The monograph that inspired Cesare Aldo

The academic monograph that inspired D. V. Bishop to create Cesare Also

D. V. Bishop recalls how a chance encounter with an academic monograph inspired twenty years of research that eventually led to writing the novel that introduces Florentine sleuth Cesare Aldo…

City of Vengeance has been a long time coming. I started the novel in 2017, thanks to a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship from the Scottish Book Trust and Creative Scotland. That gave me a month largely free to write, and in that precious time I was able to draft what became the first fifty pages.

But the origins of my crime fiction debut go back a lot further, to the 1990s when I was working in London. I’ve never been able to resist the lure of a bookshop. One day I wandered into a shop near the British Museum with no idea what I might find.

One book caught my eye: Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence 1537-1609, by John K. Brackett. Published by Cambridge University Press, it was a monograph that did what it said on the cover, exploring criminal justice in 16th Century Florence.

Glancing through the text, one sentence leapt out at me. Writing about the Otto di Guardia e Balia, the most powerful criminal court in Florence, Brackett wrote that this law enforcement organization with its investigating officers and constables was 'roughly comparable to that of a modern police force'.

Within moments my writer's brain was working overtime, imagining what a police procedural set in late Renaissance Florence might be like. How did criminal justice work in this period? What was crime like in the 16th Century? What sort of mysteries would law enforcers have to solve?

I bought the book, reading it on my way home. One thing quickly became apparent: I would need to do an awful lot more research before I could dream of attempting to write such a novel. I hadn't even visited the city of Florence back then.

The fact I didn't start writing CITY OF VENGEANCE until 2017 tells you how long that journey has been, and why its publication by Pan Macmillan means so much. But I owe a debt of thanks to John K Brackett and his monograph, which started me along the path that lead to creating Cesare Aldo...

A heavily annotated spread from Brackett’s influential monograph.