Foreign Bodies
Foreign Bodies is the 18th in the Marcus Corvinus series. In AD 42, the emperor Claudius sends Corvinus off to Gaul to investigate the murder of a wine merchant to whose family Claudius owes a personal debt. It doesn’t take long for the situation to grow far more complicated than helping a family from the emperor’s hometown.
Wishart’s mysteries are well-established as a delight for fans of Roman noir. This subgenre works because the cynical, tough language borrowed from ´30s detective fiction matches the tone of life in the Empire. Wishart uses contemporary British slang and obscenities to reflect the bawdy language that comes down to us in various Roman “literary” traditions. Wishart carries his anachronisms to a fairly extreme degree, but it works as entertainment, an invitation not to take the Romans too seriously. For example, an official asks “to meet him ASAP in the provincial admin building.” Marcus notes, “If I was wrong then I was in complete schtuck.” This flippancy is often explicitly humorous: “My throat was as dry as a camel’s scrotum.”
Marcus is a privileged patrician, but he doesn’t like the snobbery of his class. So as an investigator he has the dual advantages of being at the social top while having the attitude of a skeptical outsider. His “talking-it-out” partner is his wife, Perilla, who matches his ability to solve labyrinthine crimes. This being the Roman Empire, politics is mixed in with murder, so Wishart has raised the stakes enjoyably high. The plotting is intricate and keeps the reader guessing. The necessary Roman history, quite a lot actually, is loaded in without overburdening the story. Wishart wisely waits until the reader is motivated to hear the complexities of history and puts explanations into believable mouths.
