E NTERING a bookseller's shop where I did not realize for years, I've been tempted by the purchase of two novels Romano-antico-Police Danila Comastri Montanari , Mors tua (Editions 10/18, 2008, ISBN 978-2-264-04726-7; original Italian edition, 2000) and Cui prodest? (Editions 10/18, 2006, ISBN 2-264-04231-1; original Italian edition, 2001).
As I have already had occasion to write historical thrillers, I read a few shelves, some very good, some fair, and quite a others avoid. Among authors of mystery novels taking place in ancient Rome, my preference is, by far - I have clearly said, again - to those of Lindsey Davis , for your hard-boiled and cynical. I tasted the series by Steven Saylor (and his detective Gordian), John Maddox Roberts (and his plebeian Decius Caecilius Metellus), Cristina Rodriguez (and his praetorian Kaeso), which I found very unequal, each in turn. I still had to discover Danila Comastri Montanari novels.
Why those two rather than others (there were a dozen in the stack at the bookseller)? Because in their fourth reading respective coverage, these are two guys who made me say "hey, here I might be interested." Side Cui prodest? the murder of a slave and an index seems to revolve around the game latrunculi ; side Mors tua of the murder of a prostitute whom the hero's lover was discreet.
Why those two rather than others (there were a dozen in the stack at the bookseller)? Because in their fourth reading respective coverage, these are two guys who made me say "hey, here I might be interested." Side Cui prodest? the murder of a slave and an index seems to revolve around the game latrunculi ; side Mors tua of the murder of a prostitute whom the hero's lover was discreet.
Race results (or rather reading)? These two novels are all there is more classic in the form of narrative in their conduct. What will delight fans of classic form, and leave the others on their hunger. Classics in the process, especially with their respective final chapters in which all below the case are revealed during discussions between the "investigator" (here, a wealthy senator) and suspects (Including the culprit, of course). These "chapters of explanation" in which the perpetrators themselves reveal what led them to crime, in a sudden outpouring of food items offered in the player after a narrative studded with red herrings sometimes flimsy , make me an unpleasant effect of artificiality. That's what makes me dislike the novels of Agatha Christie, for example, and all its successors or imitators, even when they dress the classical pattern of Roman toga.
Classics, also in the springs of their intrigues. But let us not be unjust: that For thousands of years that we, human beings, we live and we tell the same stories, love and hate, jealousy and generosity, courage and cowardice. Products and ingredients have excellent stories, and worse. This is not the classic ingredients that makes the quality or failure of the recipe, but the talent of the chef and storyteller. In this, Danila Comastri Montanari I'm not the effect of a storyteller who hangs forever the attention of his audience, but it is at the very least, a storyteller from whom you never get bored. Danila Comastri Montanari
known portraits that live of his characters. In particular, and is the least of things, his "hero," Publius Aurelius Statius, a wealthy nobleman, holding the Epicurean philosophy (that is to say, to find happiness by refusing to be the slave of the unnecessary pleasures, even if the senator's behavior will often against this guideline), fair and generous master with his slaves. Readers will most acidic retort that if the senator was so generous that he will not have a hundred slaves in his service, his cooks and porters to his bathroom to his wives. But make this patrician an anti-slavery time of the Emperor Claudius, after the upheavals of the reign of Caligula might have been too avant-garde that Danila Comastri Montanari already made him someone who does not believe in the existence of the gods ...
Make no mistake, this is not good novels and ethnographic reports on the Rome of the '40s, and liberties are taken in the moods of the characters and their behaviors.
However, if you do not already know this author, or if you have already read some of his novels but not the two, I advise you to avoid reading them both along so close. Because that even if their plots are not completely identical, these two novels were still a fairly strong general resemblance, both revolving around love difficult.
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