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R. S. Downie

In 2004 Ruth Downie won the Fay Weldon section of BBC3’s End of Story competition. Novels include Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls and Ruso and the Demented Doctor. She is married with two sons and lives in Milton Keynes.

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A messy and mysterious process

You’d think I’d have got the hang of this by now. After all, I’ve done it three times already. Ruso and the Demented Doctor, the second escapade for my Roman Army medic, will appear in paperback any day now. Penguin plan to publish the third, Ruso and the Root of All Evils, early next year. Meanwhile, I’m working on the fourth.

It’s strange how we choose the wrong things to worry about. Not long ago, I was a private scribbler stunned by a publishing contract. The thought of publicity was embarrassing (didn’t my mother always say it was ‘not nice to put yourself forward’?) and I couldn’t imagine ever anticipating literary festivals or meeting readers without absolute terror. In fact, meeting people turned out to be fun. But what I could imagine – what I’d expected - was that once I’d written several novels, I’d know what I was doing. Surely it gets easier as you go on?

Er… no. As I launch into writing the next book, it’s just as scary as ever.
Paul Theroux wisely described writing fiction as a ‘messy and mysterious process’. Despite my efforts to tidy it up – I’ve got a room to work in now, where the debris of failed Plot Outlines and Diary Plans can be stashed away under the desk – each start is no less chaotic than the last.

The endings aren’t much clearer. A novel, it seems, is never really finished. It just gets taken away and shown to everyone else when the editor decides it’s reached an acceptable point. This is undoubtedly a good thing. Without that discipline I’d still be playing with Book One, although probably not improving it.

Instead, it’s my job to create a whole new story. This is a strangely insecure feeling, even if the new plan seemed like a great idea when the editor agreed to it. It reminds me of the moment when Husband and I arrived home from the hospital with a new baby and realised there had been a dreadful mistake. Somebody had left us in charge of this thing by accident, and we’d better take it straight back to the experts before we broke it.

Every new start is a launch into the unknown. Even if you’re writing a series, you’ve never tackled this mountain from this particular angle before. Maybe this time the journey will turn out to be as exciting as it seemed when it was a brilliant idea in the middle of the night. Maybe it’s impossible to get to the top from here and you’ll have to stop halfway up and start all over again. Maybe a kindly editor will extend the deadline while you retreat to plan a new approach, and maybe not. And maybe that creaking noise you can hear is the sound of an overloaded metaphor falling apart. Sorry.

With luck, though, some sort of miracle occurs between the private dithering over the choice of one word or another, and the final submission. A story emerges. It’s polished by the editor and several unsung others, gets a smart jacket with a photo of a tidied-up author, goes through journeys and processes I can’t begin to imagine, and ends up on the bookshelf. After that, it’s on its own.

Hopefully the story will be adopted by a reader who’s willing to take the risk of spending several hours with it. To everyone who’s taken, or will take, that risk with the Ruso books, I’m enormously grateful. I’m never entirely sure where we’re going, but I hope we’ll enjoy each other’s company on the journey.

The author of Ruso and the Disappearing Dancing Girls and Ruso and the Demented Doctor talks to us about Famous Five and Biggles and how Ioan Gruffudd would be the perfect Ruso...

What is the first novel you remember reading?
The Famous Five – I forget which. They had a girl called George, which for some reason I found very impressive.

Which novel do you wish you’d written?
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things, by Jon McGregor

Pick one: first person or third person?
Third for mysteries – it’s useful to be able to use another point of view.

Has any thriller ever made you sleep with the lights on?
No, but I’m a wimp and don’t like to read anything too scary.

Pick one: series or standalone?
Series.

If stranded on a desert island, which fictional character would you most want to be stranded with, and why?
Ray Mears is real, so it’ll have to be Biggles. Before long Algy and Ginger would fly in and rescue us.

When you begin writing, do you know the ending?
Yes, but sometimes I surprise myself halfway through.

Who would you like to play Ruso in a movie adaptation?
What a lovely question. You wouldn’t believe the time I could spend fantasising over this one. Robert Bathurst has a wonderfully exasperated expression but he doesn’t look very Mediterranean, does he? Choosing George Clooney would just be too obvious. How about Colin Firth? Jeremy Northam’s rather gorgeous. Ioan Gruffudd? Excuse me, I need to go and lie down quietly.

Pick one: Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot?
No thanks, I’d still prefer Ioan Gruffudd.

What’s your top tip for new writers?
Find friends who write, and read each other’s stuff. It’s a great way to learn.

Writer’s Bottom and other worries...
The written word is an amazing thing. Ruso is travelling to places I’ll never see, and having relationships with people I’ll never have the privilege of meeting. He’s currently lodging in homes in Montreal and Morecambe, Sydney and San Francisco, Ormskirk and Enniskillen, and he’s even had a brief encounter with the New York Times bestseller list.

