A first blog post on places that have inspired the books can only begin with Lindos. Thirty years on I still remember the leap of my heart at the first sight of the village as the car rounded the bend on the approach road above. It is that way for most newcomers and even for those who have lived there all their lives. That first sudden revelation of Lindos is one of the most beautiful sights not only in Rhodes and in Greece, but on Earth: the whitewashed houses clustered in the basin below you, the acropolis with its temple to Athene and castle of the Knights of St John rising like something in a fairy tale opposite. And the sea, the blue Mediterranean stretching away to meet the horizon in a thin violet line.
To summarize what Lindos is in a blog post is a hopeless endeavour. Beyond the basic facts that it is a village just over half way down the east coast of the island of Rhodes, it has taken three books to begin to express something of the impact of the place, the layers of human experience, the interplay of man-made and natural beauty found there. When you walk its streets, you can feel its history in the air; its history not only something to look at with the eyes – and it is a feast for those eyes - but to breathe in. Not all that history has been pretty. Lindos has had its share of hardship and violence, but there is a sense of unquenchable light that endures both physically and energetically. When a place has that kind of light, the presence of shadow can appear all the more stark. Lindos – and Greece as a whole – has always felt to me to be a place of sharp contrasts. It is those contrasts that have kept me fascinated for three decades and have inspired the exploration of the relationship between good and evil that is at the heart of the mystery trilogy.
If you want to meditate on what it is to be human, there are few better places to do it than one that has been continuously inhabited since Neolithic times. To call Lindos a village seems almost impertinent. Ships set sail for Troy from Lindos’s harbour. Alexander the Great made sacrifices to Athene in the temple atop the acropolis. Lindos was no less than a city state in ancient Greece. St Paul is said to have landed at St Paul’s Bay after being unable to get to shore in the main harbour because of a storm. Legend has it that the rocks parted to allow him safe entry to the enclosed bay. On and on through the medieval period with the advent of the Knights of St John and then the Ottoman Turks, Lindos has attracted the attention of wave after wave of visitors and invaders and through it all endured.
Given this backdrop, when Vangelis Skouras is posted to Lindos as chief of police it is by any standards a dream posting. He has left the grit of Athens for apparent paradise, but in paradise there is always a snake and Vangelis soon encounters him. Light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate – the stuff of life and the stuff of stories. If you already know Lindos, I hope the books will offer a welcome return; and if you don’t know Lindos, perhaps they will inspire you to visit.
St Paul’s Bay
