Tom Swan and the Head of St George Part Three: Constantinople

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There’s something very . . . historical, about writing an historical serial for e-publication. If it’s been done recently, I haven’t heard about it, and yet it has impeccable historical credentials – before we had the epub, we had the magazine, and in that format Dumas did it, and Conan Doyle, and a host of other authors with magnificent credentials; Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, and Charles Dickens.

It’s a fine format. Instead of a single pulse of seven hundred manuscript pages, the author can write in blocks with independent storylines that may still have an arc and a complex interweb of characters and motivations. I was resistant – but not for long.

So here is Tom Swan, my first serial character. Tom is firmly based in history; Italy was full of itinerant Englishmen, especially soldiers, throughout the period, and so was Greece. I confess that the man who forms the basis for the character was not English but Italian – Cyriac of Ancona, sometimes known as the ‘Grandfather of Archaeology,’ who roved the Levant in search of antiquities and manuscripts that he could beg, borrow or steal for the Pope and other rich clients in their burning zeal to rediscover the ancient world. Ancient manuscripts were then, and remain, incredibly valuable; recent re-discovery of a complete text of Archimedes in a palimpsest shows that such manuscripts are still out there, and give us an idea of the kind of treasures for which Tom Swan – and Cyriac of Ancona – searched.

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