What did Agatha Christie ever do for the Romans?

A different kind of mystery for 2024

[image credit: author]

I don’t whether it’s just the benign influence of Agatha Christie. In 2023 I took the Christie tour in her home town of Torquay; sort-of listened to Murder on the Orient Express while in bed with Covid in August; and in the autumn went to the theatre to see the latest production of And Then There Were None. Next month I’m off to Stoke to hear what the inimitable Lucy Worsley has to say about the Queen of Crime.

Whatever the reason, my new book, The Bath Curse, is turning into a different kind of mystery for me — a “locked-room” puzzle. This is a type of story where a murder occurs and a closed circle of suspects, one or more of whom must be the murderer, are unable to leave the scene of the crime due to circumstances. The circumstances could be a snow-storm, an storm-wracked island (And Then There Were None), being stuck on a train (Murder on the Orient Express) or a boat (Death on the Nile), a spaceship (Ascension), a submarine (Vigil, series 1)… I could go on.

I had already decided to set my fourth Roman mystery in Bath when I discovered that Bath had suffered sudden and catastrophic floods in the past, witness this map of floodwaters in 1968:

[Image credit: historyofbath.org]

Clearly, Bath was smaller in Roman times, in fact largely confined to the inside of the SE loop of the Avon, with the main road stretching out north through Walcot along the Avon. The only bridge is thought to have been where the modern Cleveland Bridge now runs, leading to Bathwick. You can imagine that anyone trying to reach Bath from the south (along the Fosse Way, from Bo Gwelt, say) would find themselves cut off if the bridge was overwhelmed by floodwaters. Conversely, anyone wanting to exit the town during a flood like this would find that they could not travel either north to Cirencester (Corinium), or east to Sea Mills (Abona), as the road to both junctions would be under water, and the town walls would preclude any other way out. Ergo, my locked-room mystery. Thank you, floods!

You’ll notice straightway that this will be a new and unwelcome set-up for Quintus and Tiro. They are used to being sent a long way from home, arriving to find mayhem and jeopardy, with no back up and lots of shady actors free to come and go. This time the setting is really quite tiny. To make matters worse, it’s their home base, where they should feel comfortable. But suddenly their cohort is on the wrong side of a flooded bridge, and everyone involved in the increasing mystery is trapped with them inside the loop of the raging Avon. There is no help to be had, and the mounting death toll could be carried out by practically anyone.

And Julia? Needless to say, she is not safely at home in Bo Gwelt. Instead of confidently running things her own way as usual, she too is trapped inside Bath, just as suspect as everyone else. Her anxious husband is getting bad-tempered, fretting about the rising death toll, while her children are up to who-knows-what at home. So a load of fun ahead for everyone!

To illustrate how convoluted planning such a mystery can be, I thought you might like a peep at where I’ve got to so far. I always know the beginning and end of my books. Then I use mind-mapping to work out who will do what to whom, when and where, with clues, twists and red herrings dropped in for my Roman lads and lass.

The idea here is just to share with you an early snapshot of the plan for The Bath Curse. To avoid spoilers for you, I’ve anonymised the character names in this version. Don’t spend ages trying to work it out. You’ll find the end result inevitably veers away, as I’m still a long way from finished with planning. There’s also the risk of developing a squint, never attractive.

There! Enough for this month. More on The Bath Curse in February.

My December/January News

• My article “The Hunt for Aila”, about the inspiration for my Pictish girl in The Loyal Centurion, appeared in the December issue of The Crime Readers’ News. It’s free to join the CRA here, and every month you’ll be sent a newsletter bulging with news and reviews perfect for readers who love crime fiction.

• I was honoured to visit the crime reader’s group at St John’s library, Worcester, on a bitter day in early December. Despite ghastly weather, my own hacking cough, and some IT troubles ably wrangled by my lovely IT support and husband, Peter, the talk went well. All the video clips worked, books were sold, and the lovely readers lingered to ask excellent questions and to serve us mince pies and very welcome tea. It’s always a pleasure to support Worcestershire libraries. Thank you to Jenny at St John’s for organising the event, and the stalwart readers there for turning out on such a cold foggy day.

• Just in time for Christmas, I finally got to “meet” the lovely readers at Tregolls Lodge Book Club, down in Cornwall. I was saved a very long drive by the excellent online setup arranged by booklover and impresario there, Howard Embery. Our meet had been postponed for quite some time due to previous technical glitches, so it was a real pleasure to answer fired questions from the audience about all three of my books. Great fun, and I do hope to be invited back. Many thanks to Howard, and to keen Tregolls reader Josephine, who bought all three of the Quintus Valerius series on the spot!

I’ll leave you with my review of the exciting new novel by famed SF author Dave Hutchinson. This was my Christmas present to myself, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Review: Sanctuary (part 3 of The Aftermath series) by Dave Hutchinson

In post-apocalyptic England, very few centres of civilisation persist. One such is Plymouth, taken over by the Royal Navy when the deadly comet struck a century previously.

Now Adam Darby, spy and reconnaissance agent for the Plymouth authorities, is sent to infiltrate Oxford, still a centre of science and scholarship. Rumours are emerging that a warlord Father John , who nearly overthrew Plymouth years ago, is building an army nearby.

Adam manages to get into Oxford, and immediately everything goes wrong. In a maelstrom of murders, missing persons and betrayal, Adam is forced to work with the truculent strong-minded Inspector Léonie Mellow, descendant of generations in the Thames Valley Police. It’s a reluctant partnership of very different equals.

In a quickly-shifting world of treachery and danger, Adam and Léonie must work out who’s really in charge in Oxford, and how to survive their dangerous search.

Dave Hutchinson, also author of the Fractured Europe science fiction series, is a captivating writer whose terrible near-future worlds are vivid suggestions of how awful the less salubrious parts of our history must have been to live through . After the withdrawal of the legions in AD 410 is a period that springs to my Romanophile mind. His stories are peppered with the unexpected, the shocking, and at times the downright gruesome.

Thank goodness he also creates some of the strongest and most vivid characters in the business, to get us all through to the other side. Maybe.

You can’t do better if you love pacy, clever, hard-hitting dystopian science fiction mysteries. I certainly do!

[Jacquie’s latest Roman mystery, The Loyal Centurion, is out in ebook and paperback now. You can follow Jacquie on social media, watch her research videos, and read her non-fiction articles at her Linktree.]