Aztec crime thrillers

‘We tend to think of the Aztecs [he writes] - when we think of them at all - in rather grand, dramatic terms. All too often, they are presented as builders of pyramids and temples, practitioners of grisly sacrificial rites and players in the final tragedy that saw their civilisation overturned and their magnificent island city devastated. Of course, the Aztecs were these things; but they were also men and women with food to prepare, children to bring up, errands to run, debts to pay and relatives to squabble with. Domestic concerns probably loomed larger in their minds than the great and terrible events that were unfolding around them: in that, of course, they were no different from us...’

English author Simon Levack’s fourth Aztec Mystery novel

What first inspired Simon to immerse himself in early 16th. century Aztec society was a chance reading of Inga Clendinnen’s ground-breaking and now classic study ‘Aztecs’, published in 1991. Professor Gordon Brotherston wrote at the time of its publication that “’Aztecs’ begins and ends with the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, the glistening lake city which rose like a dream to the eyes of the Spaniards who first saw it. The energy it contained and which brought about its construction appears remarkable within and beyond the New World, and in order better to understand it Clendinnen takes us deep into the heart of Mexican or Aztec society. Rather than in official belief systems, of the kind painstakingly reconstructed by generations of Americanists, she is interested in what it actually felt like to live in Tenochtitlan, as warrior, priest, mother, or merchant.”

‘Aztecs’ by Inga Clendinnen