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Gary Devore

~ archaeologist and author

Gary Devore

Category Archives: A Murder of Crows on the Wall

Meat-Scenery

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Film, Hadrian's Wall, Pedius, Roman, Rome, Writing

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mystery, publishing, Rome, writing

 

butterfly

The penultimate scene of All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), a far better piece of cinema than anything associated with Mel Gibson.  If you don’t know it, learn it.

In the 19th century, photography brought the carnage of the American Civil War home to the civilian population.  Photographers captured the torn and twisted bodies of anonymous soldiers strewn across battlefields, and those images were published in newspapers and journals to show the cost of a war that would go on to kill 2% of the entire population of the country.  The barbaric violence was put on full display and changed our national perception of death.

civilwarbattlefield

During the brutal trench warfare of WWI, photography, and also increasingly the moving image, documented horrible new forms of mass death men inflicted upon men.  Poison gas and the machine gun rendered killing impersonal.  The brutal slaughter, the bloody sundering of bodies without discrimination, horrified a generation of European men.

Now such graphic violence is masturbatory fodder for men (almost always men) playing a gory video game or watching a violent movie.  Especially a fucking Mel Gibson movie.

hacksaw-ridge-banner

Anonymous men in uniform get torn apart let and right in Gibson’s new film– and most of the time in “cool” graphic ways bordering on both the sadistic and acrobatic.  Unnamed soldiers are “disposable people” and their cinematic suffering is presented without any real thought or comment other than a voyeuristic pleasure inversely proportional to any audience’s sense of compassion.  These torn-apart bodies are dehumanized on the screen (especially the non-Christian Japanese).  They are background meat-scenery.  They are not protagonists.  They are not actual humans with thoughts and emotions, or anything the camera is willing to linger on except their blood, viscera, and gore.  These men are mute but for their screams.  In the larger narrative, they don’t matter because the camera only objectifies their anguish.  The film perversely revels in their messy deaths.  Their only role is to convey whatever pious, cruel, muddled message Gibson’s harping on now (jonesing for some sort of professional comeback without, you know, actually doing any real contrition to deserve it).

This lack of compassion, or at least the failure to apply it uniformly, is a tiresome hallmark of Gibson’s directorial work.  It is also a theme in the novel I just finished.  I’ve written a murder mystery set in the ancient Roman world– a brutal world Gibson would have felt at home in.  But I didn’t want to just present corpses for my detective, already cold MacGuffins simply representing puzzles to be deciphered.  I wanted to explore what it meant to be a compassionate man in that time who understood on a deep level that there really are no “disposable people,” and only our immature selfishness deems them so.  My main character, Gaius Pedius, learns every life has value.  He realizes that every man who dies on a battlefield (or is cut down by a murderer) is the subject of his own tragedy, his own subjectified reality.  Pedius’ investigations are not just a search for justice, but a forceful rejection of men like Gibson (who exist in every age) and their bloodthirsty nihilism.

death-meleager

I’m assembling the final draft now and getting ready to begin the protracted process of querying agents to shepherd it toward publication.  Along with hopefully being an enjoyable, amusing mystery novel, I hope A Murder of Crows on the Wall can also be, in its small way, a compassionate, Humanistic counter to our modern American trend toward dehumanization and cruelty.  And anything else Gibson puts up on the screen.

 

Crows: A Tyrant’s Empire

27 Wednesday Jan 2016

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Hadrian's Wall, Roman, Writing

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3071

I mentioned in my last post that my new mystery novel A Murder of Crows on the Wall takes place in 209 CE. For most people in the Roman world, I suppose that year was one of relative calm and security, although they could easily remember violence and civil war. A North African military man named Septimius Severus had been their emperor for 16 years. In the beginning, he had been just one of four powerful men attempting to seize power after the assassination of the despotic Commodus (the villain from that Gladiator movie). Severus had succeeded by force of arms after a chaotic four-year civil war when Roman legions fought other Roman legions on behalf of their favored imperial candidate.

After a short respite, the question of who was finally going to be the uncontested emperor was only solved after a big, bloody battle in 197, twelve years before the opening of my story. For context, Bush’s electoral defeat of John Kerry was only 12 years ago from now. The seizure of the throne by a powerful family of upstarts and outsiders from North Africa was fresh in the Romans’ minds.

Severus was a cruel and ruthless man who valued the might of the military above all else. He began a new imperial dynasty at Rome, and his family members mostly took after him. His eldest son Caracalla would eventually be his disastrous successor, becoming what Edward Gibbon called, “the common enemy of mankind” (quite a statement given the general reputation of Roman emperors). Caracalla’s reign would also begin with great violence, including the murder of his brother Geta by his own hand in the presence of their mother. Both brothers are characters we meet in my novel.

It is no surprise that between 197 and 209, Severus conducted several large-scale military campaigns around the empire. Warfare was mostly what he knew, and he felt the most comfortable on campaign. The economy and internal politics at Rome were still relatively stable, an inheritance from the period of prosperity cultivated by the second century emperors (such as Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius). Severus launched offensives in the east, conquering some land from the mighty Parthian empire, and in Africa where he established a line of fortifications to protect the southern frontier of the Roman Empire.

Severus then turned his sights on the province of Britain, to do something the Romans had never quite been able to accomplish­– lay claim to the entire north of the island (modern Scotland). So for the first time in two generations, Roman troops marched into Britain and conducted a brutal war of suppression against the northern tribes. Severus led the campaign, although he was old and infirm and had to be carried around in a litter because of his painful gout. Before the end of the war, he would be dead and his son Caracalla would hurry back to Rome as the new emperor.

This northern war is the backdrop for my novel. My main character, a Romanized Greek named Gaius Pedius, is a mapmaker and surveyor sent (with a hundred others) to Britain in order to re-survey property lines in the province. It is part of the war effort, since Severus hopes to redraw the tax records in his favor and extract more funds for his expensive campaigns. While there, Pedius stumbles into a murder mystery involving a mysterious religious cult and five dead soldiers.

(More information about A Murder of Crows on the Wall can be found at garydevore.com/crows/)

 

 

 

 

209 CE – A Year of Murder

25 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Archaeology, Hadrian's Wall, Roman, Rome, Writing

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Sir_Lawrence_Alma-Tadema,_English_(born_Netherlands)_-_A_Reading_from_Homer_-_Google_Art_Project

I’ve finished the entire working draft of my next novel that is set during the year 209.  It is a historical murder mystery with a cast of Romans, Greeks, and native Britons. It is called A Murder of Crows on the Wall, a title that references both the fact it takes place along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England and involves initiates of the mystery cult of the god Mithras (who were called ‘crows’).

For the past year, my head has been in the third century CE, specifically the autumn of 209.  It’s been interesting to see what focusing upon that one period of history has brought up creatively.

Getting the novel finished has been a long process, but I’m so happy it’s finally done.  In the coming weeks I’ll post some thoughts here about the novel’s setting, characters, and theme, and also about the process of writing this historical murder mystery.  The next step is to solicit beta readers and ultimately agents and publishers.  Join me in my historical journey!

(More information about A Murder of Crows on the Wall can be found at garydevore.com/crows/)

 

Leo Tolstoy on not eating meat

09 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Food, Writing

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Tolstoy, vegetarianism, writing

leo-tolstoy-photoI’ve been a vegetarian since about 1989 when I went away to college and could control my diet for the first time in my life.  When asked why, I usually reply it was a mix of health and conscience reasons, though as time goes on, I’ve realized I’ve stuck to it for more of the latter than the former.

In the novel I’m currently writing, I debated about putting in or leaving out a scene where an animal is sacrificed on an altar to an ancient Roman god.  My own disgust at the practice had to contend against the desire to be faithful to the historical time period I was writing about.

In seeking examples of how fellow vegetarians had written about violence toward animals, I came across this piece by Leo Tolstoy.  It is an excerpt from “The First Step”, the preface Tolstoy wrote for the Russian translation of The Ethics of Diet by Howard Williams (1883).  It combines Tolstoy’s masterful gift for dramatic prose, as well as his deep philosophical reasoning. I could never hope to live up to either, but it did help me identify what was needed in my scene, as well as the moral compassion that was largely behind my own vegetarianism.

It is from an English translation now in the public domain, and only a small part of the whole piece:

There never has been, and cannot be, a good life without self-control. Apart from self-control, no good life is imaginable. The attainment of goodness must begin with that…

I had wished to visit a slaughter-house, in order to see with my own eyes the reality of the question raised when vegetarianism is discussed. But at first I felt ashamed to do so, as one is always ashamed of going to look at suffering which one knows is about to take place, but which one cannot avert; and so I kept putting off my visit.

Continue reading →

A Writer’s (Tardy) Review of Broadchurch

09 Wednesday Oct 2013

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, Television, Writing

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broadchurch, mystery, writing

itv_broadchurch_04I’d heard great things about iTV’s Broadchurch, written by Chris Chibnall (who I know mostly through is work on the modern Doctor Who and Torchwood).  It’s finally been imported to BBC America where I found the acting stunning, the production (mostly) beautiful, and the writing passable at best.  As someone struggling with writing a murder mystery currently, I was hyper-focused on how Broadchurch would do it, and was I have to say very disappointed.  Here are some random thoughts why.

This post will contain spoilers, so be warned if you haven’t seen the series yet and want to experience that part of the show fresh.  I won’t mention the name of the killer here, but you’ll be able to figure it out.
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Matt Alber is amazing

02 Tuesday Apr 2013

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall, soundtrack

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A Murder of Crows on the Wall, crows, matt alber, video

In a new DVD, Matt Alber gives new arrangements to some of his songs by involving a cello string quartet. The result is truly amazing and they deliver an incredible performance.

In the clip below, the song “Old Ghosts” even includes a line that jumped out at me with this viewing. The novel I’m currently writing involves initiates to the Roman cult of Mithras, or “Crows”. It is a murder mystery set in the 3rd century province of Britain, and although the topic of the song and the novel are very different, the line “I hear the crows, they know what nobody knows…” hit me in the heart.

Old Ghosts (from With Strings Attached) from Matt Alber on Vimeo.

You can find Matt’s DVD here at his website: http://www.mattalber.com/cellos/

Crows Blurb

15 Sunday Apr 2012

Posted by Gary Devore in A Murder of Crows on the Wall

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I’ve finally posted a brief synopsis of “Crows” on garydevore.com/crows/.  I’m never very good at ‘selling’ a plot, or distilling it down to bite size chunks.  Comments welcome!

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