Janet’s official obit is being written elsewhere. I couldn’t hope to write such a thing, there were so many facets to her life, and I knew only a small part of the whole.

People reading this will probably know her best for her literary agent blog, and for the famous (in literary circles) Query Shark. Indeed Janet spent so much time helping others from the goodness of her heart that I don’t know how she found the time to do any paid work. And yet she did. She was an engine, and sometimes a very forceful one, when it came to representing her clients. I was one of the beneficiaries of all that energy, and so were many others.

I’m pretty sure that none of the thousands who read her free and wise advice online knew that she also did volunteer work for her church. I wouldn’t have known either except she mentioned it once in passing in a conversation. That was so very Janet. Also very Janet were the times when she went above and beyond to help, not her authors, but early readers of her online blogs, people who had started as fans and become friends. Invariably over-the-internet friends, because Janet was a remarkably private person for someone who seemed so larger than life, and who knew absolutely everyone in the publishing world.

Have you noticed how so much of what I’m writing is about how she helped others? Everyone else who writes a memorial will be saying the same thing.

You would struggle to find any pictures of Janet. She had an aversion to being photographed. This did not stop some of her authors from playing a game where we made her a character in our published novels. One of her other writers had her as a character, killed her, brought her back to life and then killed her again. She thought it was hilarious.

Janet was one of the heroes of my own novel The Singer From Memphis, in which she was the eponymous Singer. In honour of her dislike of imagery I made her tall and dark, the exact opposite of the real Janet. Spoiler alert, but I think it’s fair enough here…at the the end she outsmarts everyone and rides off across the desert as a true Princess.

That also is the real Janet. So very smart, and a true Princess of Publishing.

She will be missed.

Gaius Julius Caesar

Hard to go past this one for the top spot.

Caesar's death led to the official end of the Roman Republic and the rise of the first Roman Emperor, Octavian Augustus, who just happened to be Caesar's nephew and heir.

I think we can reasonably say the Roman Empire was kind of a big consequence.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand

A man defined by his death.

The otherwise forgettable Archduke managed to get himself killed by Serbian anarchists.  Which he largely did by ignoring not only a lot of serious warnings, but also a previous attempt on his life on the very same day.

Unfortunately, since he was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, his demise kicked off a war which in turn started a domino effect of treaties that ended with World War One.

So that's about 38 million casualties right there that this assassination caused, plus the near destruction of Europe.

Philip II of Macedon

He was the father of Alexander the Great. 

Philip was assassinated when Alexander was only twenty years old.  Alexander spent the next thirteen years conquering the entire known world, and then himself died.

The world would be a very different place if Alexander had spent those thirteen years as his father's lieutenant.

You might argue that Alexander would have gone on to conquer the world after he inherited the kingdom anyway, but Philip was only 46 when he died. He might have lasted another twenty or thirty years. Which would have left Alexander inheriting at age 40 or 50. 

So Philip's death at just that moment changed the world a lot.

Ephialtes

You've probably never heard of him, unless you've read my first murder mystery, which is about the death of this fellow.  

Ephialtes created the first true democracy at ancient Athens, which in turn invented the whole idea of Western democracy. Not a small thing.  

Ephialtes was promptly assassinated for his troubles, and here comes the part that makes his killing so significant:

Ephialtes had a lieutenant, a rather likely lad by the name of Pericles.  

Pericles took the top job when his friend died, and that was the start of the peak of classical civilization that we call the Age of Pericles.  

Carloman

Charlemagne had a younger brother, which was very inconvenient because by the rules of inheritance at the time they were required to split their father's kingdom.  

Charlemagne was particularly put out. He had plans to conquer Europe &/etc, and an uncooperative little brother was going to be a drag.  

Then Carloman mysteriously died, still a young man, in circumstances that were never explained, and no cause of death was ever given.

It was very convenient for Charlemagne though. He promptly conquered Europe and founded the Holy Roman Empire.

Which probably would never have happened if Carloman had hung around. Charlemagne was never actually accused of arranging the assassination of his little brother, however this must be tempered by the observation firstly that Charlemagne was incredibly good at planning things, and secondly that only a crazy person would accuse the Holy Roman Emperor of murder.

Do feel free to add your favourite assassinations in comments.  Somehow I have a feeling people will have their own lists.

