpse of a corner of the Temple of Divine Claudius and almost no cracks in the walls? Or the crude son who farts uncontrollably, however many times he is told … It’s not the first time he has mused gloomily like this: Cronies fall out. They sit in a tavern having a drink, then they quarrel about money, or women, or political philosophy, or simply about whether their boat home leaves on Tuesday or Thursday. Then it’s natural that somebody gets stabbed and his pal legs it … [PG]

  For other kinds of crime, especially deception by confidence tricksters, I am heavily influenced by what Latin authors say. Clearly Rome was full of chancers. According to Horace, wills were eyed up jealously:

  You must fish cunningly around

  For old men’s wills. If one or two are clever enough to nibble

  The bait off the hook and escape your clutches, don’t give up hope …

  Juvenal adds other disreputable types:

  Don’t you just want to cram whole notebooks with scribbled invective

  When you stand at a corner and see some forger carried past

  On the necks of six porters, lounging back like Maecenas

  In his open litter? A counterfeit seal, a will, a mere scrap

  Of paper – these were enough to convert him to wealth and honour.

  Do you see that distinguished lady? She has the perfect dose

  For a thirsty husband – old wine with a dash of toad’s blood.

  Since official forces of law and order exist, Falco inevitably gets cases where the crime has been cunningly disguised, the victim has no one to speak for them, or the mystery is so old nobody else thinks it can be solved.

  Clients

  They come pleading with you to save their skins, then when you’ve given up weeks of hard effort for some pitiful reward, you take them the answer and they stare at you as if you are mad to bother them with these puny facts … [PG]

  While they are working as partners, Petronius Longus devises an advertisement (which disgusts Falco) where he claims they offer a select service for discerning clients, making specialist enquiries, and offering no charge for preliminary consultation. As Falco fears, they are inundated with unsuitable customers and he has to admit, I hate barristers, but their work might make the difference between survival and going under. [THF] We see him taking legal casework at the beginning of The Accusers.

  They saw us as devious political sneaks; we knew they were incompetent thugs. They could put out fires. We possessed more sophisticated expertise. [OB]

  Falco does constant routine work that he never bothers to tell us about. He has been hired by all sorts, from the Emperor, through the vigiles when they are shorthanded, down to freedmen; a six-year-old girl tries to hire him in One Virgin Too Many but he puts her off. He will investigate corruption or serial killings for the state, but the ultimate Falco client tends to be an oddball who comes uninvited, with a case that sounds ghastly (yet is compelling), where the fee is uncertain, the encounters annoying and dangerous, the outcome most likely disappointing.

  Skills

  In writing about an ancient period, there are benefits; you don’t need knowledge of modern ballistics or forensic science. Falco has to ‘keep ’em peeled’: eyes, ears, nose (my smells!). That, plus understanding human nature, will see him through. He says pragmatically: Investigating consists mainly of failure. You need thick boots and a strong heart, plus an infinite capacity for staying awake while parked in a draughty pergola, hoping that that strange scuttling sound is only a rat, not a man with a knife, though all the time you know that even if the person you are watching for ever does turn up, they will be a dead loss … [PG]

  I have tried to deduce actions an informer could take: checking public records, looking up geographical information at a public library, looking for a missing person at the Aesculapius hospital on Tiber Island or seeing if they have been arrested by the vigiles. Falco knows useful people personally – or he knows Rome enough to winkle out those who hold information.

  He likes to give us professional insights, for instance when discussing the rather strait-laced Marius Optatus: Some people are eager to gossip, but a few unusual souls do find discussing their neighbours distasteful. These are the ones who are best value to an informer. They are offended by offers of payment, and better still they tell the truth. [DLC] Or, Many a craftsman’s lock-up is overrun by children; people dislike being interviewed about their life-or-death problems while an energetic baby hurls porridge at their knees. [OVTM] And: I was hoping that the witness would cave in out of sheer anxiety. In life, they never do. [BBH] Or: She spoke like a woman who was being quite honest. Women who are lying always know just how to do that. Above all, Falco’s take on the job is humane:

  ‘When I look at a corpse I remember “he must have parents somewhere; he may have had a wife.” If I can, I find them. I tell them what happened. I try to be quick; most people want time to react alone. But some of them come back to me afterwards and ask for details all over again. That’s bad enough.’

  ‘What’s worse?’

  ‘Thinking about the ones who want to ask but never come.’ [SB]

  In the Appendix, I have reproduced a recent archaeological find, tentatively translated as The Forum Informer’s Handbook, though it may be spurious.

