David Hewson's Roman stories

I've posted often about authors who set novels in countries other than their own. What do they miss because of their outsider status? What do they gain?

David Hewson sets books in contemporary Rome but, in The Fallen Angels, ninth and newest in his series about the young Roman police officer Nic Costa, he makes use of the historical period that has most shaped the way the city looks today: the Baroque era.

Hewson chose for his taking-off point the hair-raising tale of Beatrice Cenci, whose life, legend, and horrific death offer enough material for a hundred painters, a million tear-jerkers, and scores of Romantic dreamers. I worried for a while that Hewson would content himself with simple, pat parallels between Beatrice's case in 1599, and that of young Mina Gabriel, whose family lives in a reduced state on a street named for the Cenci.  

But Hewson is up to more than that.   Costa, his colleagues, and receptive readers will learn salutary lessons about the dangers and the necessity of stories. And those readers just might pick up some tips about good places to eat around the Campo dei Fiori and what to order when they get there.

***

David Hewson will be part of the “NEVER LET ME GO: PASSPORT TO MURDER” panel, with your humble blogkeeper as moderator, Saturday, Sept. 17, 1 p.m., at Bouchercon 2011.

© Peter Rozovsky 2011

Bouchercon VII: Gods and ends

(Indiana War Memorial)

John Maddox Roberts sets his S.P.Q.R. mysteries in the first century BC in the waning days of the Roman republic. Kelli Stanley set her novel Nox Dormienda in the first century AD under Domitian, not by reputation one of the good emperors. I asked Stanley and Roberts which periods they would choose if they were to set a book in a different period of Roman history.

Roberts would go back earlier into the Republican period, because once the empire was instituted, he said, politics started getting dynastic and boring. Stanley, on the other hand, would jump forward, to the fourth century under Constantine, who granted official approval to Christianity. Stanley said she was interested in the various religions to which the Romans were open.

One author is attracted to political unrest, another in change of the religious kind. The common factor: Upheaval is good, at least in historical crime fiction.

(Stanley is a classicist by training. So is Lindsey Davis, author of the Marcus Didius Falco series. Davis sets her books in the time of Vespasian, who came to the plate two spots before Domitian in the imperial batting order. Had a good chat with Stanley about Italy and its art at the convivial post-convention dinner Sunday night.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2009

Surprises in historical mysteries, or, "Hey, those folks are just like us"

I've just read a story that raises questions of Larger Significance, as stories sometimes will. The story is Anthony Price's "The Boudicca Killing," in the Winter's Crimes 11 anthology, published in 1979, and it has everything a short story ought to have, including a surprise ending and a double-edged title. That title is a key to the surprise as well as a reminder that crime fiction can bring history alive.

The killing in question is financial (though the story is full of references to killings of the more literal kind, as befitting a tale of events occasioned by a famous revolt). The action begins with suspicions arising from a Roman speculator's huge gains in Britain at a time when everyone else was losing money.

Now, I suspect that most people don't associate ancient Rome with finances, speculation, investments, syndicates and allegations of insider trading, yet here they are, believably presented in fictional form. I don't know the Roman empire's financial history, but a quick search for "Boudicca's revolt" yields numerous references to the calling in of loans, so the connection is plausible. And, boom! Thanks to a short piece of crime fiction, I may think about the Romans a bit more realistically from now on.

And now, your questions: What historical crime fiction made you think: "Wow, I didn't realize they did that back then"? More broadly, what historical crime fiction left you feeling you had been taught some history?

(Read Tacitus' account of Boudicca's rebellion here. Also, "The Boudicca Killing" appeared in the UK in 1979, at the dawn of the Margaret Thatcher era. Its clear-eyed discussion of speculation as well the hand-rubbing glee of its last line lead me to suspect strongly that the author was commenting on what he suspected was about to happen. Any comments, British readers?)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008

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Rome crime fiction
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Another prejudice that might be history

I feel like a man unburdening myself of my sins. First I dropped a prejudice against crime stories set in countries other than the authors' own. Now I'll try to do the same for historical crime fiction.

