Backstabbing, politics: D.V. Bishop on crime novel The Darkest Sin

D.V. Bishop. Photo / Paul Reich

New Zealand-born novelist David (D.V.) Bishop on why Italy and Scotland inspire his writing

The view out my window has changed over the years. I’m in my home office, which is a small room right under the eaves, upstairs in our house in Biggar, about an hour’s drive southwest of Edinburgh or an hour’s drive southeast of Glasgow, depending on which way you’re coming from. Biggar is a small Scottish township, about the size of Maraetai or Mangawhai Heads.

When I look out my window, I see the front of my next-door neighbour’s property and across that up to a load of hills, essentially, because I’m just on the edge of what’s called the Scottish Borders. So, there’s a lot of looking out the window to see hills and more hills.

In the winter the hills have snow on them.

When we first moved here, gosh, 23 years ago, it was just an empty field next door, and occasionally farmers would come and put sheep on it, which was lovely. It gave me a nice feeling of being back home in Auckland. My family lived in Royal Oak and whenever you’d go through Cornwall Park you could see the sheep grazing there. I still remember one day here in Biggar when they didn’t have the sheep next door and the grass had got really high. I saw this guy pull up in his van and get out. He had a huge scythe in his hands and came marching down through the grassy field as if walking straight towards me. I thought death would have a cloak.

But he was just there to get the grass down.

I’ve written a lot of stories in this room, looking out this window. My latest novels are historical mysteries starring Cesare Aldo, an officer of the most powerful criminal court in Renaissance Florence. They’re the result of an idea I originally got a long time ago from this old textbook that still sits on my bookshelf here, that I’ve had longer than we’ve lived in this house.

It’s by John K. Brackett and has the grand title of Criminal Justice and Crime in Late Renaissance Florence, 1537-1609. I bought it from a bookshop around the corner from the British Museum when I was living in London in the 1990s, working as an editor on Judge Dredd Megazine and 2000 AD. I love history, and always had an interest in Renaissance Florence.

If you watch a news report about contemporary politics, or politics of any time, an awful lot of it is Machiavellian machinations. The backstabbing, frontstabbing, side-whispering, all that. The template for that was Niccolo Machiavelli, from Renaissance Florence. So, you have this period full of absolute political skullduggery, yet it also gives you incredible artwork and architecture, and massive breakthroughs in science and philosophy, and the birth of humanism, all happening in the same place at the one time. All fuelled by money, of course.

I just found that combination of all these things in one place fascinating.

I visited Florence after moving to the UK, and loved it as a city. The fact so many buildings from 500 years ago are still standing there today, you can walk around and imagine yourself back in the past, especially first thing in the morning before dawn when it’s not packed with tourists.

Then I picked up Brackett’s book and it said Florence had a criminal justice system roughly comparable to a modern police force. That was the lightbulb in my head. I thought I could tell a story almost like a police procedural, but set 500 years in the past with artists and musicians and architects and scientists and politicians – plus backstabbing and skullduggery, which you’re going to need if you’re writing a crime fiction series. But it was 20 years before I started writing my first Cesare Aldo book. I was doing a lot of other things those years, from writing Doctor Who novels and audio dramas, to teaching at Edinburgh Napier University. And I spent a lot of time researching. I have two bookshelves here in my office, double-stacked with books about Renaissance Florence. Just vast piles of reference materials. And an old map of Florence.

Writing about Cesare Aldo, after many different things I’ve written over decades, I’m not going to say I’ve got default settings, but I do have themes that tend to come up in my writing. Aldo is an officer of the most feared court in Renaissance Florence, and a gay man at a time when that could be punishable by death. He’s a principled lawman who lives on the wrong side of the law.

Because I teach creative writing, one of the things we ask our students to think about is what recurrent things come up in your writing. I have to do it every year with new classes, so have become good at identifying this now. So I tend to write about secret loves, forbidden loves, and stories that are full of pyrrhic victories where someone wins a battle but knows they’re going to lose the war, whether that’s because of history or the weight of forces against them. A lot of what I write tends to be people fighting the good fight, knowing they’re going to lose eventually, for one reason or another. It’s certainly there in my Cesare Aldo books. That sense of a man working in the service of, if not a corrupt system, a biased one, but he’s trying to do the right thing, trying to see justice done even when the law doesn’t allow it or enable it to happen.

I suspect my journalism training and five years as a daily newspaper reporter at the Taranaki Daily News and the Herald before I moved to the UK built a degree of cynicism in me. I find characters who’ve got secrets or who are thwarted from getting what they want, there’s always another story to tell. Why are they the way they are? What are they going to do when you put them under pressure? And that’s where we find the truth of who the character is.

- As told to Craig Sisterson

The Darkest Sin by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan, $34.99), the second Cesare Aldo mystery set in Renaissance Florence, won the 2023 CWA Historical Dagger and was longlisted for the Ngaio Marsh Awards. The third book, Ritual of Fire, is published in NZ in September and has been longlisted for the McIlvanney Prize.