Empiric

Some time ago, I was advised by several authoritative sources that I would never find a publisher for my first book, Pistols! Treason! Murder! So I decided to have a go at writing a fictional version of the same story instead. Both the historical and the fictional accounts would describe the career of the Venetian spy Gerolamo Vano, but my strategy in the latter was to undermine and contradict the (necessarily incomplete) version of the story given in the former, using a series of unlikely presuppositions and hypotheses about what had really happened in Venice prior to Vano's execution in 1622. And by 'what really happened', I obviously mean what - almost certainly - did not happen, but what, by reckless extrapolation, could be made to appear as a compelling and plausible explanation of selected historical events. The more unlikely a given interpretation was in relation to the documentary evidence, the more potentially interesting it could be made to appear in a fictional account. My fictional version of Vano's story was - not without a certain irony - entitled Empiric.

I had idle fantasies of publishing Empiric under a pseudonym, and then denouncing its departures from the historical record under the cover of my own professional identity as a historian, as many nineteenth-century fictional accounts of Antonio Foscarini, Vano's most famous victim, were similarly denounced for their extravagance by historians of the time.

The publication of Pistols! Treason! Murder! rendered Empiric redundant, but the latter remains an interesting counterpoint to the former. I shall post the first chapter of Empiric here over the next couple of days. Anyone so inclined may compare it to the opening of Pistols! Treason! Murder!, which is available free here.