Poetic Justice follows a poet in Rome who is exiled by the emperor and winds up in a town plagued by a mysterious murder. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

It started with a question much asked by Classicists – why did the Emperor Augustus exile the poet Ovid? We still don’t really know though it hasn’t stopped people guessing. Ovid himself – the real poet Ovid, that is – hints that he offended the Emperor with “a poem and a mistake”. From there I started to wonder how Ovid would have coped living in a small Greek town on the edge of Empire. And when I discovered that, in his youth, the real Ovid possibly spent a year working in the world of law and order in Rome, that gave me the idea for him turning detective.

​What kind of research did you do for this novel to ensure you captured the essence of the story’s theme?

I read Ovid’s poems – the ones he wrote in exile – and was struck by how badly he seemed to be coping. Of course, this is a portrait of himself that he wanted to convey in the poems. Interesting that he wants us to see him constantly complaining and wailing. No Roman endurance here!

I also had to research the town of Tomis, now covered by the modern Romanian city of Constanta. I was fortunate in that Constanta has a wonderful Museum of History and Archaeology, and its website freely publishes many useful documents.

I read a lot about how witchcraft is depicted in Roman writers, and I discovered that Ovid stopped at Samothrace on the way to Tomis. It is likely that he was initiated into the mysteries of the Great Gods at the huge temple complex on the island. You know the famous Winged Victory statue in the Louvre? That comes from Samothrace. These cults from the east were embraced by the Romans quite readily, which I found interesting.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I always like to explore the difference between what the sources tell us and what common sense tells us. If you just read Ovid, then you would wonder why anyone ever lived in Tomis, so I wanted to show life here as normal, relatable. A small town like Tomis would have a long history but there would be none of the huge buildings we see in Rome, none of what I call the Hollywood element. There would be far fewer slaves than in Rome, and the population would be mixed – Greeks, some Romans, people who had settled from around the Black Sea, lots of locals from the tribes around the Danube, and traders from around the Mediterranean. And Ovid would have been the most famous person ever to live in Tomis – just imagine if your favourite writer came to live in your ordinary, nobody’s-heard-of-it small town!

When will book 2 be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?

Book 2 should be available by the autumn, and it takes the reader away from Tomis to an extent, giving an Empire-wide view. It’s set around the death of Augustus, and this was important because an Emperor had never died before. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen. I’m afraid our hero is still in trouble – we find out what it was that was so terrible that Augustus could never forgive Ovid…

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