Finished Business
In 1997 TLS announced that Richard Lee was starting the Historical Novel Society. I wrote him a letter expressing an interest in Roman novels and the difficulty in finding historical fiction by subject. He responded with a list of authors, and David Wishart was the only one that was new to me. I obtained one of his books immediately and many more over the years. Since then, through the efforts of the society and other sources, it has become much easier to locate historical novels by period and place.
Marcus Corvinus, an alcoholic amateur sleuth, belongs to a senatorial family, but he tries to avoid politics. He investigates an apparently accidental death at the urging of a relative of the victim, who tells him that Alexander the Great appeared to her in a vision telling her it was murder. To his surprise, Corvinus finds that there was foul play and continues on the case in spite of being assaulted on more than one occasion. Clues lead to the conspiratorial side of Roman politics under Caligula (always referred to correctly as Gaius). Wishart’s Author’s Note shows that he has persuaded himself that his imaginative reconstruction was probably the real story, something he has done before.
Wishart’s style mixes Roman similes (a nose like the beak of a trireme) with contemporary slang (easy-peasy, flavour-of-the-month), while creating a satisfying historical mystery. Recommended.
