What brought you to medieval Florence?
David Caldo: It started when I came across Giovanni Boccaccio’s book Decameron - a collection of a hundred colourful stories from 14th century Tuscany, not unlike our Canterbury Tales - and fell immediately and deeply in love with the period. His people enjoyed life with such bawdy exuberance, the high politics were so wickedly devious and the times so perilously turbulent - what storyteller wouldn’t want to bring them back to life?

What do you aim to achieve in your writing?
David Caldo: I wrote Florentine Masque to be read for pleasure. While I have enjoyed taking pains to make the historical detail as accurate as I can, don’t expect a history lesson! The delights of the story take precedence. If the adventures of Alessandro and Felicia and their friends and lovers make your heart beat faster in fear, if some of their more colourful escapades make you laugh out loud, and if you wipe away the occasional tear, I will be well satisfied.

What readership are you aiming at?
David Caldo: I hope Florentine Masque will be enjoyed by anyone with an intelligent but light-hearted appreciation of the vivid excitement of being alive. These are not stories ‘suitable’ for children, though I expect many youngsters will sneak a read while their parents aren’t looking. They are stories for readers who enjoy a colourful grown-up adventure story "expertly evoked," as one reviewer so kindly writes, "in elegant, economical prose".

What inspired you to take up writing fiction in the first place?
David Caldo: That is truly a mystery to me. Most writers seem to have always wanted to write or they’ve been writing since they were six years old - but not me! It came silently, without conscious volition and totally out of the blue. One morning, while I was shaving, I started to compose a story in my mind. Seven months and 120,000 words later I had a completed novel! Nowadays I can see many imperfections in the writing of Codeword Jixrey but it had an interesting plot and I’m not ashamed of it as a first attempt. Since then I have written well over a million words and I think that at last I’m beginning to get into my stride.

Will you ever use your experience in electronics and software in your writing again?
David Caldo: This is my fourth novel, though the first to be published, and two of my political thrillers include realistic hi-tech gadgetry drawing on aspects of the development work I do professionally. In that sense I might certainly make use of my experience again in the right type of story. But, in a more interesting way, my writing and my technological work each act as a foil for the other, drawing on different aspects of the brain. Thus, even if I never write a technological thriller again, that experience is always present.

Could you see this being adapted in any way - TV, film?
David Caldo: One reviewer wrote, "No agent will fail to observe that there could be a movie here. The storytelling is both sensual and graphical, and the headlong adventure is told in short visual episodes that are almost cinematic."

Yes, I think the Florentine series would adapt well into a visual format. When I am writing I see, and hear, and smell - and even taste - what my heroes are going through. I would love to work with actors to bring these sensations to the screen should I ever be lucky enough to have the opportunity.

Could you give a hint of what lies in store for Alessandro, Felicia et al.?
David Caldo: Florentine Masque was always planned to be the first of a series. Each book will involve the same group of friends and lovers, but each will tell a different adventure focussed on one or other of them as the chief protagonist. Just as Alessandro is the main hero of Florentine Masque, so Florentine Gold, will follow Sofia. Loved by Alessandro and dutiful daughter of the powerful Gamaldi Bank, she is caught in a conflict of loyalties between her family, her love for Alessandro, and a persuasive and devious French nobleman who wants access to the wealth that her family controls as well as physical possession of her body.