My second novel, Return of the Shade, tells the story of Parysatis, a Queen and Queen Mother of the Persian Empire at its peak of power. I stumbled upon her in doing research for Spindle and Bow. She lived for about 60 years from around 444 to 384 BC, one and a half millennia ago. Ok, I know what you're thinking: "Why bother?" "Why pluck this woman from the dustbin of ancient history? For goodness sakes, she wasn't even a Greek!" No, not Greek. She was the purist strain of Persian, a direct descendent of Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty and of the Persian Empire, which lasted 220 years from 550 to 330 BC - a dynasty that brought stability, prosperity and a flourishing civilization to what we now call the Middle East and beyond. In its day, the largest and most powerful Empire the world had ever seen. It extended from the Indus River to North Africa, from the Aral Sea to the Persian Gulf, all told one million square miles. So, one reason for writing of the Persian Empire was to try to understand the proud and glorious origins of what today is Iraq and Iran. The head and heart of this Empire was the so-called "land of two rivers", the Euphrates and the Tigris, between which the cradle of civilization had rocked. The research necessary to tell the Parysatis story might start to fill in my personal knowledge gap. Readers of my story might similarly benefit. But this was not the main reason for creating this novel. The Persian Empire had everything under the sun. Everything, that is, except a single historian to preserve for posterity its highs and lows. Herodotus, much later recognized as the father of history, was just then making a name for himself, and that name was Greek. As seen through his eyes, and those of other Greek historians, the Persians were weak and effeminate: a barbaric and despotic foil against which the courage, discipline, democracy, and culture of the Greek civilization could be set. The British Museum titled its stunning exhibition "The Forgotten Empire." So, my heroine was the forgotten Queen of a forgotten Empire. And that's the answer to why Parysatis? At first I hoped, and then, gradually, became convinced that hers was an immensely interesting and important life that no one had bothered to write about. Parysatis wielded great power as Queen and Queen Mother. Imagining the hows, whys and wherefores was my goal in writing Return of the Shade. It was a joyful task, and, in the end, one that convinced me hers was a life well worth remembering.
Author Profile by Bevis Longstreth I have now written three historical novels: Spindle and Bow, Return of the Shade and Boats Against the Current. The characters developed in each story are wrapped around a particular period of history that I knew just enough about to know I didn't know much, and about which I wanted to know a great deal more. As a lawyer for most of my professional life, I knew and enjoyed research. And I knew and enjoyed writing that tried to achieve objectives with the reader, be they to inform, enlighten, persuade or engender feelings of passion, hatred, envy, anger or whatever. It seemed natural to turn to history as the platform for making up characters and the stories of their lives. And there was another reason, if I were to be honest and complete. Old folks like me often need a trainer to force them to do the exercises that, theoretically, they could do alone. These novels were my trainer, forcing me to research the period of history I needed to know to write a novel, but might not have the zeal and energy to take on without the prospect of having that research enable a novel to be born, as Michangelo's chisel enabled his famous Prisoners to be released.