Meanwhile back here, the garden is still full of weeds, the pond full of newts and there’s a pile of ironing stuffed behind the sofa. While Ruso and Tilla are off gallivanting, I sit at the PC drinking too much coffee and developing an expanding case of Writer’s Bottom. Frankly I wish one or other of them would take the time to pop home and tell me the plot of Book Two, which is proving no easier to write than Book One, but I suppose they’re too busy enjoying themselves.

Perhaps I shouldn’t begrudge them their freedom. They did, after all, spend many years hidden away in the bottom drawer of the desk, waiting to see if anybody was going to take the trouble to finish them off.

In fact if I had known what was going to happen to them, not only would I have refused to believe it but I’d probably have run away. It’s all very well to be bold when it’s just you and the PC, but when you find out that lots of people are going to read what you’ve written, and those people are going to include real classicists, aficionados of crime fiction and your Mum, it’s very different. So when the agent rang to say, ‘I thought I ought to let you know what’s going on down here…’ the exhilaration was mingled with terror.

Of course most of the things I was worrying about never happened. My Mum would probably have liked it whatever I’d written, because Mums are like that. One classicist pointed out a particularly daft error in time for it to be corrected for the paperback. Reviewers were gentle and despite Ruso’s forthright opinions on Roman Britain, the group of readers I met near Chester were very friendly. Plus I’ve just had one of those weird experiences.

You don’t have to spend long in the company of writers before someone will tell you about an odd coincidence between writing and reality, or about inventing things and then finding out they’re true. One of the things I worried about was the minutiae of the research. Little things that might spoil the flow for readers who know more about Roman Britain than novelists do. I did get kindly and well-informed souls to check the manuscript, but one of the things that slipped through was the mention of steps up the outside of the amphitheatre wall. Now, I’ve seen reconstruction pictures of Chester amphitheatre. I’ve been to visit the amphitheatres still standing at Nimes and Arles. Not one of them has external steps - what was I thinking of when I wrote about them? I don’t know. Last week I went back to Chester and visited the new excavations. They’ve found evidence of steps up the outside of the amphitheatre wall. Weird.

Pretty soon I’m hoping to hear that someone’s dug up Merula’s bar, the fish-faced fountain and the Laundry on the East Road, which I put there not because I’m aware of any evidence for it, but because I couldn’t imagine six thousand legionaries all doing their own washing. As I said, the written word is an amazing thing. If something ought to exist and there is no evidence that it didn’t, you can create it with a few taps of fingers on the keyboard.

One of my other worries about being a published author was that people would expect me to be interesting. The sad truth, I’m afraid, is that I’m much better on paper. If I were interesting in real life, I wouldn’t have to sit here making things up, would I? What is interesting – to me, at least – is the odd things you turn up when you’re trying to find out what it would have been like to live in Roman Britain. The latest discovery is that given a choice between runner bean seedlings and a mature woad plant, nine out of ten snails prefer woad. I can’t see how this is going to be of much use in a novel, but it’s very handy for the garden. Yesterday it struck me that the Druids may have resorted to the oral tradition not only because it kept their knowledge secret, but because if you live in a society where artificial light is expensive, smelly and inefficient, it’s convenient to have instant access to all your information after dark.

The best recent discovery came when I was asked to do a talk about The Romans to a group of seven and eight year olds. Now, I have an intimate knowledge of the patterns on the sides of Roman box flue tiles (the sort used to channel the heating through the walls in bath-houses). I have been known to seek them out in museums and photograph them and frankly I think they’re fascinating (I did say I was more interesting on paper). However, the chances of finding any like-minded seven year olds seemed rather slim, so in desperation I turned to Visual Aids, Things to Handle and Dressing Up. In the course of this, I learned that a traditional second-century outfit is just the thing for a person of my shape. Maybe I’m wrong to have an independent-minded heroine. Maybe while their menfolk were out running the Empire, the women of Roman Britain stayed at home like me, quietly developing Writer’s Bottom.

Write what you know, they say. But when one has spent a career largely slithering sideways from the bottom of one benign organisation to the bottom of another, what one knows is not going to produce convincing political thrillers or courtroom drama. Or, sadly, best-sellers involving lots of wild sex between people in and out of designer clothing.

What I do know is that I was brought up in a village where the main road to town was said to be haunted by a Roman soldier, and that story has haunted me. I know that some of the stones in our flowerbeds – and possibly yours, if you have them - are not stones at all, but scraps of ancient pottery still bearing the finger-marks of their makers. Under our feet the earth bears traces of our forgotten ancestors and the stories history has recorded are as nothing to the countless stories that have been lost.