My hesitation about such writing has two causes. First, is the inability of many authors to dispel the reader's nagging awareness that decades, centuries, even millennia have elapsed between the story's time and the author's. Then there is Lindsey Davis, whose historical research is so good and whose tone is so engagingly breezy that for me the two have interfered with one another, at least in her novels.

But I'm giving her another try because I've just visited the spectacular setting of one of her books. Fishbourne Roman Palace in Fishbourne, West Sussex on England's south coast, contains gorgeous Roman mosaics that are all the more moving because most are in situ, right where they were laid in the first and second centuries. Davis' novel A Body in the Bath House, part of her long-running series about Marcus Didius Falco, the Sam Spade/Philip Marlowe/Travis McGee of first-century Rome, sends Falco to far-away Britain in pursuit of some shoddy building contractors who have fled Rome. There, the palace later to be known as Fishbourne is under construction and plagued with problems that include fatal accidents.

At Fishbourne last week, a member of the staff told me that Davis launched her novel at the palace and that she was highly respected by historians and classicists. That and the memory of some funny lines from Davis' other work were good enough for me. I'm reading her again.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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A good opening lion

I don't normally read historical mysteries, but it's hard to resist an opening like this, from Lindsey Davis' One Virgin Too Many:

I had just come home after telling my favorite sister that her husband had been eaten by a lion. I was in no mood for greeting a new client.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Lindsey Davis
Rome crime fiction

Non siamo più Roma!

Siamo Roma, that interesting English-language online magazine about the Eternal City, has changed its name for an interesting reason: Too many people thought it was called "Slamorama."

The new name is Rome File , and it's still an ideal guide for English-speaking travelers to Rome. I heard about the magazine through a posting on another blog about an interview with the Roman writer Massimo Mongai that turned into the blog post heard around the world. The interview is now to be found here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2007

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Massimo Mongai

Massimo Mongai comes full circle

Remember Massimo Mongai? He's the Italian writer whose lively and insightful English interview in Siamo Roma magazine came to the attention of It's a Crime! (or a mystery ... ) and from there to me. I passed the news on to my Italian correspondent Andrea Fannini, who responded: "Incredible! I know him!" He hadn't read him, though, but now, thanks to this chain of trans-Atlantic blog posts, he has -- a good thing for those of us who don't read Italian, or at least not well enough to read fiction, since Mongai has yet to be translated into English. Andrea talks about Mongai's science-fiction novel Alienati here.

"Curioso il mondo della rete e di internet, " he writes: "Curious is the world of the Web and the Internet." He tells of his acquaintance with Mongai's cultural and political activities in Rome's Garbatella neighborhood, where they both live, and he relates the exciting tale of how a blog finally got him to read a book by his writer-neighbor. And, he says, "It won't be the only one, because Mongai is very, very good."

The book concerns a space gypsy who tries to organize a meeting of creatures from everywhere: "The incredible thing is that (Mongai) makes riveting and not at all boring a novel whose narrative thread centers on the organization of a convention. Thanks to inventions and original creatures who populate this spaceship. To cliff-hangers ... to the antithesis between seriousness and nonsense that pervades the novel."

Sounds like fun.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006

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Massimo Mongai

Rome, city of crime

It's a Crime! (or a mystery...) posts a notice of this lively interview with the Roman writer Massimo Mongai. The discussion includes entertaining thoughts on, among other subjects, why Rome is a good place to write a crime novel ("it has double the number of embassies of any other city") and the city's neighborhoods ("Trastevere, which is full of freaks, American tourists and Italian snobs").

Mongai won a award for his science fiction novel Memorie di un cuoco d'astronave (Memoirs of a Spaceship Cook), according to the article. He has just published a crime novel, La memoria di Ras Tafari Diredawa, and he has this to say about his fellow citizens: "And remember, in Italy dramatic situations are always dramatic but never serious." With an attitude like that, you know this guy will be fun to read, even more so when I can read him. His work has yet to be translated into English.

© Peter Rozovsky 2006