Marcus Didius Falco is a private informer and the protagonist of Lindsey Davis‘s mystery series set in Ancient Rome. Emperor Vespasian has come into power and good imperial agents are required to hide royal crimes, curb corruption and sniff out political scandals.
This detective series starts with ‘The Silver Pigs‘ where Falco accidentally stumbles upon an imperial minting fraud. The investigation begins with the death of a Senator’s young and impressionable niece.
Falco’s inquiry takes him into desperate neighborhoods of Ancient Rome and across the channel to the edges of the Roman empire in cold and dry Britannia. Nefarious plots to overthrow the Emperor are discovered, and the investigation gets more bloody. Along the way, we are introduced to a cast of characters that will continue to be central to Falco’s investigative efforts.
There is Petronius Longus, an employee of the Roman police force, who is often the reluctant inside source for information for Falco. Helena Justina is the sharp and witty daughter of the Senator who predictably forms Falco’s love interest. She also brings some diversity into a vastly male cast of characters. Falco’s garrulous family makes several excursions, only to add to the book’s length.
While there is a lot of fodder for a great novel, ‘The Silver Pigs’ cannot deliver. The flaws are plenty, the biggest being the first-person narrative. Davis appears to be inspired by the film noir detectives who presented their sordid lives to the viewers in their ironic, dry style. Falco tries, but is never convincing. He tries too hard to push his intelligence, charm, and wit down our throats.
The first rule of writing is to show and not tell. Unfortunately with Falco, the story appears to be a long monologue. All your impressions of people and places are made through him. Fight sequences are especially painful to read where Falco explains every motion of his body as he punches around thugs.
The other flaw is the meandering plot. It digresses so often that you get through several chapters making no headway in solving the crime. Fast-paced, these novels are not. Davis has clearly put in a lot of hours researching the minutiae of life in Rome. The writing is eager to describe every little detail of Roman architecture, culture, and life. Only in some cases does it organically fit well. One worth calling the descriptions of the streets of Rome out when Falco and his client, Helena, are on the run and escape into the by-lanes of Rome at night.
The third flaw I find the hardest to overcome is the writing itself. I know there is a problem with the quality when I mentally start scratching off words and rewriting sentences as I read along. Dialogues are often accompanied by tone descriptions of ‘gasped‘, half-grinned‘, ‘said satirically‘, ‘snapped‘, ‘snapped back’ etc. It gets exhausting after a while to keep up with the emotions with each statement.
It’s hard to point but something is off about the writing in general. It’s too elaborate yet casual as if Davis is not able to find the right form representing the period.
Other books in the series
As I generally love detective fiction, I tried a couple more just to see if there was any progression in characters or writing.
‘Scandal Takes a Holiday‘ is a much later novel and the most useful thing I learned from it was about piracy during Ancient Rome. Again overly complicated plots and with more inane writing follow.
‘Alexandria‘ is the only one that I enjoyed. It is a traditional closed-door murder mystery with a definite list of suspects and motives. The writing is more taut. The location is Alexandria, beautifully described but not overtly so. I would still make it 100 pages shorter!
The Final Word
I have only read only 3 of the dozen in the Marco Didius Falco series and feel equipped to pronounce some sort of judgment. It may cater to a certain type of reader and maybe even a certain reading mood, but in a market inundated with murder mystery novels, I think I am done with my experimentation with Falco. I definitely will not be reading another one.
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