Steven Saylor

• Born: March 23, 1956
• Birthplace: Port Lavaca, Texas

Type of Plot: Historical

Principal Series: Roma Sub Rosa (Secret Rome), 1991-

Contribution

Along with British novelist Lindsey Davis, who first introduced her comic detective, Marcus Didius Falco, in 1989, and John Maddox Roberts, whose investigator, Decius Caecilius Matellus the Younger, made his first appearance in print in 1990, Steven Saylor is part of a small cadre of modern mystery writers who have chosen to set their narratives in the world of ancient Rome. Unlike the work of Davis and Roberts, however, the novels and short stories of Saylor are perhaps less dependent on the clever sleuthing of their fictional protagonist and more focused on the recovery of a palpable, visitable past.

Saylor asserts that his work is dominated not by Gordianus the Finder but by the historical figures who populate his narratives. Critics seem to agree that the author’s greatest strength is his successful evocation of the tumultuous years of the last century b.c.e. In recreating the ancient world, however, Saylor is not content to adopt, without question, generally accepted interpretations of historical events; on the contrary, he is adept at exploring plausible alternative explanations for why some larger-than-life personages, such as Catilina or Julius Caesar, made some of their pivotal decisions. In so doing, Saylor often draws parallels to the social and political forces operative in modern times.

Saylor’s fiction has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and his novels have been short-listed for prestigious literary prizes, including the Ellis Peters Historical Dagger Award from the Crime Writers’ Association.

Biography

Steven Warren Saylor was born in Port Lavaca, Texas, on March 23, 1956, and grew up in the small town of Goldthwaite. His parents divorced when he was quite young; his two siblings, Gwyn and Ronny, and he were raised by their mother, who did secretarial work to make ends meet. Saylor credits his mother, Lucy, with instilling in the family a solid sense of self-worth. In particular, she emphasized academic achievement. As a consequence, by the time that they graduated from high school, all three Saylor children earned grants and loans to attend college.

During Saylor’s formative years in the hill country of Texas, he strove to conform to external expectations. He got good grades, played trumpet in the school band, got a part-time job at the local supermarket, and dated girls. All the while, however, he harbored a secret that he was not willing to divulge until he moved one hundred miles away from home to attend the University of Texas in Austin in 1974. In Austin, which Saylor has described as an oasis in a desert of intolerance, Saylor felt comfortable enough to embrace his sexuality. At the age of nineteen, he found his life partner, Richard Solomon; the two moved in together as a gay couple.

In 1978, Saylor graduated from the University of Texas with a bachelor’s degree in history with honors, and in 1980, he and Solomon moved to San Francisco. For more than ten years thereafter, he worked as a freelance writer and magazine and newspaper editor. It was during this period that he began writing erotic fiction under the pseudonym of Aaron Travis. Saylor credits his first visit to Italy in 1987 with re-igniting his long-standing interest in the ancient world. When he returned to San Francisco after this trip, he decided to write a murder mystery set in Rome before the days of the empire.

The success of Saylor’s first novel, Roman Blood, in 1991 allowed him to devote himself to writing fiction. The Roma Sub Rosa (secret Rome) series of historical mysteries that evolved from the publication of that first novel permitted Saylor and Solomon to buy a house in Berkeley, California. The series also solidified his credentials as a classicist, and Saylor has been called on to speak to academic audiences and appear on television documentaries (History Channel) to offer expert commentary on topics related to the classical world.

In addition to his mysteries set in ancient Rome, Saylor has published two books with Texas settings: A Twist at the End: A Novel of O. Henry (2000), set partially in Austin in 1885 when the city was rocked by a series of serial murders, and Have You Seen Dawn? (2003), a contemporary suspense novel set in a small town like the one in which he was raised.

Analysis

Gordianus the Finder, characterized by one of his enemies as a man of “no ancestry at all, a dubious career, and most irregular family,” would appear, at first blush, to be an odd choice for the protagonist of a historical novel. This choice seems particularly odd for Steven Saylor because of his decision to focus on the last three decades of the Roman Republic when various politicians, often representatives of the noblest families, vied for supremacy. However, by virtue of the fact that he has no pedigree and hence no class loyalties, Gordianus can move freely among competing parties in search of the answers to problems that vex some of the key figures of his time.