Almost inevitably one of her detectives is an archaeologist, called Emma Fielding, whose first adventure is called Site Unseen.

Site Unseen has been picked up and made into a movie for television!

Site Unseen is coming out from Hallmark in only a few days.  If you want to see an archaeological detective written by someone who actually knows archaeology, this is your big chance.  

Dana by the way has the most amazing New England accent, which people outside the US don't typically hear.  She should totally be doing podcasts.

Well he'd have some stiff competition on that.  It set me to thinking about which politician in history did get the worst treatment. 

Back in the ninth century in the city of York, King Aelle of Northumbria had the skin of his back sliced down the middle; then they tore away the skin to expose his spine and entire back — all while he was still alive, mind you — then they used an axe to cut away his ribs from his backbone.  The pressure on the cut ribs caused them to splay outwards away from the backbone, which must have been agonizing.  This completely exposed all his internal organs.  Then they put their hands into his body and pulled out his lungs.  All this while he was still alive.  But in this position, Aelle died.

This is called the blood eagle, because when it's over there's blood everywhere and the victim with his lungs lying beside him looks like an eagle with wings spread.

King Aelle is one of only two or three people in documented history to have had this happen to them.   The other two were Viking princes, and the people who did this to Aelle were the sons of the Viking Ragnar Lothbrok.

It must be said that Aelle had previously thrown Ragnar into a pit of snakes. So there was not a lot of love lost on either side.  On the other hand, having your lungs torn out through your back pretty much outranks anything that's happened to Donald Trump.

There is a superb TV series called Vikings, in which this unfortunate episode is portrayed.  Don't watch this unless you have a strong stomach.  

There are other candidates for worst treatment of a politician.  I'd be interested to hear your nominations.

I won't summarize the book for you, because the highly esteemed Publishers Weekly has done a sterling job of describing the opening disasters in their review, which you will find to the right.

You might notice it's a starred review.  It's also the seventh straight starred review for this series.  That's kind of a big thing in the publishing world.  

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]]>Death On Delos: a starred review from Publishers WeeklyGary CorbyTue, 14 Feb 2017 10:15:27 +0000http://garycorby.com/blog//beware-the-ides-of-february-cupid-eros-and-st-valentines-day56cae5ec4c2f85180fbf7144:56dbf74bfe5f74d4d57be9a7:58a2b32ad2b857d8329c5d59Today is Valentine's Day.  Happy Valentine's Day!

As an author of murder mysteries I feel I must point out that February 14 is Valentine's Day because it was on this day that the real St Valentine was beaten with clubs, stoned, and then had his head cut off. Not perhaps the most auspicious beginning for a day to celebrate love.

However that was during the Roman period and I am an author of classical Greek mysteries.  There is a surprisingly strong connection between Greek mythology and our day of Love.  It comes via Cupid, the little fellow with the arrows, who we see on so many Valentine's Day cards.  

Cupid is the Latin name for the Greek god Eros.  Here he is, from a vase at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The wings for the little god of love were there right from the beginning.  It's not shown here, but the bow and arrow are original equipment too.  Some early pictures show the god blindfolded as he shoots his arrows, hence the meaning that love is blind, a common saying which is thousands of years old.

The earliest mention of Eros is, incredibly, from Theogeny, a book written by Hesiod in about 700BC.  It was the first ever attempt to describe the Greek Gods.  Eros gets a major mention.

Hesiod listed Eros among the very first of the gods, right at the start of Creation.

In the beginning there was Chaos.  From out of the chaos came Gaia, the Earth, the foundation of all things.  Then came dark Tartarus, the Underworld.  And then came Eros, the god of Desire, who is fairest of all the deathless ones.

So Eros, our god of falling in love, is one of the most primordial of all deities.  Zeus doesn't even appear for another two paragraphs. 

Eros then reappears a little later in Theogeny, emerging from the sea behind his mother Aphrodite.   Yes, I know that's a paradox.  Eros arose before the Olympian Gods, but Aphrodite is his Mum.  Welcome to Greek Mythology.

That, then, is the little deity who appears on our Valentine Day cards.  Oh, and he helped start the Trojan War.  But that's another story.

Back then two men were vying for control of the city: Nicias and Alcibiades.

Nicias was a crusty old conservative General and an associate of Pericles.  (Pericles had died thirteen years before.) 