  Some Other Aspects of Roman Life

  I can’t produce a Roman encyclopaedia, but these are subjects people regularly ask about:

  The Roman Home (and Its Frequent Refurbishment!)

  The Roman domus turned a blind, unbroken wall on the street and all its doors and windows opened on its interior courts. The insula, on the other hand, opened always to the outside and when it formed a quadrilateral around a central courtyard, its doors, windows, and staircases opened both to the outside and to the inside. The domus was composed of halls whose proportions were calculated once
for all and dictated by custom in advance. These halls opened off each other in an invariable order: fauces, atrium, alae, triclinium, tablinium (doorway, hall, colonnades, dining room, and terrace) and peristyle. The insula combined a number of cenacula, that is to say, distinct and separate dwellings like our ‘flats’ or ‘apartments’, consisting of rooms not assigned in advance to any particular function. The plan of each storey was apt to be identical to that above and below, the rooms being superimposed from top to bottom of the building.

  This was my template from the outset, from Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome. It gave me both tenements and grand houses. My task was to show that most people lived in tenements, so grand houses would be, for a man like Falco, a matter of wonder, envy and distrust. I found it easy to impose squalor on the tenements; I trowel on dirt, pongs, crawlies, noise, fear. Andrew Wallace-Hadrill’s work on the houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum helped firm up my vision of wealthier spreads with their frescos and gasp-inducing sightlines; For example, A public figure went home not so much to shield himself from the public gaze as to present himself to it in the best light.

  We know from premises where builders were at work when Vesuvius erupted that places were frequently rearranged, refurbished and rebuilt for new uses. Jobbing craftsmen with various levels of competence must have swarmed everywhere, exploiting general fashions or owners’ personal taste. This proved topical to write about in the age of the TV makeover (how Roman designers would have swooned over feng shui and that darling, the ‘colour accent cushion’). It also fits my own life as a home-owner, with its glorious highlights of Fruiting Bodies, putting up an Anaglypta frieze, and those energy-sapping encounters with swine who inspired Gloccus and Cotta. For legal reasons I cannot reveal from whom I recovered the price of a defunct central heating boiler using the Small Claims Court; threatening to name the maker at all my public events and saying I would have better service from a Roman hypocaust did work. This was a highly satisfactory by-product of writing the Falco series.

  To illustrate Roman curse tablets, try this:

  I curse Peter and Kevin and Roy and Young Roy and their life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and their words, thoughts and memory … May he who cheated me over the gravity-feed hot water tank become as liquid as water!

  DAVIS

  Food and Drink

  First there comes the complex science of flavours which has to be mastered.

  And it isn’t enough to sweep fish off an expensive slab

  Without knowing which are better with sauce and which should be grilled

  HORACE

  It’s vital to remember that Roman food included nothing from the New World. No tomatoes, pasta, potatoes, aubergines, peppers, sunflower seeds, and certainly no cocoa, chocolate or real ice cream – ruling out the main ingredients of modern Italian cuisine. There was no sugar, but people used a great deal of honey.

  Think Roman, think Apicius. Think several of them, though the original lived early in the First Century; Falco can go to dinner parties and eat such lush cuisine – Roast Kid stuffed with Ginger Sausage, Peas Vitellian, Sea Urchins in Wine Sauce. I’ve had fun implying that a Chicken Vardanus or Chicken Frontinian might be spoken of like Chicken Biryani or Chicken Tikka …

  Most people ate more simply, as Falco does normally. Cooking at home for many was frying in a skillet or boiling in a saucepan; grilling was feasible on a kind of indoor barbecue but Falco has to build his own. It was healthy food, using fresh ingredients from markets; there was meat if you could afford it, fish and shellfish, dry-cured meats and sausages, vegetables and fruit, salads and herbs; not much dairy, though various cheeses. Needing an oven meant taking your food to a baker at the end of the day, just as it did throughout more modern history for the urban poor.

  Otherwise, people ate at the many ‘fast food’ outlets we see in archaeological remains, or bought snacks from pedlars’ trays of pies and sausages. Not good for cholesterol – though frescos don’t show many as obese. They probably worked too hard.

  Caupona, popina or thermopolium? – well, what’s the difference between a café, a trattoria and a hosteria? I tend to use ‘caupona’, a shop, inn or tavern, consistently for streetside snack or wine bars, to avoid confusion. Strictly speaking, a thermopolium served hot drinks and a popina was an eating house. Most would have offered sexual services upstairs because the definition of a waitress had the same connotations as ‘masseur’ nowadays.

