Goodreads asked Richard Blake:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Richard Blake I think the first idea came to me in the February of 2005, when my wife took me for a long weekend break in Rome. This was my first visit to the City, and my first at that time of year to anywhere in the Mediterranean World. In both senses, the visit opened my eyes. It was cold – much colder than England. Though I “knew” otherwise from the sources, I’d had a fixed notion of the ancient world as a place of omnipresent sun and warmth. Stumbling round the Forum in thick overcoat and gloves brought everything closer to my own experience, and set me thinking about what the Romans wore in winter, and how often most of them really bathed, and what the air must have been like in a place where a quarter of a million houses were heated with charcoal.

More important perhaps was the state of what remained from the past. The Forum had a melancholy grandeur. The Colisseum was vast even by the standards of London. The Basilica of Constantine must have been bigger than St Paul’s. But, excepting the Pantheon, and those parts of buildings made into churches, everything was in ruins – noble ruins, I’ll grant, but ruins even so. Everywhere I looked, there was the sense of something that was over and done with.

But I found many churches than I’d expected going back to the sixth or fifth or even fourth centuries. Though always added to, or changed in other ways, these carried me back – far more effectively than the broken stones of the Temple of Jupiter – to the days of Antiquity. And they were often astonishingly lovely in their own right. Take, for example, the Church of St Mary Maggiore. Built in the early fifth century, and more or less unchanged in its interior, this was a place where the senatorial aristocracy had come to worship, and had been used in unbroken sequence ever since for worship.

If surprised, though, I wasn’t disappointed. Ever since my first reading of Gibbon as a boy, my interest had been as much in the end of Antiquity as in its great days. At university, I’d focussed so far as possible on the early Middle Ages. Since then, if in a desultory manner, I’d been going through the history and literature of the Byzantine Empire. Finding so many connections to it in Rome was an unexpected bonus to the visit. By the second day, my wife and I had given up on the usual monuments. Instead, with a new and bigger guide book, we explored Rome from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Every time we came out from somewhere grand and wonderful, we asked each other what it must have been like to visit or live in a Rome when these buildings were new, but still surrounded by the intact if decaying remains of the Imperial City. That, I think, was the first inspiration for my Byzantine novels.

A few months later, my mother lent me half a dozen assorted thrillers set in Ancient Rome. I won’t say who wrote these, though none was by Steven Saylor – the Grand Master of the genre. A couple were excellent. I thought the rest were dire. “Can you do any better?” she asked when I’d finished sneering at the blunders of fact and atmosphere and plotting and characterisation. “Bet you I can,” I said straight back. “Go on, then,” she laughed. “Bring it round when you’ve done it.”

A few days later, I opened a new file in MS Word, and sat staring at the cursor. I was going to write a novel. I’d already written two novels in my twenties. But these had been about as dire as the ones I’d denounced to my mother, and were trapped on 5.25” floppies formatted for an obsolete computer. I was going to write an historical thriller. It would be set right at the end of Antiquity, and would take place in Rome. Where to start?

My answer was to make an Englishman the hero and narrator. You can give the lead in historical fiction to a complete foreigner. All you need is someone reasonably attractive to the readers. But I wasn’t sure how much ability I had. Besides, one of my favourite historical novels is Cecelia Holland’s City of God, which has an Englishman as the lead character. When I was a boy, I enjoyed Paul Capon’s Artor series, which, even in the volume set in Minoan Crete, has a leading character with some connection to this island. Also, when at university, I read a very good novel, written for children, about the Fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. The lead character in this was a boy from Bristol. So it was be a thriller set c600 in Rome, and the lead character would be an Anglo-Saxon. What next?

My answer here was to Google a list of Anglo-Saxon names. I didn’t fancy names like Edmund, Edward, Alfred, and so forth. Nor did I fancy names that no one would be able to pronounce. At last, my eyes stopped on Aelric. Almost but not quite familiar, and not impossible to pronounce. So I had my character. Now, what to do with him?

Here, I feel obliged to discuss how I write. Some novelists make up a detailed plan in advance, listing all the characters, and summarising each part of the story, or even each chapter. I can’t do this. After ten novels, I no longer feel ashamed to say that whatever plan I make will become obsolete within a few pages. Sometimes, I’ll start with an image of where I want to end. In Terror of Constantinople(2009), I started with the idea of Aelric, beautiful in white, standing on a boat as it moves across the shining but filthy waters of the Golden Horn. In Sword of Damascus(2011), I started with a vague idea of a climax in the Syrian desert. But that’s the best I can ever do. For the rest, I make the story up a chapter at a time. If it comes quickly, as it normally does, I can write a novel in four months. If it dribbles out like an old man’s urine – as happened with Curse of Babylon(2013) – I’ll take nine months.

The critics often say that my plots are unpredictable, but still manage to follow a logical course. The reason for this is that I generally write without knowing what will happen next, but keep going back to change what I’ve already written. Give me a pen or a typewriter, and I’d never get anything written. Let me die before finishing a novel, and anyone brought in to finish it for me would find a chaotic mass of words. The nice thing about living at the start of the computer age is that everything can be sorted as it approaches the end. The readers see only the finished product, and this is a coherent structure that looks as if it was all written to plan. When I read one of my novels, what I see is paragraphs and block of paragraphs, or just single sentences, that were written for one purpose and used for another. For me, It’s like looking at a set of geological strata that have been pressed and buckled by endless movements of the earth.

Back, however, to the first novel. I began with the idea that Aelric would be telling his story in extreme old age, and that he’d be writing about himself in his early or middle teens. I wanted someone of astonishing beauty, who’d be ruthless and uninhibited in his tastes, and who could be lusted over by monsters of both sexes. But early and middle teens didn’t work. I needed him also to be very strong and reasonably well-educated. Because I still needed youth and beauty, I spent the whole novel dithering over his age. I finally settled on nineteen. Except in Sword of Damascus, where he’s pushing a hundred, the whole series follows Aelric to the age of twenty five.

Once I’d realised the plot would reveal itself, I wrote the first novel six weeks. I wrote so quickly because I fell in love with the project, and worked on it on railway trains and even replacement busses. It took over my life, and I almost lived in seventh century Rome. Then there is the sad story of a friend’s terminal illness. He’d been complaining for several months about aches and pains legs and lower back. Everyone put this down to the fact that he was getting old – he was 55 – and his insistence on jogging and roller skating as if he were still in his twenties. But I felt an increasing sense of dread every time we met or spoke on the telephone. I couldn’t see it at the time. Looking afterwards at the photographs, however, it was plain that he had the mark of death on his face. I completed my draft two days before he told me that he might have bone cancer. My first Byzantine novel, then, was a kind of moral anaesthesia.

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