Courtroom Drama, Roman-style
Feb. 26th, 2005 07:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel14 Nov 2004
The Accusers - Lindsey Davis - Century 2003
* * * * *
So here we are back in ancient Rome. Time for another humdrum murder mystery - a senator dies in mysterious circumstances, various of his family and servants are the suspects, nobody will talk to the detectives, but Falco works out what happened anyway. This is the plot that Davis summarises in a single chapter. The rest of it is rather more interesting.
For her fifteenth Falco novel, Davis has taken Roman law as her subject and a very intriguing one it is too. Forget evidence-based law-making - cases were decided by how convincing a story the accusers could tell and how many of the jury's emotional buttons they could push. The social standing of both the accused and the accusers was also important and a successful or unsuccessful prosecution could have major consequences for one's status and finances. Roman justice was a privatised system with certain senators specialising in bringing accusations of corruption against their peers, and the wilier operators became immensely rich by doing so. The comparisons with modern jurisprudence, particularly in America, are obvious, but Davis does not belabour the point.
Into this particular shark pool wades Falco and his associates. It starts innocently enough with legwork for the senatorial informer Silius Italicus, who is prosecuting Rubirius Metellus for fraud. Metellus commits what looks like suicide, depriving Silius of his winnings, so he hires Falco to show that it was in fact murder. Silius then starts prosecuting various (strangely supine) members of the Metellus family for murder, including Metellus' son Negrinus. After Negrinus goes to them for help, Falco and associates take a liking to him and agree to act in his defence. In doing so, they find themselves drawn into a murky and cunning plot.
What I liked about this book was its sheer technical competence. Davis set herself some challenging literary tasks - a huge cast of characters (I counted forty three in the dramatis personae), the requirement for new developments in the lives of the regular cast members, a more than usually convoluted plot that must be kept clear at all times to the reader, a family secret that's important enough for members to keep quiet about even when it's clearly not in their best interests to do so and, last but not least, a delicate finessing of the ending in order to ensure that Falco and family neither gain not lose too much from their encounter with the law and end up more or less where they started.
For the most part, Davis meets these challenges with aplomb. She manages to find parts for most of the regular cast (only Maia and Anacrites don't get a look in), and these are mostly worked into the main plot rather than being sub-plots. The main storyline is gratifyingly twisty and for once Davis managed to wrong-foot me (I worked out what would happen but got the reason why wrong).
So is it a perfect book? Well, not quite. The big family secret doesn't, I think, justify some of the actions (or lack of actions) of its members. In particular, it is odd that Negrinus, accused of the capital crime of parricide (with the bizarre method of execution involving a sack, a dog, a rooster, an asp and the Tiber), would not have revealed all to Falco at the earliest opportunity. Granted, he had no particular reason for trusting Falco (who had after all been working for his accuser), but then why go to him in the first place? My favourite character Aulus spends most of the story mugging up on legal texts and I was hoping that he would get to make a speech in court that would save Falco's bacon, but sadly it didn't happen.
Nonetheless, to come up with something so fresh and imaginative on the fifteenth outing is an impressive achievement. There can't be that many other authors who have written fifteen books about the same character without some diminution in quality. Roll on the next!
The Accusers - Lindsey Davis - Century 2003
* * * * *
So here we are back in ancient Rome. Time for another humdrum murder mystery - a senator dies in mysterious circumstances, various of his family and servants are the suspects, nobody will talk to the detectives, but Falco works out what happened anyway. This is the plot that Davis summarises in a single chapter. The rest of it is rather more interesting.
For her fifteenth Falco novel, Davis has taken Roman law as her subject and a very intriguing one it is too. Forget evidence-based law-making - cases were decided by how convincing a story the accusers could tell and how many of the jury's emotional buttons they could push. The social standing of both the accused and the accusers was also important and a successful or unsuccessful prosecution could have major consequences for one's status and finances. Roman justice was a privatised system with certain senators specialising in bringing accusations of corruption against their peers, and the wilier operators became immensely rich by doing so. The comparisons with modern jurisprudence, particularly in America, are obvious, but Davis does not belabour the point.
Into this particular shark pool wades Falco and his associates. It starts innocently enough with legwork for the senatorial informer Silius Italicus, who is prosecuting Rubirius Metellus for fraud. Metellus commits what looks like suicide, depriving Silius of his winnings, so he hires Falco to show that it was in fact murder. Silius then starts prosecuting various (strangely supine) members of the Metellus family for murder, including Metellus' son Negrinus. After Negrinus goes to them for help, Falco and associates take a liking to him and agree to act in his defence. In doing so, they find themselves drawn into a murky and cunning plot.
What I liked about this book was its sheer technical competence. Davis set herself some challenging literary tasks - a huge cast of characters (I counted forty three in the dramatis personae), the requirement for new developments in the lives of the regular cast members, a more than usually convoluted plot that must be kept clear at all times to the reader, a family secret that's important enough for members to keep quiet about even when it's clearly not in their best interests to do so and, last but not least, a delicate finessing of the ending in order to ensure that Falco and family neither gain not lose too much from their encounter with the law and end up more or less where they started.
For the most part, Davis meets these challenges with aplomb. She manages to find parts for most of the regular cast (only Maia and Anacrites don't get a look in), and these are mostly worked into the main plot rather than being sub-plots. The main storyline is gratifyingly twisty and for once Davis managed to wrong-foot me (I worked out what would happen but got the reason why wrong).
So is it a perfect book? Well, not quite. The big family secret doesn't, I think, justify some of the actions (or lack of actions) of its members. In particular, it is odd that Negrinus, accused of the capital crime of parricide (with the bizarre method of execution involving a sack, a dog, a rooster, an asp and the Tiber), would not have revealed all to Falco at the earliest opportunity. Granted, he had no particular reason for trusting Falco (who had after all been working for his accuser), but then why go to him in the first place? My favourite character Aulus spends most of the story mugging up on legal texts and I was hoping that he would get to make a speech in court that would save Falco's bacon, but sadly it didn't happen.
Nonetheless, to come up with something so fresh and imaginative on the fifteenth outing is an impressive achievement. There can't be that many other authors who have written fifteen books about the same character without some diminution in quality. Roll on the next!