Making her Marcus

As usual, there will be a focus on the local, as well as on big-name visiting authors. So alongside talks from the likes of Lindsey Davis, Paul Torday and Maureen Freely about their latest bestsellers, there will be creative writing workshops, storytelling for children, poetry readings and guided walks around York’s places of literary interest.

Check out our panel for some highlights of what will be going on, go online at yorkfestivals.com, or pick up your own brochure from local libraries, bookshops or the City Screen.

Meanwhile, to give you a sense of what will be happening, we spoke to local creative writing teacher Lizzie Linklater about her Pen to Paper writing group, which is taking part in the festival, and to bestselling author Lindsey Davis, who will be in York on Tuesday to talk about her latest novel featuring Roman private eye Marcus Didius Falco….

YORK is the perfect place in which to talk about her historical novels, admits Lindsey Davis – because it has so much history.

Roman history, too – though up until now, in nearly 20 novels, Lindsey’s Roman private eye Marcus Didius Falco hasn’t managed to get this far north.

He did come to Britain earlier in his career, when he fought as a Roman soldier against Boudicca. But the Roman town of Eboracum hadn’t been founded then, Lindsey admits. “Though he could come to York at some stage, yes.”

Lindsey’s new novel, Alexandria – the 19th in the Falco series – is published on Tuesday, the day Lindsey is to give a talk at the National Centre for Early Music.

In many ways, Falco is your typical hard-boiled gumshoe, Lindsey admits. He has that laconic, slightly cynical take on things you expect of the best PIs. And he even narrates the stories in which he appears, in the style familiar to lovers of Philip Marlowe.

Brought up in the slums of Rome, he is the kind of self-made man who would have been very much at home in modern-day New York, says Lindsey. Like New York today, Rome in the first century AD was a place where there were “people of all nationalities jostling and rubbing shoulders, and lots of fast-food outlets, which we know from Pompeii that the Romans had”.

Falco was once voted by BBC Radio 4 Women’s Hour listeners the “second sexiest fictional character after Rhett Butler”.

In earlier novels, fans have seen him drag himself up from the slums, fight as a Roman soldier, then become an informer, private investigator and part-time agent of the Roman Emperor Vespasian.

He made his fortune by tracking down tax-dodgers for the Emperor during the Great Census, and by the 19th novel is middle class and wealthy enough to support his upper class wife, Helena Justina, in the style she is accustomed to.

The first Falco novel, Silver Pigs, was intended as a spoof and in many ways Falco is a comic character. He is also, despite his similarities to modern fictional heroes, a very Roman character, Lindsey says.

Unlike your typical modern fictional private eye, who tends to be a loner, Falco has a large, extended Italian family – plenty of comic potential there – many of whom are very shady characters indeed. And he grapples with very Roman moral problems, such as whether or not to buy a slave – and if so, what kind.

In Lindsey’s latest Falco novel, Marcus Didius and his wife turn up in Alexandria, the capital of Egypt.

Helena Justina is determined to see the sights, including the Pyramids and the lighthouse at Alexandria. Falco, meanwhile, has important business at the Great Library of Alexandria – some of it involving his shady Uncle Fulvius, who is taking an unhealthy interest in the world’s finest collection of scrolls.

The day after Falco and his wife arrive, however, the librarian is found dead in a locked room. Falco, as an agent of the Emperor, is asked to investigate… Lindsey is not about to give too much of the plot away here. But you can find out more about her larger-than-life character and his latest adventure at the National Centre for Early Music, Walmgate, on Tuesday from 7pm. Tickets £5 from York Central Library on 01904 552815.

•Alexandria by Lindsey Davis, is published in hardback by Century on Tuesday, priced £18.99

WRITING is a wonderful way in which to try to make sense of the world, says Lizzie Linklater.

It helps you to express yourself and your own deepest feelings – and in the process to become more clear about precisely who you are. But it also helps you to make imaginative leaps and – if you are trying to write fiction especially – to put yourself into other people’s heads.

Lizzie, left, teaches writing on the lifelong learning programme at the University of York. More recently, she has set up a writing group – Pen To Paper – that meets once a month at Millers Yard off Gillygate.

She gets all sorts of people at the group, she admits. “I’ve got people in their 20s and people in their 50s, artists, businessmen, teachers, people who work in advertising, you name it,” she says.

They are all united by a desire to write, although not necessarily for publication, Lizzie says. Some group members have had work published, while others write for the joy and satisfaction of expressing themselves.

Members of the group will be reading from their work – poems, scripts and stories – at an event for the Literature Festival on Tuesday, which will be the perfect chance for you to find out if a writers’ group is for you.

They are not for everybody, Lizzie says, but while many people might view writing as a solitary activity, there are benefits to being part of a group.

You meet like-minded people, for a start. You get to talk through ideas, and you have the discipline of sitting down at least once a month and doing some writing.

“We do some writing every session,” Lizzie says.

Best of all, perhaps, is the feedback. It is very hard to be critical or objective about what you have written, Lizzie says. “It all seems very precious to you.”

Others, however, can view it more objectively, and in a positive, friendly atmosphere give you advice. “And that is how to get better.”

•Pen To Paper, The Loft, Millers Yard, Gillygate, Tuesday March 3 at 7pm. Tickets £3 from Lizzi Linklater on 01904 331855 or 07855 546574.