1.
Why did you decide to use Greek mythology as a
theme for your first book?
Ever
since I was a small child I’ve been fascinated by Ancient Greece and especially
by the character of Odysseus, that wily man of many turns. Barbara Leonie Picard’s retelling of the
Odyssey was the catalyst – I have my original copy parked next to my computer
desk and I’m amazed it’s still in one piece.
As a
kid I spent a lot of time reading mythology and acting out my Odysseus
fantasies, dressing up in towels when I was supposed to be having a bath, and
with the family thumping on the bathroom door. Joy Cowley’s story, The Reading
Room captures the spirit if not the subject matter, and I just about burst a
blood vessel laughing when I read it.
When
I grew up, I did more normal, adult things with my love of the past. I studied
History at university, read voraciously about Bronze Age Greece, The Odyssey
and Greek mythology, and went back to uni to learn Ancient Greek, to help me understand
these remarkable people better.
In
the meantime, Odysseus had set up permanent camp in my imagination, spinning
probable and improbable yarns about his life and times. Finally I summoned up
the courage to share some of these stories with other people and began writing.
2.
Where did you get the idea for the book?
The
idea for Murder at Mykenai grew out of a completely different book concept! Basically
I got ambushed in Chapter Two and frogmarched off into a totally different adventure
to the one I thought I was going to write. My only excuses are that I’m not the
first author to be mentally kidnapped, and it turned out to be a very exciting
journey!
Let
me tell you where I was before my abduction.
Lots
of writers have retold the Troy and Odyssey stories, but almost no one has
strayed much outside these boundaries. I
had often wondered what adventures Odysseus had as a boy. What did he do before
he became a hero, before Helen of Troy ran away with Paris and all the armies
of Bronze Age Greece set off to fetch her home?
This
isn’t quite as vacuous a fantasy as it might appear. In Homer’s Odyssey there
are a couple of snippets about Odysseus as a teenager - how he was wounded by a
boar and how he came by his great bow. I planned to tackle these, but I was
also curious to find out how he met his close friend Menelaos, Helen’s husband.
Menelaos describes the friendship in Book 4 of the Odyssey and he makes it
sound like it’s one of the most important things in his life.
So I
decided to start my first book project with their initial meeting, with the
vague idea the Menelaos could then accompany Odysseus on his adventures. Being
a complete novice, I hadn’t written any kind of book plan – I knew I should
begin at the beginning and sit down to write every morning, and that way, all
would take care of itself. Huh!
This
is what really happened: Odysseus duly arrives in Mykenai, climbs up onto the
palace roof for a lark, as you do, and meets Menelaos, who’s up on the roof
having a bit of a lark himself. Menelaos looks like a nice boy – a loyal follower,
as his older brother Agamemnon describes him in the Iliad. And then …
Not
only does Menelaos turn out to have a will and a story of his own, he proceeds
to take over the whole book. Instead of stringing the great bow or going boar
hunting, poor Odysseus spends the rest
of the novel running round trying to look after Menelaos as disaster
turns to catastrophe and catastrophe to calamity. And not always doing as
stunning a job of it as he expects.
In
case you want to blame some random thought for the storyline, it is also based
on a thread of Greek mythology, which I’ve then developed in my own way while
having fun with the process of mythologizing – see Chapter 24 for a good
example.
And
because I wanted to write a historical novel, rather than a mythological
retelling, the book uses lots of information about the Greek Bronze Age which
would otherwise be gathering dust on my bookshelves (yes, I know you can dust
books but do you know anyone who does?)
3.
Have you been to Greece? If so, did it help with
the description of the setting. If not, what did you do to help you get a feel
for the setting?
Yes,
I have been to Greece – three times – and I love it. It’s so fabulous to set a
book somewhere I feel so strongly about. There are four principle settings in
Murder at Mykenai - Mykenai itself, Ithaka, Aitolia and Pylos – and I’ve now been
to three of them.
The
very first trip took me to Mykenai, or Mycenae as we English speakers usually spell
it. It’s still an impressive and scary place, with vast stone walls and the
massive Lion Gate that features in all the tourist books. You can walk over
most of the site and although the very top of the hill was wiped clean for a later
temple, you can still see Atreus’s great hall. I found it an amazing experience
and the physical look and emotional feel of the place certainly fed straight
into the book.
The
second trip took me to Rhodos and to Lesbos, where I drank lots of ouzo and ate
heaps of olives. I’m still trying to work out how to incorporate this into a
book! But because Lesbos especially is quite out of the normal tourist path, visiting
the mountain villages there gave me an idea of how traditional Greeks have
lived, perhaps for thousands of years.
Going
to Ithaka – Odysseus’s home and a major setting in Murder - on my third trip
was incredible, and because it isn’t a tourist target either (no nice sandy
beaches to put those horrid plastic loungers on), I felt very tuned in to the
passage of time, even while my right index finger was working away at my camera
shutter. Ithakan hospitality is famous and I found the people there very kind
and generous.
Ithakan
Homeric geography has been the subject of furious debate for the last 3000
years, and even that was valuable – the Ithakans sailors in the Odyssey were a
notoriously argumentative lot and I could witness how the Ithakans have kept
the tradition going.
When
I haven’t been to a place, or I need a refresher, I find Google Earth a
wonderful resource. And I have my books and my notes – I’m a compulsive book
buyer and note taker, so my reference library is embarrassingly large.
I
was very lucky during the early drafts to have a highly regarded English
archaeologist, Dr Elizabeth French, read the m/s. Elizabeth used to be the head
of The British School at Athens and spent her whole career excavating at
Mykenai, so she knows the site and the whole culture of Bronze Age Greece very
well. She has been remarkably generous whenever I ask her dumb questions.
4.
If the book was made into a film who would you
have play the leads?
Ouch!
I loved Sean Bean as Odysseus in Troy,
but he’s far too old to play a teenager. We do so need a red-head. Rupert Grint
(Ron Weaseley in Harry Potter) has
the cheeky looks but he’s also getting a bit long in the tooth. Menelaos needs
to be tall and blonde, which rules out Tom Cruise … maybe Liam Hemswort (Gale in The Hunger Games)???
Perhaps
we should hold world-wide auditions and find some magical unknowns!
5.
Have you got plans for a sequel?
Yes
indeed. My next book, which is into its third draft, follows on from Murder at
Mykenai. I’ve managed (finally) to tell the story of Odysseus and the great bow.
Though there’s a stroppy girl in there who threatens to take over, I’m in
control so far. Wish me luck!
Posts
This is the
fifth book in the Aotearoa series,
and in an Author’s Note we are told that there will be one more. Like most
long-running series, it’s more enjoyable if you’ve read the previous titles and
have some idea what’s going on. In a densely-woven story the author
re-introduces us to the main situation - the action takes place in two worlds, current-day
New Zealand plus a semi-historic supernatural version called Aotearoa. Tohunga,
both good and bad, can travel between the worlds and manipulate what goes on. 
