The Mammoth Book of Classical Whodunnits Read online

  CLASSICAL WHODUNNITS

  CLASSICAL WHODUNNITS

  Murder and Mystery from Ancient Greece and Rome

  Edited by

  Mike Ashley

  PAST TIMES™

  Oxford, England

  Constable & Robinson Ltd.

  55–56 Russell Square

  London WC1B 4HP

  www.constablerobinson.com

  First published in the UK

  by Robinson Publishing Ltd 1996

  Special Edition for PAST TIMES™, Oxford, England

  Collection copyright © Mike Ashley 1996

  All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 1-85487-463-2

  eISBN 978-1-47211-492-1

  Printed and bound in the EC

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  PREFACE: A MURDER, NOW AND THEN . . .

  Steven Saylor

  APHRODITE’S TROJAN HORSE

  Amy Myers

  THE GATEWAY TO DEATH

  Brèni James

  DEATH OF THE KING

  Theodore Mathieson

  THE FAVOUR OF A TYRANT

  Keith Taylor

  THE WHITE FAWN

  Steven Saylor

  THE STATUETTE OF RHODES

  John Maddox Roberts

  THE THINGS THAT ARE CAESAR’S

  Edward D. Hoch

  MURDERER, FAREWELL

  Ron Burns

  A POMEGRANATE FOR PLUTO

  Claire Griffen

  THE GARDENS OF TANTALUS

  Brian Stableford

  A GREEN BOY

  Anthony Price

  THE LAST LETTER

  Derek Wilson

  THE BROTHER IN THE TREE

  Keith Heller

  THE ASS’S HEAD

  Phyllis Ann Karr

  THE NEST OF EVIL

  Wallace Nichols

  MOSAIC

  Rosemary Aitken

  IN THIS SIGN, CONQUER

  Nina-Gail Anderson & Simon Clark

  LAST THINGS

  Darrell Schweitzer

  BEAUTY MORE STEALTHY

  Mary Reed & Eric Mayer

  THE POISONED CHALICE

  Peter Tremayne

  SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  The Ancient Mysteries

  This anthology brings together twenty whodunnits set in the great days of ancient Greece and Rome. The stories span over fifteen hundred years from the time of the Trojan War to the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire in the West. On our journey through time we will encounter the detective skills of Socrates, Alexander the Great, Archimedes, Brutus, Epictetus, Apollonius of Tyana and, believe it or not, the goddess Aphrodite.

  I am delighted that the anthology contains stories by Steven Saylor, John Maddox and Ron Burns, each of whom is closely associated with mysteries set in the Roman world, as well as the man who started it all, Wallace Nichols. Other popular writers of detective and mystery fiction have here turned their minds to the ancient world – Amy Myers, Edward Hoch, Anthony Price, Keith Heller and Peter Tremayne, whilst others, not normally associated with mystery fiction, have taken up the challenge – Keith Taylor, Brian Stableford, Phyllis Ann Karr and Darrell Schweitzer. Fifteen of the stories are brand new, written especially for this anthology. Only two have appeared in book form before.

  Some of the authors look behind the curtain of history and present what, for all we know, may be the true story. Perhaps the stories contained here tell us what really happened concerning the founding of Rome, the deaths of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and the exile of Ovid. And what happened to Roman law on the day the Roman Empire collapsed?

  Here you will find stories set all over the classical world, from Athens to Alexandria, and from Troy to ancient Britain. In all of them you will find ingenious crimes with ingenious solutions. Poisoning was perhaps the most popular means of disposing of an enemy in ancient Rome, so it is not surprising that several of these stories use poison as the weapon, but it is fascinating to see in how many different ways the lethal dose might have been administered and how the crime is solved. One story contains perhaps the most bizarre death of a victim I have ever encountered – in (yes, in) a tree.

