Roman Blood and Arms of Nemesis

Thanks to gem225 I just read two marvellous books.

My favourite genre is historical fiction, and I really don't believe there is a lot of good historical fiction being written these days. It's so wonderful to be pointed in the right direction....

The author is Steven Saylor. I knew the name; I knew he wrote murder mysteries set in classical Rome. I have mixed feelings about murder mysteries set in historical eras. Some are excellent both as mysteries and as history - more often they hit a mediocre middle ground and don't quite satisfy me on either count. Some do - Ellis Peters, for example, with the Brother Cadfael mysteries; Kate Ross; but they're both dead. Lindsay Davis, whose first books were incomparable but whose later books don't satisfy me in the same way.

Saylor has a lot going for him. Okay, I've only read two of his books so far, but the remarkable thing is that the history and the themes it presents make more of an impact on the story than the actual murder plots. The first book is about the Roman social and political situation in the time of Sulla's dictatorship; the second is about Spartacus and the slave revolt. There's nothing pedantic about any of it, and I've never read a better illustration of Roman times.

Part of the charm is the protagonist, Gordianus the Finder, whom I have come to like very much - a vivid, interesting man. But then, all of the characters are interesting and well-delineated, and each one an individual. This extends to slaves as well as patricians, women as well as men. I like the values Saylor reflects.

The murder in Arms of Nemesis occurs in a library, which for a happy fleeting moment made me think of Colonel Mustard with a knife. I love finding libraries in novels; magical libraries are the best, but historical ones are the next best thing. Each of Saylor's books ends with an "Author's Note", which is something of a bibliography. In his "Author's Notes" Saylor writes a tribute to libraries that echoes my feelings about them:

A library figures prominently in this novel - the library of Lucius Licinius is the scene of the murder. In the here and now, it is libraries which are being killed - cut back, shut down, dismantled and dispersed, book by book and dollar by dollar. Yet without them, I could hardly have done my research. I especially appreciate the San Francisco Public Library, severely shaken but not shut down by the earthquake of 1989; the Interlibrary Loan system, which allows access to volumes from collections all over the country; the Perry-Castaneda Library on the campus of the University of Texas at Austin, where I've spent whole days among the stacks in a kind of information ecstasy.

Oh yes - "information ecstasy" - the bliss of finding the right books. Let's hear it for libraries. I've always thought they were the best things our civilization has produced. Now I think the Net is maybe their equal - but libraries are no less precious.