Alcibiades was a charismatic, handsome, intelligent, deceitful, self-serving and utterly untrustworthy distant relative of Pericles.  If you think a combination of used car salesman and junk bond trader you won't be far wrong.

To put it mildly, these two didn't along.  They both controlled factions that between them were tearing apart the General Assembly, which was the world's first democratic parliament.  

Now in Athens they didn't need elections to their parliament, because every citizen was his own representative.

But they did have elections to exile people from the city.  This was called an ostracism.  The way it worked was that once a year anyone could propose that there be an ostracism.  If the Assembly voted in favour, then it was certain that someone was going to get tossed out, but no one knew yet who that someone was.  They had to have a vote.

This was a vote you wanted to lose, since the "winner" was exiled for ten years.  

On election day every citizen would write the name of the person they wanted to see gone.  Whoever got the most votes was the loser.  The voting slips were broken pieces of pottery, of which Athens had plenty since almost every type of food in every kitchen was stored in ceramic jars.  The ancient Greek word for pottery shard is ostrakon.  The vote was named after the voting slip: ostrakismos. Hence our English word ostracism is named for broken bits of pottery.

So Nicias and Alcibiades were causing lots of trouble, and everyone would be quite happy to see one or the other ostracised.

A dodgy minor politician named Hyperbolos, who wanted more power, realized he could make use of this.  He proposed an ostracism.  The followers of both Nicias and Alcibiades thought this was a wonderful idea, imagining the other side's leader being told to pack his bags.  The vote passed easily.

It was at this point that Nicias and Alcibiades both became very, very uneasy.  Neither was certain he'd survive the vote.

The two got together for a quiet chat, and probably through gritted teeth for the first time in their lives managed to agree on something.  

They both told their followers to vote for Hyperbolos.

When the count was complete, Hyperbolos was the one who ended up being ostracized.  Which probably isn't what he had in mind when he proposed the vote.

The result was such a shocker that the Athenians never again held an ostracism.

The voting slips when they were done with were used as landfill, since ceramic is kind of hard to get rid of any other way.  Thousands of these ostraka have been dug up around Athens.  The one in the picture has the name Hyperbolas written around the edge.  This is one of the votes that did him in.

A stoa is a classical Greek portico.  A stoa in classical Athens is where you go to see and be seen.

You would find people like Pericles and Socrates walking between these columns, under the shady roof, discussing affairs of state, or philosophy, or more likely passing on the sordid details of the latest scandal, and they would be surrounded by hundreds of like-minded citizens, all of them just hanging out.

You would also find Nico and Diotima behind the pillars, listening in on the conversations and going about their detective work.  On most of the book covers they are drawn doing exactly that.

Here on the left are Nico & Diotima, with a stoa in the background (from the cover of The Pericles Commission).  

On the right are two other dodgy characters.  That's me and my wife Helen, in the reconstructed Stoa of Attalus, in the agora of Athens.  We couldn't resist doing the cover shot.

That stoa is a reconstruction built during the 1950s of a for-real one from classical times.  It realy would have looked much like this.

Here's a view of the same building, taken from the Acropolis.

You need to remove the Byzantine church in the foreground.  Then replace all the vegetation with a lot of vendor stalls, because that space to the left of the Stoa of Attalos is the ancient agora of Athens, which obviously has seen better days.  If you then replace the buildings in the background with whitewashed daub double-storey dwellings then you have the center of classical Athens.  

Go here to start browsing.  There's something for just about everyone in the lists.

I found this while searching around for some pictures of ancient Greek jewelry.  I stayed to collect vast amounts of stuff about Renaissance masterpieces, Babylonian art, Egyptian calligraphy, Assyrian friezes, illuminated manuscripts, the architecture of mediaeval Spain...I could be quite some time reading it all.

A big thanks to the Met for the very generous availability.

Well, maybe it has.  Maybe not.  The archaeologist making the claim admits he has no proper evidence.  He does have enough circumstantial evidence to guess that it might be the right place. 

I admit I'm far from convinced that they've got Aristotle's tomb.  Here's the problem:

After Alexander left Macedonia to conquer the world, Aristotle returned to Athens and set up a school called the Lyceum, to rival the other school of philosophy called the Academy.  Which is the origin of both those words in English.

After Alexander died, Aristotle was in a spot of bother. Anyone associated with Alexander was in severe danger of being killed off in the subsequent fighting.  Then apparently someone accused Aristotle of impiety to the gods.  Since this was the same charge that had got Socrates killed eighty years before, Aristotle didn't hang around.  He ran to the ancient city of Chalcis on the island of Euboea.   There he contracted a stomach complaint of some sort and subsequently died. 

Now for the fun game of find the missing dead guy...

Aristotle's will specified that he was to be buried beside his first wife.  If that's what happened then the tomb is definitely not Aristotle's.  Aristotle appointed a very powerful man called Antipater to be the executor of his will.  Antipater was a former governor of Greece under Alexander, so we can expect a man of that ability to get something as simple as this right.  

BUT!  There are four separate sources, all of them Arabic, all writing much later and all using documents that are now lost, that say Aristotle was buried at Chalcis.  Since he died there, this is credible.  

Two of these four then say that later on, after the body had moldered, a committee arrived from Stagira asking for the remains.  Since Stagira was the birthplace of Aristotle, this is credible, but only two of the four Arab sources say this happened.

If they are to be believed then what was left of Aristotle was popped into an urn, (possibly cremated), carried to Stagira, and placed in an area then named the Aristoteleion.

The current claim then is that the Aristoteleion has been found.

To nail this they need to find an inscription that says, Welcome to the Aristoteleion.  Or words to that effect.  Since the site was locally famous there have to be inscriptions.  Without that, all they can say is that they have a lovely looking room that dates to the right period.

Pub day is a weird thing for an author.  We don't fly from store to store selling the books personally.  We didn't print the books ourselves; we didn't ship them to their shelves.  All those highly important things are done by other wonderful people.

So what does an author do on pub day?  Well, he writes the next book.

Death On Delos is finished in first draft.  I've even written the author note that so many people like to read.  It will be Book 7 of the Athenian Mysteries.  The Singer From Memphis is Book Six ... and that's really quite remarkable.

I hope you enjoy reading Nico & Diotima's adventures as much as I like writing them.

The astonishing thing is, the Athenian Mysteries have now earned six starred reviews in a row. 

If you would like to see what happens when a classical Greek PI finds himself in ancient Egypt in the company of a budding history writer named Herodotus, then this might be the book for you.

"Corby’s trademark blend of humor, fascinating historical detail, and accessible presentation of the politics of the time has never been better."

 The Singer from Memphis

Gary Corby. Soho Crime
ISBN 978-1-61695-668-4

Early in Corby’s exceptional sixth novel set in ancient Greece (after 2015’s Deus Ex Machina ), Pericles, the most powerful man in Athens, asks Nicolaos, “the only private agent” in the city-state, to accompany the historian Herodotus on a trip to Egypt.

Ostensibly, Nicolaos will serve as a bodyguard, but his real mission is to aid Egyptians rebelling against Persian rule.  The rebels’ leader, Inaros, who claims to be descended from the last pharaoh, has asked for a “man of cunning and resource” to help take the city of Memphis, the last stronghold controlled by the enemy.

Pericles shares his suspicions with Nicolaos that Herodotus may be a spy in the employ
of the Persians. Later, pirates almost scuttle the journey to Egypt, and Nicolaos nearly loses his client to a master Spartan assassin. Eventually, Nicolaos must solve a murder, but this is more spy thriller than whodunit.

Corby’s trademark blend of humor, fascinating historical detail, and accessible presentation of the politics of the time has never been better.

Agent:
Janet Reid, FinePrint Literary. (May)

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-36219991

John Squire was a British army engineer who was involved at the siege of Badajoz in the Peninsular War.  Like all the best army officers of the time, he was a gentleman scholar. He personally knew Wellington, traveled all over the place, and kept a fascinating journal.

Which has turned up in a second hand bookstore in Hobart, Tasmania; about as far from Badajoz as you can get and still be on the same planet.  My family and I were there just last year. I must have walked within twenty meters of that journal and never knew.

The earliest mention of keys that I know of is from Homer, the Odyssey, book 21.  Odysseus after one or two adventures has made his way home to discover an annoying number of men trying to marry his wife.  Penelope goes to collect her husband's weapons (this will not end well for the suitors).

