If you look at a map of Southern Italy, you see the spur of the boot (too high-backed to be of use to a working cowboy) sticking some forty miles out into the Adriatic Sea. And in the center of this spur is the dark and looming Monte Gargano where, in the year 493, a local bishop went deep down into a cave on the mountainside to investigate rumors of a recent miracle occurring there. According to the bishop’s testament, he had only just arrived at the location when the Archangel Michael appeared in full shining armor before him, confirming the miracle, and proclaiming the cave an everlasting shrine to all angels. And so became Monte Sant’ Angelo a destination for worshipping pilgrims from every direction, and where, in 1016, a band of Norman adventurers came to bless their own jaded angels, when a miracle of more earthly nature occurred. There, the Normans were confronted by a mysterious figure appearing out of the torch-lit shadows, who turned out to be a Lombard noble named Melus, begging for their help to defeat the Byzantine Greeks, with whom his people were at war. It was a plea, carried back to France, that would change the course of history and civilizations.
The Normans came, of course, first as a trickle; then a torrent. Descendants of Franks, Gallo-Romans and Vikings, these young French knights and paladins were mostly poor and without opportunity back in their homeland, but they all had three things in common: a desire for adventure, an itch for fortune and some even elusive fame, and a foolhardy willingness to ride their stout steeds, with their sharp swords slapping a rhythmic measure against their legs, into a world where empires, at the moment, were colliding together. Or as John Julius Norwich describes it in his gorgeous histories of the events: “The great cauldron…the constant clashing of the four greatest powers of the time, torn apart by the warring claims of four races, three religions and an ever-varying number of independent, semi-independent or rebellious states and cities…” It was, in the most vibrant though bloody sense and meaning of that word you can imagine, a mess. But the Normans came, regardless, encountering and dealing with that mess. And more than a century followed—the year 1130, in fact—before the dust finally settled and a grandson of that original Wild Bunch, a man named Roger, was crowned king of what became one of the most magnificent, illustrious and certainly tantalizing kingdoms in history.
In a hopefully equally tantalizing fashion my historical thriller, French Quarters, weaves elements of these events into the narrative. Of course, the main historical setting of the story builds the world of 1880s Gilded-Age New Orleans, which was a mess of a different sort. The city was still on its knees and recovering from the effects of the Civil War, corrupt machine politics controlled the city, and everyone there at the time was looking and praying for the Hail Mary that would rescue them. So an idea was hatched to host a World’s Fair, a Cotton Centennial, that would lure the world back to its muddy shores beside the mighty Mississippi and possibly return New Orleans to its Golden-Age status of the past. At least, that was the plan. So the invitations went out even as the giant exhibitions rose upon the swampy acres now known as Audubon Park. But, unfortunately, that same moment the world prepared to journey to The City That Care Forgot, in order to partake in the shindig, was also the moment the murders began.
In my story, one of the main characters, Donna Natalya Ruggiero Val Demona, a young Sicilian princess whose entire family was previously murdered, remembers her ancestral patriarch, one Richard the Wild, the Norman knight who rode with the Great Count Roger (father of the eventual king) into Sicily against Emir Ibn al-Hatta and his Saracen army. And she recalls the emir’s terrifying and derisive battle cry against the Normans: “French quarters!” By which he meant no quarter at all for these infidel Frenchmen. No safe haven. No mercy. Butchered to the last man, woman and squalling infant. And that battle cry is carried forward as a theme into the cosmopolitan war my detective brothers find themselves waging, as a fight to the finish. No safe haven. No mercy. This, as they uncover secrets and twisted motivations not only from their own time but deeply buried from that other long-forgotten time as well. A time King Roger of Sicily founded his glorious empire against all odds. One might hope my Crescent City cops working those mean, gaslit streets would be so lucky.