What is Roman Noir?
I hope to answer that question for you. I’m your host—Kelli Stanley. I’ve always wanted to be a host! Probably the years spent watching Rod Serling and Alfred Hitchcock, or maybe Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca.
I’ve divided up the answers into two sections: short and long.
If you want to skim a basic primer about what I call Roman Noir, what it is and what it isn’t, try the short version.
If you want more details about history, fiction, noir and what readers might expect, then try the long version. You can also read an interview, and a list of some of my favorite things. There are also a couple of biographies floating around and a sound file or two.
There’s a movie, too, but unfortunately I couldn’t get Rita Hayworth or Robert Mitchum.
Make yourself comfortable. Park your toga anywhere you’d like. The candlelight's starting to flicker, and night is creeping under the door.
And welcome … to Roman Noir.
What It Is:
Based on my classically-trained and educated interpretation of Roman culture
Lightning-paced
Rooted in the ‘30s hard-boiled style, especially Chandler
Emotionally vivid; what the French call roman noir
Carefully, carefully researched
Immediate and sensual
Cinematic, drawn from film noir
Historically plausible
Character-rich, first-person narrative
Provocative, rudely vernacular and peppered with Latin and wry gallows humor
What It Isn’t:In agreement with every history book, primary source or archaeological report I’ve ever read
Heavy with travelogue-type description
Unrelentingly bleak and depressing
Boring
About the puzzle
Predictable
Comfortably distant
A locked-room mystery with polite minor characters
Like anything else
Perfect in any way
So let’s talk about history. It’s a good Greek word, and it means learning about something through investigation. Sounds a lot like gumshoe work, huh?
History is never absolute. And ancient history is an act of deliberate translation. The historian is ultimately a combination of detective and story-teller, shifting through evidence, questioning the reliability of the evidence, and then compiling it into a narrative. That’s the translation part. They have to convey a story, interpreting and transforming contradictory primary sources and taciturn material culture into a best guess. Or a preferred guess. Every historian interprets history subjectively.
Historians or classicists or other scholars who spend their time in ancient Greece or Rome face centuries of research, interpretation and emotional investment in these cultures. They not only must weigh the evidence, they must weigh the hundreds of years of scholarship, opinion and outright ownership behind much of it. These ancient cultures shaped the modern world, and political entities from America’s Founding Fathers to Mussolini have appropriated them.
Combine this with the fact that most primary sources are written by aristocratic men and most material culture is wide-open to interpretation—just take a look at the hilarious Motel of the Mysteries for confirmation—and you can begin to see how fluid and subjective history—that act of learning through investigation—really is.
My Rome—my Roman Britain—is not everyone’s Roman Britain. But it is based on my interpretation of primary texts, inscriptions, artifacts, and reliable secondary sources. I’m a classicist—and I’m proud of it.
The borders between history and fiction are more fluid than anybody likes. With every new papyrus discovery, every new archaeological find, the past morphs into new shapes, a little less shadowy than before. What was considered history a few centuries ago may no longer be history at all.
You can blame Herodotus. He’s known as The Father of History. He’s also known as The Father of Lies. But he was a damn good storyteller.
While researching a paper, I discovered that the story about the Romans sowing salt in the farmlands of Carthage was a myth. No primary sources reported it. Apparently initiated by a highly trusted secondary source several decades ago, it was accepted as history, and even today is widely-believed.
So much for history and fiction.
As a writer, I can count on one thing: humanity. Cultural habits, societal concerns, economics—these things change. But not human emotion, human fallibility and human triumphs. I also count on possibility. I prefer the plausible, but I will always fall back to the possible.
You won’t find a preoccupation with minute historical detail in my Roman Noir. I’d rather you feel it than read about it. And keep in mind that not everyone wore togas and not everyone ate while reclining. If our culture died out, and all that survived was a Martha Stewart Guide to Entertaining and a few Saturday Night Live videos, I tremble to think how we’d be remembered …
Noir is an evolving concept, the darkest black composed of shades of grey. And there are a lot of shades. Shades of thought, shades of fiction, shades of attitude.
Roman Noir is a play on words, as well as a description of the Arcturus series. Many scholars, particularly the French, label early noir fiction—the hard-boiled stories of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and others—as “roman noir.”
I happen to agree with them, though I understand the niceties of finer labeling techniques.
Because my book is a continuing series—and I’m interested in characters, as both writer and reader—my book is not the bleak, depressing and existential plunge that many think of as typical noir. I personally find it hard to read or write about someone who is either doomed or thoroughly despicable for the course of more than one book.
I like a little redemption with my shots of bitter. My style and my protagonist are—like many a writer’s before me—inspired by Chandler. He found hope in the attempt, if not the success, and that’s a good enough model for me.
By “noir” I am also referring to the film noir label, again first used by French scholars to define many post-war black-and-white crime melodramas. From Double Indemnity to Sweet Smell of Success, I love ‘em all. You can check out my list of favorites and see if you’ve missed any.
As for those who might question whether ancient Rome (or any historical setting outside of the 1920s-1950s) is well and truly “noir” … well, my own opinion is that noir is more of an atmosphere than a content. It was born in a city, true—and Rome gave birth to the city. Rome was the first culture to define urbanity and stamp it everywhere she went, and like many a female in noir both cinematic and paper-bound—she got around plenty.
Londinium was a cosmopolitan spot in 836 a.u.c. A diverse mix of people from every dirty corner of the Empire, plenty of rigged investment schemes, civil unrest, native resentment, sluggish bureaucracy and a lot of expensive infrastructure. Sounds like a city to me.
Roman Noir is a natural fit.
I don’t want any unhappy readers, if I can help it. This is a new book in a new subgenre, and I’d rather you not read Nox Dormienda than be disappointed with it. It’s not written for the anachronism hunter. That’s not to say that you won’t find something that may not be correct according to someone else. It’s just that the book is no fun at all if you approach it that way.
Think of it as a thrill ride more than a historical novel. Fly down the roller-coaster with eyes and mind wide open. It’s Angel’s Flight and Playland-at-the-Beach mixed with a nineteen hundred year-old setting that feels like yesterday.
I’ve integrated real people, real inscriptions, real artifacts—even grave stones that you can visit in London. There’s a liberal use of Latin and a glossary in the back, because I love the language and hope the book will inspire someone to want to learn it. I've tried to use language and expressions that aren't too harshly modern, too jarringly anachronistic.
But its primary purpose is to entertain you so thoroughly, to enmesh you so convincingly, that you sometimes forget whether you’re reading about Roman Britain or 1930s Los Angeles, or a headline from today's paper. And more importantly—you don’t care. Because the people—the feelings—the motivations—are real.
That’s the goal. That’s the dream. I want you to enjoy the ride, to pick up a Catullus poem or watch Murder, My Sweet with fresh appreciation.
You’ll let me know if you like it. I hope you do, because the sequel’s ready.
Thanks for listening.
And welcome to Roman Noir.