[Penelope] descended the tall staircase of her chamber, and took the well-bent key in her strong hand, a goodly key of bronze, whereon was a handle of ivory.

Here we have a key, at the time of the Trojan War.  Given the likely dating on Homer, the year is at least 600BC and probably well before.  I want to point out the description of the key as "well-bent", and "bronze".  Because in the late 1800s an art collector named Edward Warren, who seriously knew his antiquities, came across this:

credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

You can find this interesting item at the excellent Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  It is exactly like the description from Homer.  The words inscribed in the bronze identify it as the key for the Temple of Artemis at Lusoi, in Akadia. The difference is, this key is dated to the 5th century BC, which is when Nico & Diotima lived. So this is a key as my heroes would have seen them. 

The key fits through a slot in the door, and you then turn it to lift the bar on the other side. 

You can forget about carrying ancient keys in your pocket. This thing is more than forty centimeters long. That's about sixteen inches.

But actually, stadium gigs go back much, much further than that.

The first stadium gig was almost certainly held during the ancient Games at Olympia -- a stadium gig if ever there was one -- at the world's first stadium -- though the musician is not known.

There were all sorts of side contests at the ancient Olympics.  Some of them were definitely music contests.   A few decades after the time of Nico & Diotima for example there was a trumpet blowing contest (and a documented winner).  But there were certainly music contests at the Olympics long before.

The format was probably something like the battle of the bands events you see these days.  It seems inevitable that the winner would have been invited to play at the closing ceremony. 

The earliest stadium gig for which I can find the musician's name is the music contests held at the Pythian Games. The Pythian Games were played at the stadium above Delphi, beginning in 586BC.

The travel writer Pausanias had this to say:

According to the tradition the oldest contest, for which they first offered prizes, was singing a hymn for the god ... in the third year of the 48th olympiad, in which Glaukias of Kroton won (586 BC) ... they added a contest for singing accompanied by a flute and for playing the flute.  As victors were proclaimed: Melanpous of Kephalai in the kithara-singing, Echembrotos of Arkadia in singing accompanied by a flute and Sakadas of Argos in playing the flute. This Sakadas won two more victories at the next two Pythian games.

Thus the ancient Greeks invented the stadium gig, even if we don't know the date or the first muso to get the gig.

So here they are, on Rebecca's blog:

The Pericles Commission: a synopsis in limerick!

The Ionia Sanction: a synopsis in limerick!

I'm supposed to write a synopsis for each of my books, when I submit them to the publisher.  I might hire Rebecca to do my next one.

This time they are called on to escort an aspiring author named Herodotus.  He needs their help with some research for a book he's writing. 

But then, one or two minor details go wrong with that plan.

This is very interesting to me because it's "only" 250 years after the time of Nico & Diotima.  Of course, a lot can change in 250 years -- think how much art has changed between 1750 and today -- but also think how much the art of 1750 is still recognizably ours.

Practically zero paintings survive from the Classical and Hellenistic world.  There are lots of statues, but that's a different thing.  These mosaics are probably close to what you'd see in a painted mural. 

So in Zeugma there is art that is plainly in the Hellenistic tradition.  What's more, we can see how style has changed, because there are earlier known mosaics.  Remember I wrote some time ago about the mosaic in the tomb at Amphipolis?

This mosaic is at least 100 years before the Zeugma one above.  Zeugma is on the Euphrates river, miles from Greece.  Amphipolis is in northern Greece (or Macedonia, depending how you think of it).

They're clearly different artists, but they belong to the same stylistic tradition.   That's possible because Zeugma was founded by a Macedonian guy called Seleukus, who was one of Alexander's Generals.  Seleukus was one of the big winners in the fallout after Alexander's death. 

While most of Alexander's successors met untimely and usually pretty gruesome ends, Seleukus survived to found the Seleucid Empire, which was very, very successful.  It was largely because of the Seleucid Empire that Greek culture kept its position so far across the Middle East.

It's been known for a long time, by the way, that Zeugma has some astounding art.  Up to now the most famous piece has been the Gypsy Girl (not really a gypsy, of course; that's just a name).

This girl is us!  If you met her in the street, you wouldn't blink.

There's a pretty good chance that I'll eventually steal the Zeugma art to describe in a book, when Nico & Diotima visit the home of a wealthy client, or maybe a dodgy but rich suspect.