Danger In The Wind

As I said last week, I invited my old pal, Jane Finnis, to let us know something about her new book, DANGER IN THE WIND set in Isurium, Yorkshire, in the early years of Roman Britain.

Here's Jane



And here's the book:

And here's how Isurium  looks today.          



Image© Copyright Paul Buckingham and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence




Over to you, Jane!




Have you ever wondered what fellow-mystery-writers talk about on the phone? Anything and everything, of course. Dolores and I occasionally discuss our works-in-progress, which  results in some pretty bizarre conversations. Anyone hacking into our phones will have heard us chatting about pagan deities, Roman curses, and last year, while I was writing DANGER IN THE WIND, the subject was Roman forts...or lack of.

“I’ve got a problem, Dolores. I’m looking for a fort for a birthday party, and I can’t find just the right one.”

“A birthday party?”

“Oh yes, they did celebrate birthdays, and Aurelia has been invited to a cousin’s party. The cousin is married to an army officer who’s stationed at a military base. It must be small and unexciting, well away from serious fighting, apparently very safe (ha ha!) And not too far from York, otherwise the whole story will slow down because everyone will need too much time travelling there and back.”

“You can always make one up. The Romans built so many forts, and you must have a good feel for the kind of places they’d choose. Pick a likely spot and let your imagination rip.”

And that’s more or less what I did. About 20 miles north of York are the remains of a Roman town called Isurium, alongside and underneath the village of Aldborough. Today Aldborough is a peaceful, pleasant spot, with the river Ure running close by, and a museum displaying some of its Roman heritage. In 100 AD, I realised, it would be perfect for Aurelia to visit – except for one problem. Nobody so far has found a fort there. Civilian dwellings, yes…but not military.

Yet geography and common sense dictate it must have begun life as a military base. It’s one of a chain of Roman settlements running north from York, first established by the army to guard key points on the main military road to the frontier. Village quickly grew up around them, housing the soldiers’ families and the civilian workers who flocked in to try to part the men from their wages by selling everything from a good warm cloak to a good night out. When the forts were no longer needed they were abandoned, but the villages lived on.

Some haven’t left much trace now, but others, like Isurium, grew larger and grander, and the early buildings were simply pulled down and redeveloped. That’s what must have happened to the fort, and the first civilian houses. The interesting Roman remains there now – mosaics, coins, kitchenware, and more – date  from much later than 100 AD. Isurium in its heyday was a prosperous town with civic buildings, rich houses, and its own defensive walls. It became an administrative capital for the Brigantian tribe who populated most of Yorkshire, so it acquired the name Isurium Brigantum. But in Aurelia’s day it was plain Isurium, and nothing to write home about, unless you got entrapped in a mystery when you thought you were only visiting for a birthday party.

I hope archaeologists will do more digging at Isurium one day to look for evidence of life there before it became powerful and posh. Will what they find  prove that I guessed correctly when I imagined it had a fort? I don’t claim (as Aurelia does sometimes) that “I’m always right, it’s a well-known fact.” But I’d love to be right about this!

The US publishing date for DANGER IN THE WIND was December 2011 for hardback and paperback; in the UK the paperbacks are available from "any good bookshop and, of course, Jane's website, http://www.janefinnis.com