The Greek Detective – Stepping over the Boundaries
Anne Zouroudi introduces Hermes Diaktoros, the protagonist from her Mysteries of the Greek Detective series, the fourth of which, The Lady of Sorrows, was published via Bloomsbury only yesterday.
Watch out for June’s Bookdagger competition to win four titles from the recently reissued series!
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Hermes Diaktoros visits a remote island which is home to an ancient icon famed for its miraculous powers. But something about the Virgin troubles him, and Hermes calls on an old friend to confirm his suspicions that the icon is a fake. Ready to hand the matter over to the authorities, Hermes intends to leave – until the island’s icon painter is found dead at sea. Did he die of natural causes or by a wrathful hand? What secret is a dishonest gypsy keeping? And what haunts the ancient catacombs beneath the bishop’s house? In the fourth Mystery of the Greek Detective, the eccentric and mysterious investigator finds himself unravelling forgery, betrayal and superstition, and the consequences of all-consuming rage.
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Crime writing is a broad church, as my editor quite rightly says. It’s a fellowship that happily welcomes mavericks, and throws its doors wide open to fiction’s outriders and outsiders, rebels, adventurers and freethinkers. Enter the fat man – Hermes Diaktoros, the Greek detective.
Hermes has been likened to Hercule Poirot,and it’s true he shares Monsieur Poirot’s predilection for good food and fine tailoring. But whilst Poirot is a cerebral creature, relying in his investigations on ‘the little grey cells’, Hermes doesn’t always employ logic, and the lines he follows are rarely straight. His targets are subtler than handcuffed wrists and courtroom convictions; his aim is for the matter’s heart. He proves nothing with forensics and he summons no blue lights; but he deals in crime, and punishment, and wherever justice has not been done, Hermes is there.
On crime’s sliding-scale, I’m far away from the hard-boiled and the procedural, the psychos, serial killers and slashers. In his world of almost-contemporary Greece, Hermes walks the mountain paths and olive-groves in white tennis shoes, his bag of tricks in hand, himself an enigma whose origins lie hidden within the pages of the novels. He’s not a family man, and yet he does have family; the authorities who send him are not those you might expect. Think logically, and he’ll baffle you; think outside the box and Homer’s Odyssey, and the solution to his identity is plain.
Hermes makes his first appearance in The Messenger of Athens, the last passenger to disembark from an ageing ferry on the remote island of Thiminos. His arrivals are unexpected and largely unwelcome; his departures for the most part are unobserved. He’s a seeker of the truth, and always seems to know when he’s not hearing it. His methods are unorthodox but fair, and there’s no business unfinished when he leaves.
His creation was a voyage into terra nova. In his company, I wanted to take readers down rarely trodden roads, so I let him put a foot across the border, and head for crime’s outer limits. The result is a fusion with a second genre which many readers find intriguing. Seven seems to be a magic number for series writers, and in that, at least, I planned to follow the crowd: a book for each of the Seven Sins, which, when deadly, are perfect pegs for a crime author to hang a hat on. At least they seemed so, when I started out; as I cheered myself across the finishing line of The Messenger of Athens (whose theme is the destructive nature of Lust), I felt six more novels to fit the remaining sins would be a lifetime’s work. But already book five – The Whispers of Nemesis, a tale of arrogance, and pride – is about to hit the shelves, and readers are asking questions. Surely Hermes will continue beyond Book Seven? In truth, I’ve grown attached to him, and I’d hate to say goodbye, so I’m thinking maybe we’ll carry on beyond the seven, he and I. The sins may be finite in number, but there are no limits on storylines.
Hermes is no run-of-the-mill maverick. He’s stubborn in his defiance of categorisation, even under crime’s wide umbrella. And yet the essentials of crime writing remain paramount in my books. The beating heart of my fiction – of all crime fiction, no matter where it lies on the spectrum – is the puzzle, and its solution, the contest between reader, and investigator. Can the reader solve the puzzle before the investigator reveals all? The challenge for me, the writer, is to be subtle, even sneaky, so the reader, despite all his guess-work, never saw it coming; yet when Hermes presents the solution to the crime, it should seem inevitable, and even, in retrospect, obvious. Above all, I aim for his investigations to make excellent mysteries, whose undercurrents are deep and dark, and whose reflections on human frailty reflect truth.
Respectfully, I invite you to make Hermes’s acquaintance. What I ask of you, the reader, is an open mind – because in his Greece, all may not be as straightforward as it seems.
