A Gladiator Dies Only Once and Saturnalia

I've been spending much of the last month and a half fighting off a flu I picked up while in Montréal. At least I've had a chance to catch up on some reading during that time, but I felt no desire to try to write about it while trying to clear my sinuses.

Mystery literature has been said to be one of the best forms of fiction to describe a particular place and time. The nature of the mystery requires the author to populate it with important details both to hide and reveal the clues. Characters need to have believable motivations for carrying out the crime, hiding it, or just appearing guilty even when they're not.

I have never seen a survey of the distribution in time and place of English-language mystery fiction. I guess that a large portion would be spread across 1920s Britain, with most of the American literature more evenly spread across the twentieth century, and perhaps a little overrepresenting the urban areas. Every once in a while, someone recommends a mystery writer to read when traveling. Sarah Paretsky's Warshaski stories for Chicago ... Tony Hillerman for the southwest. Even a remote place like Vermont is covered by the works of Archer Mayor, which my Vermont-based sister reads.

Then there are the historical mysteries. Some are truly dreadful, little better than the worst of the historical romances or formula fantasy novels set in a vaguely medieval setting. The good ones, however, are fun because they give an author with some knowledge of the period the challenge to describe a past society in a way that is simultaneously plausible and recognizable to the reader.

The two books here are Steven Saylor's A Gladiator Dies Only Once, and Lindsey Davis' Saturnalia. I brought both of these mysteries along for my travel reading, and finished both of them off quickly. Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davis are the two giants of the English language mysteries set in ancient Rome. You'd think that would be a pretty small subgenre of mystery literature, and yeah ... you'd be right.

Still, these are both interesting authors in different ways. Davis, a British writer, uses an obvious love for archeology to help flesh out her stories, set in Vespasian-era Imperial Rome. Saylor, working more from a love of ancient literature, creates a detective who hunts down details for Cicero, and later other historical figures of the later Republican era. Davis' characters barely age, comfortably moving from one comic drama to another. (Well, except for the one who was eaten by a lion.) Saylor's character starts as a young man in the time of Sulla, and has progressed to an elderly head of a family which he tries to keep together during the Civil War between Caesar and Pompey.

I have no strong preference. Davis is probably the better writer, stylistically, and has more interesting characters. Saylor is better at capturing a believable ancient world, but that said, his mysteries are just too easy to solve. But for either writer, I find I can forgive that. These days, solving the mystery story is less interesting than just seeing how the writer constructs the world that contains it.