Gordianus’s “dubious career”—finding the truth without prejudice—is made possible because ancient Rome had no police force by modern standards. Thus, his career as a private detective often involves Gordianus in matters of considerable public import, from the moment in Roman Blood when he is hired by Cicero to investigate matters related to the great orator’s first court case to the time in The Judgment of Caesar: A Novel of Ancient Rome (2004) when he is charged by Caesar to discover who might have tried to poison him at a key moment in his Egyptian campaign. By virtue of his unusual profession, Gordianus, an ordinary citizen during extraordinary times, can move easily across social strata and bear witness, from more than one perspective, to some of the key events in a momentous period in world history.

The reader’s interest in Gordianus transcends his roles as detective and reader’s stand-in. Over multiple volumes, Gordianus accumulates an “irregular family” that calls into question standard definitions of the term. His half-Egyptian, half-Jewish wife, Bethesda, was once his slave and concubine; his son and junior partner, Eco, was once a street orphan abandoned by his mother as a consequence of her witnessing a brutal murder. In conservative circles in ancient Rome and in modern times, family values have often been used as a justification for intolerance of domestic arrangements that do not match some rigid prescription. Set against the often dark consequences of the real-life blood ties that figure so prominently in many of the novels—the feuding, blue-blooded Claudii in Catilina’s Riddle (1993) or the treacherous royal siblings of the House of Ptolemy in The Judgment of Caesar—Gordianus’s hand-selected family shines.

The three elements of Saylor’s formula for success are creating a character that serves as an eyewitness to history, giving that character an interesting puzzle to solve, and allowing that character to make a family of his own choosing. All three elements engage the reader’s interest and sustain that interest from book to book.

Roman Blood

In Roman Blood, the first novel of the Roma Sub Rosa series, Steven Saylor establishes the formula that he successfully applies to each book. He provides his fictional protagonist with a mystery to unravel and, in so doing, makes him a convincing player at a critical point in the history of ancient Rome. Inspired by his reading of Michael Grant’s book Murder Trials (1975), a translation of selected speeches by Marcus Tullius Cicero, Saylor involves Gordianus the Finder in the real-life public defense by Cicero, the famous orator and statesman, of the patrician Sextus Roscius, who stands accused of hiring someone to kill his father.

As the novel begins, Gordianus is thirty, and he has already established his investigative credentials and his reputation for integrity. Hoping to make his mark on the public stage, Cicero hires Gordianus to help him find the evidence that he needs to turn an apparently hopeless case of parricide into a judicial victory. During the course of his investigation, Gordianus turns up some interesting facts, some of which shed light on political corruption during the last days of the constitutional dictatorship of the Roman general Sulla. The latter figure makes a brief but memorable appearance near the end of the novel when he passes judgment on Gordianus’s chosen profession and the sometimes unsavory consequences of his inquiries. Sulla refers to Gordianus as a dog, the “kind that goes about digging up bones that other dogs have buried.”

Gordianus also expands his unorthodox family when he gives shelter to the orphaned Eco, whose mother witnessed the murder that sets the plot in motion. This simple act of kindness toward a stranger stands in sharp contrast to the larcenous and even murderous practices that characterize the relations of those connected by blood.

Catilina’s Riddle

The riddle referred to in the title of Catilina’s Riddle, the longest novel in the series, involves the truth behind one of the most interesting figures in the history of early Rome, the populist politician Lucius Sergius Catilina. Was he the principal conspirator behind a plan to overthrow the Roman government by force or was he a man driven to desperate measures by a calculated campaign to defame his reputation and subvert his democratic motives?

Propositioned once again by Cicero, this time to offer his newly acquired farm as a place of sanctuary to Catilina and to report back anything that might be useful, Gordianus reluctantly finds himself attracted to the charismatic, if not seductive, figure. Gordianus also finds that he and his family reside at the epicenter of another crisis, both personal and public. On the local level, he must discover the source of a series of headless bodies found on his land and contend with the animosity of yet another patrician family who will stop at nothing in their maintenance of privilege. On a larger scale, he bears witness to history, from the moment of Catilina’s electoral defeat in 64 b.c.e. to the fateful Battle of Pistoria in 62 b.c.e.

Like most of the other Roma Sub Rosa narratives, this novel gives Gordianus the opportunity to act on two stages. There is the private mystery centered on the farm that he has inherited from a wealthy friend and confidant; the key to untying the knots of this conundrum is a classic device of mystery fiction: The villain is most likely to be the least suspected person. There is also Cicero’s very public campaign to expose Catilina’s conspiracy. It is the fictional linkage between Gordianus and Catilina during this fateful moment in the life of the Roman Republic that may very well be the heart of the book, for it affords Saylor the opportunity to ponder the motivation of one of the most controversial figures in ancient history. Many critics consider this novel to be a high point in the series.

The Judgment of Caesar

In The Judgment of Caesar, Gordianus escorts his wife, Bethesda, to her native Egypt in his quest for a cure for her at yet another critical turning point in world history, the first meeting of Caesar and Cleopatra. Because of his role as inadvertent witness to the assassination of Pompey the Great, Caesar’s great rival for domination of the Mediterranean, Gordianus becomes an involuntary guest at the royal palace in Alexandria, where he soon finds himself embroiled in the deadly rivalry between the queen of Egypt and her royal brother, Ptolemy XIII, as they contend for Caesar’s political alliance and personal affection.

Once again Gordianus’s private life and the course of history intersect as he must solve the mystery of who tried to poison Caesar, who has just arrived in Egypt, a once great power that has now become little more than a protectorate of Rome. Because one of the suspects is Meto, the adopted son of Gordianus, his family loyalties are engaged; and once again, the Finder’s familial devotion stands in sharp contrast to that of those with royal blood, especially the contentious members of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Yet, despite his misgivings that with the passage of time he has lost his edge, Gordianus solves the puzzle, thanks to his characteristically open mind and open heart.

In this novel, as in Catilina’s Riddle, much of the interest in the narrative comes from Saylor’s decision to recreate a pivotal point in history from the perspective of someone who did not carry the day. Like Catilina, Ptolemy XIII remains a figure of scholarly conjecture because his early death gave his rivals free rein to spin the tale of his failure. Saylor, on the other hand, tries to give voice to history’s losers in order to paint a more complete picture of their place in history. Therefore, in The Judgment of Caesar, the author devotes as much attention to Ptolemy as he does to his sister Cleopatra, and he tries to flesh out the triangle of ambition and seduction of which Caesar and the two royal siblings form the three points.

Principal Series Character:

• Gordianus the Finder is a citizen of the ancient Roman Republic with a knack for solving puzzles. Relentless in his pursuit of the truth, he often puts his own personal quest for answers above his clients’ objectives.

Bibliography

Fletcher, Connie. Review of A Gladiator Dies Only Once, by Steven Saylor. Booklist 101, no. 15 (April 1, 2005): 1348. Review praises Saylor’s collection of short stories for their ability to evoke the Roman Repulic.

Lewis, Terrance L. “John Maddox Roberts and Steven Saylor: Detecting in the Final Decades of the Roman Republic.” In The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction, edited by Ray Broadus Browne and Lawrence Kreiser. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 2000. A comparative analysis of the works of Roberts and Saylor with an emphasis on their respective accuracy of historical detail, particularly their incorporation of historical figures and events in their fictional plots.

Saylor, Steven. Steven Saylor. http://www.stevensaylor.com. The author’s own Web site, which offers up-to-date, visually appealing information on his life and work, including reviews of books, personal interviews, and links to sites related to mystery fiction and classical studies.

Sikov, Ed. “Gordianus Redux.” James White Review (Summer/Fall, 2004). An attempt to place Saylor’s Roman mysteries in the context of gay literature and, in so doing, define what is meant by the genre.

Sonntag, Claire. “Pudd’nhead Wilson and Arms of Nemesis: Two Portraits of Slavery.” In Prentice Hall Reference Guide, edited by Muriel Harris. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2006. A comparative analysis of Mark Twain’s depiction of slavery in nineteenth century America and Saylor’s portrait of slavery in ancient Rome.