Roman Blood by Steven Saylor

565 pages.
Robinson paperback.
1991.
First installation of the series Roma Sub Rosa.

Roman Blood sends us back in time to 80 BCE, to the final weeks of the dictatorship of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. The relatively young and unknown advocate Marcus Tullius Cicero seeks the help of Gordianus the Finder in unearthing evidence to help him defend his friend’s client Sextus Roscius, who is charged with the impious crime of parricide. During his investigations Gordianus moves through all strata of Roman society, and of course uncovers a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the Roman political hierarchy. Naturally, the truth isn’t quite what it appears to be, either.

There. That’s the all traditional thriller/detective story tropes done away with, and I’ve hopefully been able to communicate my loathing of the whole genre to you, my readers. I haven’t touched a murder mystery novel since I was twelve (except when my duties as a sometime librarian has forced me to handle the infernal things to place them back on their shelves), and I can’t say I’ve missed them much. I probably wouldn’t have picked up this one, either, in spite of it being set in Ancient Rome, one of the historical environs I find most fascinating, hadn’t it been for a the recommendations of a friend of mine who claimed the series was quite good.

So far, after having finished what I believe to be one twelfth of the series (but only one tenth of what I intend to read; there are at least two short story collections, which I don’t intend to touch unless the rest turns out to be stellar), I can’t say I’m wholly convinced. The plot, for starters, while never boring, of course, didn’t quite manage to awaken any noteworthy interest in me. I was of course a bit interested, because I’ve encountered the trial against Sextus Roscius during my studies, but in its fictional incarnation the exposition of the intrigue was a bit too clumsily handled, and what sympathy for Sextus Roscius Saylor managed to summon up in me was quickly dispelled. As such the plot had a somewhat nice ambiguity to it, however, and the anarchic situation in Rome just after Sulla’s proscriptions lent the story a fittingly dark atmosphere, which helped raise tensions when Gordianus was out in the streets trolling for secrets.

Is Roman Blood worth reading, then? No and yes. As a murder mystery I’m not sure it holds quite the level of quality of the best of the authors in the genre, and it didn’t really have enough interesting characters, aside from Gordianus and Cicero, mostly, to draw readers in that way, either. (But in my experience that is something most first-person narratives suffer under.) