What would happen if two of the biggest names of the Renaissance — Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo da Vinci — teamed up as a crime-fighting duo? That’s the idea behind Michael Ennis’ new historical thriller, The Malice of Fortune. The mystery novel pairs the ruthless political philosopher and the genius inventor and artist together as an unlikely detective team on the trail of a serial killer.
Ennis first dreamed up the idea of Machiavelli-as-mystery-detective 12 years ago. “The conceit was he would use the precepts of [his political treatise] The Prince to solve a crime,” Ennis explains.
Ennis wanted his work of fiction to be set against a backdrop of real events and historical figures. It takes place at the end of 1502 in a politically fractured Italy. The Borgias and a group of wealthy noblemen with their own private militias are in a struggle for control of the country. While researching these events, Ennis discovered that Machiavelli and Leonardo crossed paths in the same small Italian city at the same time these events were taking place.
That’s when Ennis remembered that Leonardo had famously dissected corpses. “I went: Oh! He could be a Renaissance forensic pathologist!” With Leonardo’s forensics expertise and Machiavelli’s talents as a profiler, Ennis now had a crime-fighting team with a contemporary edge — a kind of Renaissance CSI. But he still needed a crime.
In the small Italian city, Ennis says Machiavelli and Leonardo “both met someone … who I believe I can establish was what we would describe today as a psychopathic serial killer,” Ennis says. Of course, Ennis can’t say who that is without giving away the whodunit, but he can say this about the guy: