"My books have given comfort to people" – interview with Lindsey Davis

What was your inspiration to create Falko? How does it begin?
I was trying to be a writer, looking for something quite original. (You are not supposed to do that; you are meant to copy some established author, or publishers are terrified). I enjoyed Roman archeology and had the idea for a kind of private eye set in the great city of Rome, which equates to the classic metropolitan settings of ‘gumshoe’ novels. It was a joke to begin with, but I do try to be authentic as well.

So you are interested history and Roman Empire…
Yes, I think most English people who like history feel that the Romans, who ran our country for nearly five hundred years, are in some way ‘ours’. I like many aspects of their culture too.

Since 1989, you wrote 20 books about Falko stories. Do you plan do write next one?
All I know is that after writing the 20th Falco novel (Nemesis) and aslo Falco: the Official Companion in the same year, I need a breather. I do write other things, for instance my epic novel Rebels and Traitors, which is set in the English Civil War and Commonwealth of the Seventeenth Century. Whatever I do next will be a different kind of book.

Andrew Tayor told me, writing novels, criminal stories is lonely job for him. Do you have this same mind? Why did you decide to be a writer?
I always enjoyed writing and was probably born to do it. I probably do have a fairly solitary nature. It is a job where you have to go into your room and get the work done by yourself, and I understand what Andrew means. I don’t share the current fads for constant consultation with ‘peer groups’. A good writer has to have a strong sense of what they want to say and how it must be done, and that is sometimes quite lonely. I never talk about my work until it’s finished, so for most of a year, I have a project that’s only mine.

I found information you’ve been in all places, where you set the stories . Is it true?
I include visiting places as part of the research for a book. Apart from the fact I enjoy doing it, you can get the best sense of a place and unexpected ideas if you go there. But it is not true that I have been to every town my characters have visited, just some.

In my personal opinion the best advantage of your books are dynamic action and… Falko charakter, but… sometimes I have impression, your ancient heroes from your books think and behave like people from XXI century …
I do think it’s important in historical novels to show that human nature rarely changes, but I also think you’re wrong. Falco spends a great deal of time pondering specifically what it means to be a Roman. I can generally show that what my characters do or say is in fact shadowed in historical evidence or Latin texts (in the writers I mention above, for instance) and that most of them were not boringly ‘noble’.
Besides, the very starting point of my books is light-hearted; the Romans didn’t have detectives. In my ‘straight’ Roman novel The Course of Honour do you think anything happens that is from the XXI century (or XX century, which is when most of my books were written)?

You won the Sherlock Award for the Best Comic Detective in 2000 for Didius Falco. Did you expect that? What does mean for you?
No, I didn’t expect it and was thrilled. I wish that in general historuical novels were more seriously regarded by critics.

What do you think about Agatha Christie? Do you like her books?
I am not a huge fan, though you have to respect her achievement. My favourite Christie is her autobiographical book, Come tell me how you live – which you might expect me to like as it is to a great extent about archaeology (her life with Max Mallowan). But I think she shows more humour in it than in her detective novels, and that’s a good thing.

What is your favorite writer? Do you know any polish authors?
I’m afraid I don’t know many Polish authors, unfortunately. And I never like saying who my favourites are because I like different ones for different moods and different times of my life.

What can you say about Publius Vergilius, Gaius Suetonius, Juvenal?
I like Juvenal the best of those, use Suetonius very heavily for my portratits of the Flavian emperors, enjoy Virgil – but why pick out those three? What about Martial, Seneca, Tacitus, Horace? Notice I’m much slower to mention Cicero, Catullus and that awful prig Pliny the Younger...

Do you have some habits during work?
I don’t have a rigid timetable. The fact is that I have written at least a novel a year for twenty years, so I am very disciplined, because that’s a huge output. I don’t waste time, or effort.

Do you get some messages from your fans?
Yes, I have always heard from my readers, since long before email made it easy. Some leters are very moving, because my books have given comfort to people in terrible circumstances. And some are funny. The one I have remembered longest (as has my editor) berated me for use of crude language, but ended up ‘We are not prudes; we are both gynaecologists’. And then there was the one that said a bookseller who couldn’t find me on a computer had deduced I must be dead...

What kind of person you are?
Serious, humorous, observant, scathing, private.

Thank you for conversation.