  Typical caupona counter pots

  A Lucanian Sausage was clearly a loukaniko. When I say ‘rissole’ I mean something equivalent to a doner kebab. When I say ‘big rissole’ I mean either a bumper kebab or a master criminal.

  For Roman writers, shorthand for luxury was a turbot. Yes, I cooked one; it was delicious. Caraway sauce may be an acquired taste.

  Americans get confused by ‘corn’ – which amazes us in Europe with our much older languages and wider world view …

  Garum/liquamen

  A perennial curiosity! Sally Grainger needs almost fifteen pages to untangle Roman fish sauces, so I am at the edge of my précis skills here.

  Evidence from Pompeii attests the wide use of garum and liquamen which may, or may not, be the same thing. There were different versions, perhaps many. My mum, without question, would have boiled up her own in a saucepan at home (especially when she was bookkeeping for a stall at the fish market!).

  The finest was a gourmet’s condiment, but humble houses and foodshops used fish sauce. It could be made from whole small fish (dissolved), from entrails and/or blood or chopped parts (fermented in the sun); it probably had extremely fresh ingredients, so because of the fast-acting salt was less smelly than we think. Mackerel was a preferred base. It could be made in barrels or amphorae, with the fish layered with salt and herbs, or on an industrial scale in tanks. The fermentation time could be thirty days or three months. When the liquid sauce cleared, a thick paste, called allec, formed at the bottom of the container; this was a real fermented ‘pickle’ and had different uses.

  Spain was a centre for fish sauce production. In A Dying Light in Corduba, Falco mentions that the best came from Cadiz; there was a version considered inferior, called Muria (tuna based).

  If you are recreating Roman food, either anchovy essence or the Far Eastern nam pla or nuoc mam are reckoned acceptable substitutes. I imagine boys slathered it on as heavily as modern teenagers do ketchup.

  Silphium

  The so-called silphium was disgusting. Still, nobody eats raw garlic, and I myself had a high disdain for truffles. Owning a world monopoly was the aim. Luxuries only have to be scarce, not nice. Participants’ enjoyment is in thinking they have something other people can’t acquire or afford. [TFL]

  Silphium, a large plant, was so highly prized that the city of Cyrene, which controlled the trade, had its emblem on coins. Its uses were many. It became extinct either through over-cropping or because the local tribes wanted the land; Nero was supposed to have eaten the last shoot. An inferior alternative is said to be asafoetida.

  When Helen and I were in Libya, we heard rumours that silphium was growing again, around Tobruk, on land which has lain undisturbed because it is heavily infested with landmines. We met the proverbial man who knew a man who had seen it … we never saw it ourselves.

  Drinks

  What did people drink when they had no tea, coffee or soft drinks, when less milk is drunk around the warm Mediterranean than in Northern Europe, and when water was unpurified? It’s a problem for historical novelists. I think people must have drunk the water regardless of flies, sewage and dead sheep. Mulsum (wine mixed with honey, sometimes diluted like cordial) may have been fairly common and was a staple for soldiers. I have Falco and Helena frequently imbibe herbal tisanes, but clearly they are cranks.

  Of course there was wine. Respectable people diluted it, though Falco has a fad of taking his water in a separate beaker. Wine could be sweetened with honey or flavoured with herbs. I use aut
hentic varieties: Falernian, Setinum, Caecubian, rotgut … Because vineyards across Europe were devastated by the phylloxera epidemic in the late Nineteenth Century (the bugs were introduced from America where vines were resistant), it is almost impossible to drink the same wine as the Romans, though it seems to me that grapes grown on the same soil and in the same sun may produce a vintage in the same spirit.

  Fine wines were kept to a great age, for example twenty years. I assume people also drank much younger wines, particularly in a domestic setting where they may have produced their own or had it sent to town by country relatives. There is a strong Mediterranean tradition that everyone, including children, drinks well-watered local wine with meals. People everywhere liked the stuff; it was traded over long distances.

  The Daily Gazette, or Acta Diurna

  No middle-ranker passes on without an announcement in the Daily Gazette to warn the gods in Hades that the shade of an eminent person is expecting the best seat in Charon’s ferryboat … [SB]

  See under ‘Novels’, Scandal Takes a Holiday.

  Games

  The Romans had several board games, of which the best known are latrunculi, or Soldiers, and duodecim scripta, or Twelve Lines; the former was probably like chess or draughts and the latter akin to backgammon. Numerous sets of counters in two colours have been found at archaeological sites, with occasional evidence of playing boards; examples are scratched by the Basilica Julia in Rome. While despondent and wounded in The Silver Pigs, Falco has to fill in time playing draughts and says he hates board games, especially when playing against an Egyptian physician who always wins.