Rogues

Steven Saylor

Bestselling author Steven Saylor is one of the brightest stars in the “historical mystery” subgenre, along with authors such as Lindsey Davis, John Maddox Roberts, and the late Ellis Peters. He is the author of the long-running Roma Sub Rosa series, which details the adventures of Gordianus the Finder, a detective in a vividly realized Ancient Rome, in such novels as Roman Blood, Arms of Nemesis, The Venus Throw, Catilina’s Riddle, A Murder on the Appian Way, Rubicon, Last Seen in Massilia, A Mist of Prophecies, The Judgment of Caesar, The Triumph of Caesar, and The Seven Wonders. Gordianus’s exploits at shorter lengths have been collected in The House of the Vestals: The Investigations of Gordianus the Finder and A Gladiator Dies Only Once: The Further Investigations of Gordianus the Finder. Saylor’s other books include A Twist at the End, Have You Seen Dawn?, and a huge non-Gordianus historical novel, Roma: The Novel of Ancient Rome. His most recent books are the big second volume in the Roma sequence, Empire: A Novel of Ancient Rome, and a new Gordianus novel, Raiders of the Nile. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Recently, as recounted in The Seven Wonders, Saylor has introduced a whole new series of tales that take a teenaged Gordianus to visit the Seven Wonders of the World with his traveling companion, the elderly Greek poet Antipater of Sidon. Set in the fabled city of Tyre in 91 B.C., “Ill Seen in Tyre” is a previously untold episode from the journey of the young Gordianus. As Gordianus discovers, Tyre was also the location, a hundred years before his visit, of the only known earthly adventure of two of the greatest rogues in literature, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (as recounted in Fritz Leiber’s 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit, later included in the Leiber collection Swords in the Mist). This mulitdimensional crossing of paths in Tyre might seem a mere coincidence, but as Gordianus learns, on earth as in Nehwon, all stories and storytellers are subtly, even magically, connected.