Skip to main content

Mystery review: A Murder on the Appian Way by Steven Saylor

Genre: Historical mystery
Year of publication: 1996
No. in series: 5
Series detective: Gordianus the Finder
Type of investigator: Private detective
Setting & time: Rome, 52 B.C.

Story:
A rabble-rousing Roman politician is killed on the Via Appia highway, a day's journey from Rome, causing widespread rioting in the city. The dead man’s wife sends for Gordianus the Finder to hire him to discover what happened, but eventually he sets out along the Via Appia at the behest of another client. With a lot of digging and patient questioning he finds out what happened, but meanwhile trouble is brewing in his own household…

Review:
This is an interesting 1st century B.C. detective story and political thriller that reads in parts like a modern police procedural. Saylor’s writing is rich in detail and historical information, the plotting is layered and the narrative gripping, and the characters come alive on the page. Saylor is very good at drawing up an image of what Rome and the surrounding countryside could have been like in those times, and is able, without being overly wordy, to conjure up images of cityscape and landscapes that are almost cinematic.

While the story deals with deadly serious events, there is still place for humour, which Saylor has applied with a light and subtle hand.

Several famous historical characters take part in the story, among them Cicero, Pompey, Marc Anthony and Julius Caesar. All of them come across as plausible and their behaviour does not feel out of character, as sometimes happens when real characters are included in fictional narratives.

The story is all the more remarkable in that it is based on real events. The fictional Gordianus is inserted into the story as the investigator, and some twists are provided that make it more than just a novelisation of the events, but the historical basis is there and has made me interested in finding out more about Roman history.

I will definitely be reading more of this series.

Rating: Not just a good mystery, but also an interesting history lesson. 3+ stars.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme