Lindsey Davis' novels are awkward things. Not in the reading. Not in the writing. But in the bracketing. Try as you might, you can't put her books into a genre, or even a sub-genre. You might think you've got it, you might just be on the point of pinning it down, and then she just chucks something else into the mix and off it wriggles again. You can imagine booksellers running round their shops, puzzling over which shelf to put them on. They're historical. They're mysteries. They're thrillers. They're romances. That you can't pin them down is no bad thing. Pigeonholing is so passĀ. Besides which, there are lots more authors following in her footsteps. Steven Saylor, David Wishart, Rosemary Rowe . . . which should make things easier for the booksellers, at least. Lindsey has written 16 books featuring her hero, Falco, who she describes as "a 40s gumshoe style character living in First Century Rome." And if you think that sounds quirky now, you should have seen Lindsey trying to get them published 20 years ago. Back then, she was the only one doing this kind of thing. Which made life considerably more difficult. "I chose to set my books in the Roman period because no-one else was doing it, basically," she says. "So yes, because it was so different, publishers saw them as a bit of a risk, and it was hard to persuade them that something that back then seemed so exotic and worryingly new was worth taking a chance on. "What made it more difficult was that there was noTime Team or any programmes like that then, so it was harder to gauge what the public reaction would be. It was a risk, but luckily neither I nor my readers thought so." It wasn't the first time Lindsey had taken such a gamble - and had it pay off. Born in Birmingham - the Loveday Street Maternity Hospital, to be precise - she went from King Edwards' School for Girls to Oxford ("I read English Lang and Lit, although everyone thinks because of the books I did Classics") to a job in the Civil Service. And then, at 35, she decided she'd had enough. "I just got fed up. After working for the Civil Service for 13 years I began to see that career progress for women was very, very slow. So in the end, I resigned. "I'd always wanted to be a writer, and I thought 'if I don't give it a go now I never will'." She made her first inroads into writing just before leaving her job, winning second place in a competition. Inspired, she kept on, eventually managing to get romantic serials published in Woman's Realm. Back then, too, she went for the historical, but it was Civil War England as opposed to the Roman Empire. "The Civil War is a good period for romance fiction because you can have people torn apart by the conflict who are then reunited. I was also interested in the politics of the period, too." It was romance that got her into the Roman era, too - only this time it was a real one. The story of the Roman Emperor Vespa-sian and his mistress Antonia Caenis fascinated Lindsey, and, given the lack of information about Antonia, she decided to turn it into a novel. The Roman setting made publishers reluctant to take it on, and it took ten years before it was finally published. Yet writing The Course of Honour inspired Lindsey to begin the Falco novels, the first of which, The Silver Pigs, was published in 1989. "The research I did for The Course of Honour got me interested in the Roman period, and gave me the idea of setting a detective novel in the big, dangerous city that Rome was at that time. Having written romance, I wanted to do something that involved other emotions. But I will always be a romantic writer in a way, because I'm interested in human relationships." And that is something that the Falco novels are full of. For in typical Lindsey fashion, her hero isn't your average gumshoe. Sure, like most of them, he has a history. But his is more immediately visible. "For a joke, when I was writing the books, I decided to give Falco a huge Italian family, because you don't normally get that with these kind of characters, they're usually loners. And the family have become really popular. "I think that's why people like the books - there's something for everyone. Some buy them for the history, some for the mystery, some like the Mediterranean life that it looks at and some like the relationships and romance." Lindsey is now working on her 17th Falco novel, See Delphi and Die, to be published next June. But she doesn't rule out trying something a bit different. "I do get a hankering to write something a bit different every now and again, just so I can say 'I can do this'. "It is tempting to say 'I'll do 20 Falco novels and then think about something else', but that's for the future." Whatever happens though, you can bet it won't be easy to bracket. Booksellers beware. l Lindsey Davis will be appearing at Droitwich Library, Droitwich, Worcester-shire, at 7pm on Thursday, July 15 and at Glebe Farm Library, Hodge Hill, at 2pm on Friday, July 16. l Scandal Takes A Holiday, Lindsey's latest novel, is out now in hardback (Century, £16.99) | 
