I had one of those rare weeks where I didn’t write.
fColosseum isfColosseumWe spent the week in Rome. Not a writing trip. No laptop. No word counts. No pretending I’d make a few notes and somehow end up with three thousand words before breakfast.
But writers don’t really switch off.
Especially not thriller writers.
Rome is beautiful, obviously. Grand. Ancient. Impressive in ways that make you feel small. But what struck me most wasn’t the beauty. It was the layers.
Every street seemed to have another history beneath it. Every ruin hinted at lives lived, deals made, lies told, reputations protected, and bodies forgotten. Rome doesn’t just show you power. It shows you what power leaves behind.
And as someone who writes psychological thrillers, I found myself thinking less about emperors and battles, more about people.
The private fears behind public faces.
The secrets families keep.
The gap between what someone appears to be and what they actually are.
In other words, exactly the stuff I’m always drawn back to./i
The Colosseum is one of those places that feels unreal even when you’re standing inside it.
I kept trying to imagine the crowd.
Not the gladiators in the arena. Not at first. The crowd.
Tens of thousands of ordinary people turning up to watch violence as entertainment. Families. Friends. Politicians. Merchants. Children. People who might have been kind to their neighbours in the morning and then cheered while strangers killed each other in the afternoon.
That’s the part that stayed with me.
How quickly terrible things become normal when everyone around you accepts them.
How a crowd gives people permission.
How easy it is to hide cruelty behind tradition, spectacle, or duty.
Thrillers often turn on one frightening idea: ordinary people are capable of more than they think. Rome gives you that on a grand scale. It asks uncomfortable questions about complicity. About what people will watch. About what they will excuse. About what they will tell themselves afterwards so they can sleep at night.
Cheery holiday thoughts, obviously.
The Forum gave me a different kind of unease.
It felt like walking through the remains of certainty.
Law courts. Temples. Political spaces. Monuments. Places where people once argued, judged, prayed, schemed, accused, defended, and decided the futures of others.
Now they’re ruins.
That gap fascinates me. The distance between what a place once claimed to be and what remains after time has stripped away the performance.
I kept thinking about reputation. How much effort people put into controlling the story told about them. How families, institutions, and governments build versions of themselves they want others to believe.
And how fragile all of that is.
A lie can last for years. Sometimes generations. But it only needs one person to ask the wrong question. One document in the wrong drawer. One witness who decides they’ve stayed silent long enough.
That’s where stories begin.
The Vatican Museum was a mixed experience.
As most of you know, I’m legally blind, and the Sistine Chapel’s lighting did me no favours. Much of the detail was lost on me. I couldn’t make out the imagery people travel across the world to see.
But I still got plenty from the place.
Not the detail. The atmosphere.
The scale. The wealth. The careful staging of sacred authority. The sense of an institution presenting itself exactly as it wishes to be seen.
That interests me as a thriller writer, because so many of these books are about image management.
The perfect marriage.
The respectable family.
The trusted professional.
The quiet neighbour.
The person who knows exactly what to show the world and exactly what to keep hidden.
The Vatican also made me think about contradiction. About the distance between belief and institution. Between humility and gold. Between what people say they stand for and what their buildings, clothes, rituals, and locked doors reveal.
That kind of contradiction is a gift for fiction.
Not because it gives easy answers, but because it creates tension. And tension is where character lives.
The Egyptian collection was a highlight, especially a statue of Anubis.
But my favourite part of the Vatican Museum wasn’t the Sistine Chapel.
It was the Popemobiles.
I genuinely loved them.
There’s a whole section showing papal transport through the ages, from golden carriages to modern vehicles with raised bulletproof platforms. A golden carriage tells you one thing about power. A bulletproof glass box tells you something else.
Both are public statements.
Both are protective.
Both create distance.
And that made me think about the ways people protect themselves. Not just physically, but emotionally. Socially. Psychologically. The armour people wear. The version of themselves they place between their real life and the watching crowd.
Sometimes that armour is status.
Sometimes it’s charm.
Sometimes it’s silence.
Sometimes it’s a lie repeated so often everyone in the family agrees to treat it as truth.
My favourite place on the whole trip was Ostia Antica, the old Roman port at the mouth of the Tiber.
I’d been to Pompeii before. Astonishing, but busy. Ostia Antica was quieter, which gave it a different feeling.
There was space to slow down.
Space to notice.
We walked through streets, bathhouses, courtyards, old living spaces. The amphitheatre felt almost modern in its layout. A strange thing to say about something two thousand years old, but you could see at once how people gathered there.
That’s what got to me most.
The ordinary lives.
Not the emperors. Not the grand history. The people who wanted somewhere to live, somewhere to wash, somewhere to eat, somewhere to be seen. People gossiping, working, praying, showing off, falling in love, falling out, betraying each other, forgiving each other, keeping things from each other.
All the usual human mess.
The past feels distant until you stand in someone’s old home and realise people haven’t changed as much as we like to think.
Different clothes. Different gods. Different laws.
Same shame. Same pride. Same desire to belong. Same fear of being found out.
The museum at Ostia Antica was wonderful and, thankfully, well-lit, so I could actually enjoy the exhibits.
A good sculpture shows you what someone looked like.
A great sculpture makes you wonder what they were hiding.
There were portraits, reliefs, sarcophagi, mythological figures. A statue of Minerva I keep thinking about a week later.
Portraits are strange things. They preserve a face, but not a life. You look at someone carved in stone and know almost nothing about them. Were they loved? Feared? Kind? Cruel? Faithful? Dangerous? Did their family mourn them honestly, or out of obligation? Did the inscription tell the truth?
Probably not all of it.
That’s the thing about monuments. They’re often less about memory than control. This is how we want this person remembered. This is what we agreed to say. This is the version that survives.
Every family has something similar.
Maybe not carved in marble.
But there are stories everyone repeats. Stories everyone avoids. Photographs no one mentions. Names that make the room go quiet. Old decisions softened into anecdotes because the truth would be too sharp.
That’s where psychological thrillers live.
Not always in murder, though murder does tend to focus the mind.
They live in pressure.
In silence.
In the moment someone realises the official version doesn’t quite fit.
So, no, I didn’t write while I was away.
But I came home with plenty.
Not plot ideas exactly. More like questions.
What do people hide in plain sight?
How does power protect itself?
What does a family choose to remember?
What does it choose to bury?
How much of a person can survive in the stories others tell about them?
Rome is full of ruins, but ruins aren’t dead places. They’re evidence. They show us what people built, what they valued, what they feared, and what they hoped would never be forgotten.
They also remind us that secrets rarely disappear.
They wait.
Under the floor.
Behind the wall.
In the locked room.
In the family story nobody questions anymore.
And then, one day, someone starts asking.