  When I first considered compiling a volume of detective stories set entirely in the ancient world I was a little unsure if there were enough good stories around. I knew there were plenty of good writers, but would they be interested? Maybe they would be too busy? I was staggered at the response. I ended up with more stories than I had ever expected, and this book is far bigger as a result. I must thank all the contributors for their inventiveness, and for meeting such tight deadlines. May I give special thanks to Steven Saylor, who not only wrote a new Gordianus the Finder story but also provided an insightful preface. I’m also delighted to be able to publish the very first story by Claire Griffen. May I also thank my editor, Jan Chamier, for her remarkable patience and help during moments of crisis.

  So, with no more ado, let me hand over to Steven Saylor to open the doors on the Golden Age of Crime.

  Mike Ashley

  April 1996

  PREFACE

  A Murder, Now and Then . . .

  Steven Saylor

  Why do you work in passions, lies, devices full of treachery, love-magics, murder in the home?

  Euripides, Helen, 1103–4

  Not long ago I wrote a story called ‘Murder Myth-Begotten’, in which two modern-day, would-be matricides (any resemblance to Orestes and Electra being entirely intentional) try to persuade their vulgar, anti-intellectual mother (more like Medea than Clytaemnestra) to read the Classics. ‘They’re not dry at all,’ insists the snooty daughter. ‘You’re always reading those tawdry murder mysteries and awful true-crime books. Well, the Greek tragedies are full of murders. That’s what they’re all about. Lurid, shocking stuff!’

  That may be simplifying things a bit, but it’s no coincidence that the Oxford don who spends his day lecturing about Euripides may curl up at night with Colin Dexter, or that the insatiable reader of Agatha Christie may just as avidly devour I, Claudius. The inspirational link between the ancient world and the modern mystery story – the happy circumstance which has produced the stories in this volume – is hardly surprising. Sophocles’ Oedipus the King can be read as a stunning whodunnit (in more ways than one!); Cicero’s defense orations tell stories as seamy and gripping as today’s courtroom thrillers; Polyaenus gives us the nuts and bolts of Classical espionage, revealing how ancient spymasters concealed their secret messages; and for surefire page-turners, full of sex, murder, politics and poison, Plutarch and Suetonius set the standards. It seems to me only reasonable (indeed, irresistible) to draw upon these sources not only for themes and inspiration, but more directly, recasting their stories for modern readers in the form of the modern murder mystery.

  Reading Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose first convinced me that the combination of historical and mystery fiction could be sublime; reading Cicero’s defense of Sextus Roscius, a man accused of murdering his father, inspired me to try my own hand at the game with my first novel, Roman Blood. I originally intended to make Cicero himself the narrator, but the more I got to know
him, the less I savored the idea of spending twenty-four hours a day with such a prig – and so my detective-hero, Gordianus the Finder, came into being. Reading between the lines of Cicero’s oration, researching the era, placing the trial in its political context, and walking with Gordianus down the mean streets of Rome, circa 80 BC, I stumbled upon an insidious conspiracy that spanned all levels of society and ultimately reached to the highest circles of power. Snooping through the musty stacks of the San Francisco Public Library and rushing home to pound the keys of my Macintosh, I often felt as exhilarated and edgy as a hero in a John Grisham thriller, carrying dangerous (albeit 2,000-year-old) secrets in my head.

  And there you have the great pleasure of writing the historical mystery: the detective work. You begin with a crime. You research (investigate) the long-ago scene, interrogate the long-dead witnesses, evaluate the suspects and their motives. One clue leads to another. You backtrack; in a book opened by chance, you come across a name that’s vaguely familiar and suddenly realize how it fits in, and with a thrill you discover a whole new set of suspicious circumstances. You start to get so close to the truth that you can almost taste it . . .

  All historical researchers know this excitement of discovering the past, but for the researcher with the goal of constructing a murder mystery, the game is especially complex and rewarding. This is because of the built-in Aristotelian closure of the genre: the murder mystery, by definition, must have a beginning, middle, and end. The research – the detective work – is never an end in itself, but a search for the unique resolution that will restore order and meaning to a universe thrown out of kilter by crime.