Britain was once a distant outpost of somebody else’s empire. What did our forebears think of being the underdogs: the people who worked the land and paid the taxes that kept the Roman system going? We don’t really know, because such history as we have was written by the conquerors. What we do know is that Boudica’s was not the only rebellion, and throughout the occupation those conquerors had to maintain a large standing army here to keep order.

Happily, it seems life in Roman Britain was not all mutiny and grumbling. There was time for romance. Roman soldiers were not allowed to marry, but they were allowed to have ‘relationships with local women’. One can only imagine what the British lads thought of it, but with tens of thousands of soldiers overpaid, oversexed and over here, there must have been plenty of excitement for local girls willing to collaborate. Untold numbers of promises must have been made or broken; lies told; secrets kept or betrayed. There must have been misunderstandings, jealousies and squabbles. There must also have been a level of genuine affection that we can only guess at from the occasional inscription on a tombstone or casual hint in a letter.

Inspired by curiosity about what it would have been like to be in a cross-cultural relationship in the early Second Century, I set out to write a Serious Historical Novel. After numerous bizarre twists and false starts, what emerged instead was Medicus and the Disappearing Dancing Girls.

Researching it was fun. Regrettably writers of second-century crime novels do not get to ride around in police cars and call it work, but beyond the books and the great museums on offer, there are other ways of enjoying oneself in the name of finding out about Roman Britain. I can highly recommend them. You can spend a delightful day picking and grinding up herbs and learning how to make Roman cures for hangovers and gout and worms. You can join a re-enactment society and dress up, but presumably for that you have to have a tolerance for itchy underwear and a family willing to lose you for several weekends a year. Or you can do what I did – find a community archaeological society and enjoy getting muddy.

Rather like writing, archaeology is not as glamorous or exciting as it might appear. Televised archaeology, for very good reasons, does not show much of the preparation before a dig or the recording and analysis afterwards. It does not show volunteers struggling against a high wind to clear last year’s site of protective straw bales, old car tyres and vast sheets of black plastic billowing round pools of stagnant water – although on reflection viewers might find this very entertaining. Many long hours of weeding are invisible to the camera, as are attempts to clean out the caravan which for one month shelters the Site Supervisors but for the other eleven months of the year is home to the local wildlife. Still, they say no experience is wasted if you’re a writer, and for me this was a chance to study the nesting habits of mice. They (the mice, not the Site Supervisors) make an appearance in the novel.

The archaeologists don’t appear in the book because I don’t like to write about real people, living or otherwise. Unless, that is, they are Emperors, in which case they are unavoidable - and fair game. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, I like my friends and want to keep them. Secondly, I don’t think it’s fair to take people’s names from their gravestones and make up scurrilous tales about them, even if they have been dead for nearly two thousand years.

Archaeologists, however, have other uses. Remove the black plastic and straw bales from a dig site and what you have is… a large expanse of stones and mud with the occasional deep damp hole. An archaeologist looks at it and magically the stones and odd stains in the soil become clues to the existence of a whole lost world. Houses appear. Characters wander in and out of them and drop loose change, or break a once-elegant glass. Girls fiddle about looping each other’s hair up with fancy pins. A worker who’s just laid out a batch of tiles to dry in the sun yells at a dog who’s run across them, leaving paw prints in the wet clay. Someone preparing dinner wields a sharp knife that leaves a slice across an animal bone – a bone which will be thrown away only to be found and treasured centuries later. And although we have no way of knowing, I like to think that when those people stood in their courtyard and looked out across the valley, they enjoyed the view every bit as much as we do. Little suspecting, any more than we did before it appeared, that beneath the cobbles lay a secretly-buried body…

Like a detective, the archaeologist’s job is to try and interpret random evidence that - in most cases - nobody intended to leave. Sometimes there just isn’t enough evidence for a conviction. So far there is no tidy solution to the mystery of why that poor man died, or why he was buried with scant respect in a very odd place. But, who knows? Something new might turn up. In real life, you can never tell. Thirty years ago nobody would have believed that today we would be reading the Roman Army’s bills and birthday party invitations. As I write this, somebody somewhere might be digging up Boudica’s lost tax returns.

In fiction, of course, we can solve any mystery using a biro, a few sheets of paper and some imagination. Which is perhaps why, whilst I have enormous respect for those clever and hardworking souls who puzzle over scraps of old pot in the pursuit of truth, it’s sometimes fun to make up the stories that might have slipped through the gaps of history.

Fun, that is, for everyone except my own reluctant hero. Gaius Petreius Ruso really doesn’t want to take on any sort of investigation. He is trying – not very competently, I fear – to build himself a career in the Army medical service. His only wish is to disentangle the occasional exasperating mess so that he can be left in peace to get on with maintaining the health of the Twentieth Legion, helped by an unreliable friend and a few gods he doesn’t quite believe in.