Amber in A Visible Darkness

MIchael Gregorio

Michael Gregorio are Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. She teaches philosophy. He is interested in the history of photography in the nineteenth century. They have been married for almost 30 years and live in Spoleto, a small town in central Italy. They’re the authors of the Hanno Stiffeniis mysteries – Critique of Criminal Reason, Days of Atonement, and most recently A Visible Darkness. The following article can also be found on their website, www.michaelgregorio.it.

Amber

Michael Gregorio writes:

We were interviewed last year by an American journalist named Lenny Picker of Publishers Weekly (you can read the interview here). Lenny contacted us again recently because he is writing a general article about historical crime fiction, and he asked if we would contribute some ideas.

One of his questions set us thinking: How do you perform your research?

Anyone who has read our latest Hanno Stiffeniis mystery, A Visible Darkness, may be interested to know where the principal ideas for the book came from. We also hope that this short piece with illustrations may encourage anyone who has not yet read A Visible Darkness to go out and buy a copy without delay!

The plot of the novel can be summed up thus: Procurator Hanno Stiffeniis is sent to the Baltic coast of Prussia to catch a murderer of women who work on the shore gathering amber … Lenny Picker’s question might have been: how did you go about documenting what the Baltic coast was like in the early nineteenth century?

We knew that the Baltic coast was, and still is, one of the few places in the world where amber can be found, so we began by learning as much as we could about Baltic amber, and how it is formed. Our interest grew as we learnt more.

picture one

Amber is the result of resin dripping from tropical plants, and slowly solidifying. What have tropical rain forests got to do with the Baltic Sea? We discovered that the Baltic Sea was a tropical rain forest 40 million years ago in the Eocene epoch. As the resin dripped and hardened into transparent amber, it often smothered plants and small insects, which were ‘enclosed’ inside the nuggets of amber (remember the saying: ‘a fly in amber’?), preserving evidence of their existence long after the species had died out. A naturalist named Nathanaele Sendelius published his Historia Succinorum Corpora Aliena Involventium… in 1742.

picture two

What did this mean for Prussians in the nineteenth century?

In the first place, people who believed in the Garden of Eden wondered whether it had once existed on the shores of the Baltic Sea. It also meant that the European scientific community began to take a great interest in amber ‘enclosures’ containing creatures and plants which were extinct. Long before Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, many scientists had noticed that the tiny creatures contained in amber were similar to, but slightly different from, creatures which existed in the contemporary world.

The French scholar, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, was prominent among them. His influential Philosophie Zoologique (1809) proposed a primitive theory of the evolution of non-vertebrates, which was widely debated. During the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia was overrun by the French in 1806, and vast quantities of valuable amber were sent back to Paris. Prussian nationalists and naturalists were very upset. You can see where this is leading, we hope. The amber riches of Prussia were being plundered to finance Napoleon’s military adventures. We had a plot!

We also had a setting, but how was amber actually collected on the shores of the Baltic Sea? Internet research revealed the existence of a rare book entitled Succini Prussici by Philip Jacob Hartmann which had been published in 1676. As an added bonus, a copy was available on-line from a library in Madrid.

picture three

Thus, we were able to document the clothes that amber-gatherer’s wore, and verify the techniques that they used to loosen amber from the sea-bed with prongs and spades, and skim it from the surface of the water with nets; amber floats because it contains air bubbles.

The French, of course, were going through their own industrial revolution. Wouldn’t they have tried to mechanise the process of amber gathering and eliminate the Prussian workers? We checked out a complete (?) and original copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedie in a library in Italy. There was nothing specifically concerning amber mining, but there was information about mining in general. Nothing suited our purposes, however.

Then, by chance a few weeks later, we found an eighteenth-century print from a French edition of the Encyclopaedie at an antiques market which seemed to fit the bill.

The steel engraving shows a system of mechanical open-cast mining. We added steam, put the machine on a barge, invented the inventor, then started drilling for amber in the Baltic Sea …

We were moving away from documented historical fact and into the realm of historical possibility, but why not? It is historical fiction, after all.

If you would like to know how the story works out – and discover what we discovered about anatomical waxworks, the brave women who collected amber on the Baltic shore, and much, much more – A Visible Darkness is now available in paperback.

NB: Anyone interested in learning more should look at Amber by David A. Grimaldi (American Museum of Natural History, 1996).

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