What is that thing? — Your chance to win a book

I've spent my time shooting instead of reading this past month, and such reading as I have done ain't no crime. (Still, Herodotus on Egypt is worth reading for the pleasure of seeing a sharp, critical mind at work. His guesses about Egypt's geological origins, for example, are breathtaking.)

But it's my new camera that has been keeping me from the books. Here's a photo I took earlier this week. Tell me what the photo shows, and win my respect and maybe a free book.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Herodotus, father of the gentleman thief

The Father of History may also be the father of the gentleman-thief story.

Herodotus turns up in Historical Whodunits, published first under the Mammoth name and later by Barnes and Noble, the only author from the fifth century BC in a collection of authors otherwise from the twentieth century.

Herodotus' story, a selection from the celebrated "Account of Egypt" section of his Histories, concerns a rogue who concocts with his brother an elaborate scheme to plunder the locked treasury of Rhampsinitos (Ramses III) and, when the brother winds up dead, an even cleverer plan to recover the body so their mother can mourn it properly. Except for the brother, all ends well, and the pharaoh so admires the thief's guile that he awards him his (the pharaoh's) daughter's hand in marriage,

Detractors called Herodotus the Father of Lies, though he was generally careful to specify when he was merely passing on stories he had heard.  His hedge ("This king, they said, got great wealth of silver...") only enhances the impression that he is telling a genial, amusing tale of wit rewarded (Read the excerpt from Herodotus here.)

Herodotus joins an honorable roster of proto-crime writers that stretches back almost 5,000 years. Read about some of history's great pre-Chandlers, Christies, and Hammetts here at Detectives Beyond Borders (click the link, then scroll down.)

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Herodotus' selection is second in the Historical Whodunits  book, after Elizabeth Peters' story of an impossible grave robbery in ancient Egypt. Yes, the story is called "The Locked Tomb Mystery."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012 

Flashman and America

(Photo by your humble blog keeper.)

The Fourth of July is a day of quiet reflection in the United States.

Families gather over frugal meals to debate the legacy of the Federalist Papers, and when darkness falls, the populace comes together to discuss such topics as French influence on the doctrine of the separation of powers and to sit in rapt awe at the number of vowels in Montesquieu's name.

Independence Day is wrapping up here in America, and that may be why some passages in Flashman on the March, set though the book is in Abyssinia in the nineteenth century, resonate in the United States of America in the twenty-first:

"I've a sight more use for him and his like than for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip-service to delivering the heathen from error's chain by preaching and giving their ha'pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a thought for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilization and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn't wish for your worst enemy."

That's as least as fine a burst of rhetoric as "Support the troops."

Flashman's misgivings about "a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat" might provoke a shock of recognition, as will this exchange, about a leader known for his massacres of thousands:

"This makes it simple; the bastard'll have to go."

"You will try him, in a court, and put him to death?"

"Oh, I doubt that. ... "

"But you said of Theodore, `he will have to go'!"

"So he will, one way or t'other. Bullet in the back o' the head, shot trying to escape, dead of a surfeit of lampreys, who knows?"

If Larry Gonick, who writes and draws The Cartoon History of the Universe, is the new Herodotus, then Flashman's creator, George MacDonald Fraser, was the new Thucydides. And each is probably funnier than the original.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Herodotus, crime writer

I can’t get away from crime even when I try. Herodotus’ Histories traces the enmity between Persians and Greeks in the fifth century BC to a spate of kidnappings.

When did people stop believing that war could have such a personal cause? (Before Herodotus' body was cold in his grave, apparently. Aristophanes' satirical play The Acharnians, produced in 425 BC, around the time Herodotus is thought to have died, pokes fun at the notion.)

And here's your chance to provide new answers to the classic question What works of great literature contain elements of crime? (Extra credit for going beyond the standards of Hamlet, Macbeth and Crime and Punishment.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2010