  Such a pursuit would have been understood intuitively, I think, by our old friends, the ancient Greeks and Romans. They knew what hubris was and where it inevitably led. They understood the agency of Nemesis. Yet they realized, too, that guilt and innocence are seldom simple matters, and they doggedly explored, in their laws as in their stories, all the possible, mysterious permutations of justice, retribution and revenge.

  APHRODITE’S TROJAN HORSE

  (or Murder on Mount Ida)

  Amy Myers

  Amy Myers should need no introduction to devotees of historical mysteries. Her novels about the Victorian cordon bleu chef and solver of mysteries, Auguste Didier, which began with Murder in Pug’s Parlour (1986), are immensely popular. But her presence in a volume of classical mysteries may seem a little surprising. Amy, however, was keen to bring her special skills to the ancient world, particularly the time when history became legend. She takes us back to the dawn of the ancient Greek world, to the time when men were heroes and heroes were gods (or was it the other way round?) – to the time of the Trojan War. And though our sleuth is none other than the goddess Aphrodite, don’t imagine Amy pulls any supernatural punches. She abides by the rules. Though her tongue remains firmly in her cheek throughout.

  ‘Murder? Me? You accuse me falsely, O Cow-Faced Lady of the Golden Throne.’ (Goodness knows why Hera always considers this appellation such a compliment.)

  I burst into tears with one of my splendid hyacinth-blue orbs carefully on Father – sorry, Great Zeus the Thunderer, ruler of the heavens. You can never be sure which way Father is going to rumble; he is terrified of Cow-Faced Lady, otherwise known as his wife.

  I had been rudely summoned to a full council of the gods in the Hall of the Golden Floor just when I was anointing my golden body with a most delightful oil of violets. There they all were, the happy family: Pallas Athene, Ares, Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Hermes, Dionysus, even Uncle Poseidon had turned up for the occasion, not to mention every nymph and naiad who could scramble into her gauze knick-knacks in time. And I, Aphrodite, goddess of laughter and love, was promptly not only accused but apparently convicted. Father cleared his throat, his sable brows twitching, and decided to thunder a little. Coward. ‘Hera has justification, daughter. A dead body had been found and one of my thunderbolts is missing.’

  ‘Hera’s always been jealous of me, just because I’m Dione’s daughter, not hers.’ My mother, the goddess of moisture, was a bête noire of Hera’s, just like Thetis, Europa, Leda and all the other thousands of ladies whom Zeus had favoured with his own private thunderbolt.

  ‘Is that why you’re always weeping, O laughter-loving Aphrodite?’ enquired the Poisoned Dart of the Flashing Helmet, otherwise known as Pallas Athene. Like Hera, she thought those dull long-haired Greeks were the sacrificial sheep’s whiskers, just because when she, Hera and I paraded our charms for Paris of Troy on Mount Ida, he awarded the Golden Apple Prize for beauty to me. Well, naturally. How was I to know when I told him he could have of Helen, the fairest woman in all the world, in exchange, that it would start the Trojan War, which after nearly ten years was still raging? We may be immortal, up here on Olympus, but we’re not omniscient, nor omnipotent, not even the Thunderer himself, though he likes to pretend he is. He may be sovereign administrator for Destiny, but he can’t decide it, and he does tend to nod off from time to time.

  I ignored her. Just wait till she pleaded for my kestos next time, my magic girdle in which my immortal aphrodisiac powers reside. She needed it. These Amazonian types couldn’t seduce a centaur without it. It all comes of her having leapt out of Zeus’ head fully armed instead of being conceived in the usual far more interesting manner which is my domain.

  ‘But why me?’ I wailed.

  The Mighty Son of Cronos lost patience with me; his nectar must have been off this morning. ‘Because the blasted body belongs to Prince Anchises,’ Zeus thundered. ‘What else can we think?’

  I put my hands over my shell-like ears. I was truly shocked. ‘But I wouldn’t kill Anchises.’ (Give me half a chance!) ‘He is the father of my beloved son.’

  ‘Which one?’ enquired my husband Hephaestus, with a rare flash of what passed for wit with him. We have no children, the god of the forge being too hot to handle. I ignored him too. I usually do.

  ‘Aphrodite,’ Father said more kindly. ‘You’ve been threatening to punish Anchises ever since you heard he’d been boasting about his relationship with you. Now his body has been found on Mount Ida. Near my shrine,’ he added crossly.

  Mount Ida! The very place where Anchises and I had consecrated our love – he had looked so sweet lying there asleep with that natty little leather apron awry exposing a truly princelike appendage. He was serving the usual shepherd’s apprenticeship obligatory for Trojan princes (even the junior line to which he belonged), a year out to see how other folks lived. I just had to swoop on him there and then. Darling pious Aeneas was the result, and Anchises never let anyone forget it.

  ‘But, Mighty Zeus, I didn’t touch your thunderbolt.’

  ‘The thunderbolt store in the Chamber of the Golden Bed was rifled.’

  ‘But there is no proof I did it.’

  ‘There is.’ The sable brows looked even blacker, and my peerless knees began to tremble. ‘All the gods with keys, save you, have sworn that they were all occupied in” – Zeus paused – “amorous nocturnal occupations. I’ve already decided only you could have stolen the thunderbolt.’

  I pleaded with him, but this time all my beauty and winning ways failed to move him. It was just my bad luck that this was the one day in a thousand when he didn’t need the help of my girdle to carry out his busy agenda.

  Then he delivered his verdict: ‘I sentence you to be expelled from Olympus, and thrown down to my brother Hades in the Underworld.’

  ‘You can’t do that.’ I was horrorstricken. ‘They only eat pomegranate seeds down there, and they wear the most dull clothes. Who’s going to do my hair?’ I’d only just got the Graces trained to curl my tresses properly over the shoulders – Thalia, I think (otherwise known as Good Cheer. She’s always giggling anyway).

  It was then I had my first bright idea. There’s always been a rumour flying around that just because I’m beautiful, and loving, and kind, I haven’t a brain in my head. What happened now was to disprove all that for ever.
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  ‘I claim the right to see the body. I wish to gaze once more upon the body of my love before it is swallowed by the funeral pyre,’ I intoned as dolorously as I could. Even now I can’t imagine why this brainwave struck me, but it was to save me from a fate of immortal death.

  Zeus coughed, and ostentatiously looked round his ‘council’, though he takes all the decisions. ‘I see no reason why not,’ he ventured. There’s courage for you!

  ‘She must be guarded,’ snapped Hera.

  ‘I’ll send Paean with her. A medical man might be useful.’

  ‘He’s a fatuous old fool. She’ll twist him round her slippery body,’ quoth the Queen of the Sour Grapes, Pallas Athene, of the gods’ physician. Who’d have sisters – well, half-sisters?

  ‘Ares, you go too,’ Zeus barked.

  I tried not to look too overjoyed. I’d always fancied the god of war. At least he is a real man, not a Hephaestus, roaring around like an ox in a nectar-cup shop, or mooning over nymphs like sneaky Sun God Apollo.

  Ares stepped to my side with alacrity, I was pleased to see.

  ‘Do you wish to chain me?’ I asked in a low seductive voice.

  He turned red. ‘I don’t usually, not the first time,’ he stuttered.

  One-track minds these gods! Really, what could he have thought I meant? I arched my body towards him, aware that my wondrous breasts were shimmering sensuously through my diaphanous gown.

  ‘Can we take the golden chariot, Mighty Zeus?’ I asked winningly. No one seems to credit that we goddesses can get tired winging through the air, on our own two feet as it were, and Olympus is some way from Ida.

  Zeus hesitated, obviously noticing Queen Hera’s glare. Surely it wasn’t her day for visiting Grandma Rhea? ‘In the interests of speed, yes.’

  Splendid. I’d pick up darling Aeneas on the way, and hope Zeus was safely tucked up in bed with Cow-Faced Lady so that he didn’t spot this diversion from his orders.