My Weekly Book

[Written by guest blogger Random]

It’s always satisfying when you meet someone you’ve long admired from afar and they turn out to be exactly as you’d expected them to be.

We’ve been fans of the writer Lindsey Davis since about 1990, when we saw a copy of her first novel, The Silver Pigs, in the gift shop at Lullingstone Roman Villa and thought “that looks interesting”. And we were right, it was.

[Search for Lindsey Davis’ books on eBay]

On one level, the Falco novels are classic hardboiled detective fiction, with hero Marcus Didius Falco clearly owing a debt to Philip Marlowe as he investigates conspiracies, skulduggery, dead blondes and dangerous widows. The mean streets he prowls, however, are not 1940s America but the Rome of AD70 onwards, when the Eternal City was still looking nervously over its collective shoulder at the terror of Nero and the chaos of the year of the four emperors.

And adding depth and humour to the mix is Falco’s family - Marlowe never had to put up with a tyrannical mother, a feckless auctioneer father (estranged), a military hero brother (deceased) and a clutch of scathing sisters with dreadful husbands and tribes of offspring who’ve been taught their Uncle Marcus is Rome’s biggest joke.

Davis herself has a website, a good one, which positively hums with her presence - try the postbag, or the “rants” page where she has some choice words to say to readers (often American) who write in demanding “corrections” to supposed errors in her vocabulary.

Let’s get it straight now. I will correct mistakes, inconsistencies and passages that even I can’t understand in retrospect. Otherwise, don’t even ask. The Falco books are English in origin. Their ‘voice’ is not only English, but narrowly defined on occasions right down to the bolshie British Midlands, in the mid Twentieth Century, with influences from BBC Radio and middle class girls’ education. This voice is crucial. If it means readers have to stretch themselves, then gung ho and jolly good show. Bolshie is another word implying the onset of a colourful argument; that will be obvious from the context. Enough said.

I love this no-nonsense tone - if anyone ever told her to moderate it for fear of alienating delicate readers, they didn’t get very far. And the result, predictably, is an army of loyal fans who know what to expect from her: lively, intelligent novels with humour, strong female characters, a disdain for respectable conventionality and a very human perspective, books that know exactly how seriously to take themselves without either selling the reader short with shallowness or giving themselves pretentions. It’s all there in the website.

Turns out, it’s all there in person too.

Back in July, Astrofiammante and I went to an open day at Reading University’s annual excavation of Silchester Roman Town. The archaeology was fascinating, the weather dismal - there are some photos on my blog here.

As you’ll know by now if you went to look at them before reading on, Lindsey Davis was there too. She was giving a reading from her latest Falco novel, See Delphi and Die, talking for a bit about her career, and answering questions. Afterwards she signed autographs - the few people who approached her beforehand, as she ate what appeared to be a rather appetising lunch from a practical plastic pot, were politely but firmly shooed away.

Davis is an accomplished speaker - not for her the shy aesthete blinking nervously at the sight of her public - and her ‘voice’ as a speaker is very much along the lines of the writer’s voice outlined in the quote from her website above. Like one of the better sorts of college lecturers, she makes material she has certainly delivered before, and undoubtedly will deliver again, sound as if it’s fresh and interesting and educational to her and, by extension, to her audience. Even when she was asked whether Falco would be killed off in the Vesuvius eruption - a question she must have heard a thousand times before, and a logical impossibility given that her hero narrates the stories from later life and mentions the destruction of Pompeii - she managed to answer as if the idea was new and exciting.

Possibly, if you had already read every single thing Davis has written or said about her work - her publisher’s newsletters and guide to The Silver Pigs, her website, the witty reading group notes she supplied for Three Hands in the Fountain - then you would have come away from her talk wondering if you had learned anything new. Possibly. Certainly, I asked one question that I later found the answer to in a publisher’s newsletter, which made me feel an arse for not already knowing. But that isn’t really the point. The point is that, when you hear it from the author herself, it all fits together into a narrative.

If you had read everything, one thing you would certainly have learned is that when Davis finds a good phrase then - like a teacher or politician - she isn’t afraid to reuse it. For example, this or something very like it crops up quite often, and is key:

I hope the historical detail is accurate, because otherwise I may as well write science fiction or fantasy and invent everything - but part of the fun is the interlayering of perspectives: relating the ancient world to modern life, contrasting what a fairly macho Roman male thinks (or says he thinks) with what it can be deduced his fairly feminist English author believes (or wants you to think she believes).

And there you have it in a nutshell, really - she knows what she wants her audience to believe, and how much she wants them to know about her past and her career and the way she works, and how far to let them in so they go home happy. The modern, Heat magazine / reality TV notion of celebrity - whereby the person in the public eye opens themselves up completely and lets their fans pick through their entrails and assert their own reading of what the celeb stands for - is clearly utterly alien to her. Sure, you can go to her readings to sit at her feet and look starry-eyed (and write hagiographic blog posts afterwards), but one gets the sense that, if her audience did nothing but that, she would feel she had failed.

Practical and businesslike, she parcels up her experiences and dispenses them in easily-digestible chunks through which run the key themes that she feels passionate about - the importance for women of education and ambition, the pleasure to be had in the English language, the significance of the individual voice and - by extension - opposition to the tyranny of conformity.

Lindsey Davis enjoys playing games with her readers, fights a running battle to stop her books being taught as textbooks to ancient Rome and loudly asserts that detective novels exist to be escapist fun, not the subject of serious-minded over-analysis. But anyone who takes this to mean that they, or their author, are mere fluff and fripperies would be very gravely mistaken.

The author and her public
Lindsey Davis signs autographs for fans after her talk, held in the marquee where off-duty diggers eat, rest and - to judge from the stereo on the other side of the tent - party after hours.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 29th, 2006 at 9:07 pm and is filed under Encounters, Other People. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.