<p><a href="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/porchetta.jpg"><img src="http://davidhewson.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/porchetta-tm.jpg" width="200" height="206" alt="porchetta.jpg" style="float:right;padding-left:4px;" /></a>Back in 2002 I was stuck with a problem. I was writing the second book in the Costa series, <i>The Villa of Mysteries,</i> and struggling like mad with a character. He was Gianni Peroni, an older cop who was to be Costa's kind of sidekick in the books to come. The man just wasn't working. He was predictable, two-dimensional, unreal somehow. I just didn't know what made him tick.&nbsp;&nbsp;</p>
<p>This didn't worry me much at the time. The book was in its early stages and I was due to go back to Rome for more research. Then the day of the flight came... and Ryanair cancelled. Worse, they said they wouldn't fly me out to Italy for another four days at the very least.</p>
<p>Great. I got a ticket on the Shuttle, and set off by car, through France, through Switzerland, down into Tuscany, eventually settling in the hillside town of Sinalunga, trying to work out what the hell I was going to write.</p>
<!--more--><p>The problem with Peroni at that time was simple. I didn't know where he came from. I don't mean geographically -- I'd already decided he was Tuscan, which was one reason I diverted to Sinalunga trying to pin him down. I just didn't understand his background -- what made him, why he became a cop. I wanted him to be a sympathetic character but with a bit of mystery. He's big, he's ugly, he's got scars, he looks as if he can handle himself.</p>
<p>But appearances are deceptive. He's actually very gentle, kind and thoughtful. In some ways the most 'emotionally intelligent' of the lot. Why?</p>
<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinalunga" target="_blank">Sinalunga</a> is a modest little place, a small hilltop Tuscan town a long way from the tourist tat of Chiantishire. That appealed to me as a place from which my character could come. I poked around for a while and still didn't have a clue what else I could add to the man. Then, after a couple of days, there was the most amazing local holiday. The streets at the bottom of the hill filled with stalls selling food and trinkets. People flocked from miles around. I wandered round, chatting to people, most of whom were utterly baffled why a solitary Brit should have been so far off the beaten track.</p>
<p>The event had a whole line of porchetta stands, stalls where locals were selling roast whole stuffed pig. Must have been a dozen of them or more, mostly stout husbands and wives, happy as Larry, holding out bits for you to try for free and nodding at their neighbours, laughing, saying, 'Don't buy <i>his!'</i></p>
<p>I've never seen anything like it, and never tasted so much wonderful roast pork in my life. They were all local, many of them farmers who'd raised the beasts they were selling and had spent all night roasting them for the fair. All utterly contented with their lives, without ambition, fired by nothing more than a love of the moment and this beautiful, unspoilt part of Italy.</p>
<p>And in a flash I had Gianni Peroni. I still remember excitedly scribbling down what drove him on a little notepad in a café, fingers still greasy from all that free meat. Gianni came from here and was destined to be a farmer too, happily roasting porchetta for the locals, handing it out for free, chanting, 'Don't buy <i>his!'</i>.</p>
<p>But circumstances, difficult, tragic circumstances, dictated otherwise. He was, in other words, defined by what he was not. By failure if you like. And the memory of what might have been -- selling porchetta in rural Tuscany instead of chasing bad guys in Rome -- informs him to this day every time he walks into a scene in my head.</p>
<p>That back story is explained in full in <i>The Villa of Mysteries</i>. It gets mentioned with a diminishing brevity in the books that follow. Not so much any more though. Peroni is who he is, and while I wouldn't rule out his Tuscan origins reentering a book in the future I don't need to keep mentioning them. If readers are sufficiently interested all they have to do is go back to the early books and find out for themselves.</p>
<p>What did I learn here?</p>
<ul>
  <li>The things that make books work aren't gifts; you have to go out and track them down.</li>

  <li>Characters, like real people, can be formed as much by what <i>doesn't</i> happen as by what does.</li>

  <li>The subterranean qualities of characterisation remain important even when they never make their way into the book, because they colour and create the individual in the writer's head, as foundations underpin a building.</li>

  <li>If you want some great porchetta, go to Sinalunga at festa time.</li>
</ul>
<p>I've never been back. I've never needed to. But I'm glad Ryanair cancelled that flight to Rome. If they hadn't Gianni Peroni would never have turned out the way he did.</p>