Tag: The Venetian Mysteries

Categories
Writing

The Medici Murders begins…

For me, three key elements support a conventional narrative, each critical to the recounting of a good tale.

  1. The characters. Love them or hate them, they must be interesting enough for the reader to want to know how their story pans out.
  2. The world in which they live. Location isn’t enough — that’s a two-dimensional thing. A world is about more than looks. It has atmosphere, aromas, weather, temperature, a feel for the way locals respond to the changing seasons. It’s important to me that this is unique to the story. Or to put it another way, if you could pick up the narrative and shift it from Venice to London or even Rome then I’d feel I hadn’t quite got this bit right.
  3. Events. The challenges our characters must face along the way in pursuit of the resolution. Events, again, that should often be unique to the world in which they take place.

Every conventional story, be it crime, thriller, horror, sci-fi or mainstream novel, sits on that structural tripod. What makes each different may be the balance between the three. In one of those breakneck, read-in-a-flash thrillers which The Medici Murders isn’t, events are often uppermost, a series of non-stop shocks and twists designed to get you to rip through the book at top speed.

But here I’m focusing more on characters and the unique world that is Venice. There are plenty of twists and turns along the way. But I also want to transport the reader to those dark and cobbled alleys during Carnival, to let them smell the salty winter air, relish the cicchetti and the bitter-sweet taste of spritz, to become absorbed in one of the most extraordinary cities on earth as a very Venetian mystery unwinds around them.

Continue reading “The Medici Murders begins…”
Categories
Venice Writing

The real Medici Murders

One of the courtyards of the Frari. The murdered Lorenzino de' Medici is thought to have been secretly buried nearby.

History is full of murders, most of them documented by people who weren’t there, and were often writing hundred years after the events they chronicle with such apparent confidence. History’s full of holes too, lacunae open to any number of ideas and theories. The assassination of Julius Caesar, the killings of the princes in the Tower of London, even, more recently, the shooting of John F. Kennedy still raise questions in people’s minds, and any number of conspiracies.

The slaying of Lorenzino de’ Medici, one of the lesser figures in the clan that was effectively the royal family of Florence and Tuscany, is rather different. Almost five centuries on we still have a first-hand account of how Lorenzino was hunted down in the dark streets of Venice in winter, cornered on the Ponte San Tomà in San Polo below and stabbed to death.

Continue reading “The real Medici Murders”
Categories
Venice Writing

Introducing Arnold Clover and a new series set in Venice

The Medici Murders is out in the UK and the US in hardback next week (October 4), the first in what I hope will become a long-running series set in Venice and featuring a very unusual protagonist. It’s time I issued what I suspect, in the language of the day, ought to be called a trigger warning. If it’s one of those lightning-paced, breathless, heart-pounding read-in-a-flash thrillers you’re after, you should probably look elsewhere.

With this book, and those that follow with the same characters, I’m out to do something different.

You can get a glimpse of what I’m going to talk about when I tell you Arnold Clover, the protagonist, is a newly retired civil servant from the National Archives at Kew outside London. A quiet, intelligent, inquisitive man with a name I picked because I wanted something a million miles from a standard action hero.

Continue reading “Introducing Arnold Clover and a new series set in Venice”

The Medici Murders is out in the UK and the US in hardback next week (October 4), the first in what I hope will become a long-running series set in Venice and featuring a very unusual protagonist. It’s time I issued what I suspect, in the language of the day, ought to be called a trigger warning. If it’s one of those lightning-paced, breathless, heart-pounding read-in-a-flash thrillers you’re after, you should probably look elsewhere.

With this book, and those that follow with the same characters, I’m out to do something different.

You can get a glimpse of what I’m going to talk about when I tell you Arnold Clover, the protagonist, is a newly retired civil servant from the National Archives at Kew outside London. A quiet, intelligent, inquisitive man with a name I picked because I wanted something a million miles from a standard action hero.

Continue reading “Introducing Arnold Clover and a new series set in Venice”

The Medici Murders is out in the UK and the US in hardback next week (October 4), the first in what I hope will become a long-running series set in Venice and featuring a very unusual protagonist. It’s time I issued what I suspect, in the language of the day, ought to be called a trigger warning. If it’s one of those lightning-paced, breathless, heart-pounding read-in-a-flash thrillers you’re after, you should probably look elsewhere.

With this book, and those that follow with the same characters, I’m out to do something different.

You can get a glimpse of what I’m going to talk about when I tell you Arnold Clover, the protagonist, is a newly retired civil servant from the National Archives at Kew outside London. A quiet, intelligent, inquisitive man with a name I picked because I wanted something a million miles from a standard action hero.

Continue reading “Introducing Arnold Clover and a new series set in Venice”

The Medici Murders is out in the UK and the US in hardback next week (October 4), the first in what I hope will become a long-running series set in Venice and featuring a very unusual protagonist. It’s time I issued what I suspect, in the language of the day, ought to be called a trigger warning. If it’s one of those lightning-paced, breathless, heart-pounding read-in-a-flash thrillers you’re after, you should probably look elsewhere.

With this book, and those that follow with the same characters, I’m out to do something different.

You can get a glimpse of what I’m going to talk about when I tell you Arnold Clover, the protagonist, is a newly retired civil servant from the National Archives at Kew outside London. A quiet, intelligent, inquisitive man with a name I picked because I wanted something a million miles from a standard action hero.

Continue reading “Introducing Arnold Clover and a new series set in Venice”