Lindsey Davis is one of the best British novelists, indeed one of the best novelists anywhere. And if we narrow it down to novelists who write about ancient Rome, and in particular the first century A.D. she has few peers. And none of those peers has her gift of both comedy and tragedy, of both humor and pathos. The series started almost a decade ago, and has now grown to ten volumes with an eleventh one promised. Like John Grisham, Lindsey is nothing if not prolific, this being a spin off series from the wildly popular Falco the detective series she did first. In fact this particular volume is one of the best in the whole Flavia Albia series not least because she picks up some of the characters and themes from an earlier Falco novel (Last Act in Palmyra from 2008) and takes them further, which is interesting.
This particular novel of about 340 pages, is about a very clever homicidal maniac who is gradually killing off various actors, and staging these murders as scenes from famous Greek plays by Aeschylus and others. His biggest mistake is picking on actors in a traveling troupe that once worked with Marcus Didius Falco and Helena Justina out east in Palmyra. Since they are out of sight and out of mind, it is left up to their child Flavia Albia with some help from her husband Tiberius and the vigiles to track down the killer.
Davis has many strengths as a novelist— she knows ancient Rome in detail, and its geography. geopolitics, daily life, religions, the arts etc. She is good at plotting, character development, description, suspense, and she is the very best at interjecting humor into the story. Even in a story about deadly serious things, like murdered people, she is able to show the lighter and brighter and funnier side of daily ancient life, and I love it.
This novel begins with a teasing clue— one of the murdered females with her dying breath says ‘the undertaker’, and Flavia is off and running trying to figure out who that could be or what the clue could mean. Many, if not most ancient Roman burials involved cremation, and Davis knows her ancient rituals (see also Stephen Saylor’s A Mist of Prophecies).
This novel brings up memories of Shakespearian proportions (e.g. ‘who can minister to a mind diseased’) or French proportions (i.e. ‘revenge is a dish best served cold’). This story is all about revenge taking of epic proportions. And yet what sort of undertaker knows so much about Greek comedy and tragedy from Oedipus to Jason and the Argonauts? Though a good knowledge of ancient Greco-Roman drama does help in figuring things out to a degree….. it is not enough for one to lose one’s sense of suspense and curiosity and even whimsy right to the end. Will Flavia solve the case? Will she survive the encounter with the deranged killer? Inquiring minds want to know. You’ll have to read the 340 pages to find out. And get cracking because while ‘ars longa’, ‘vita’ is all to ‘brevis’.
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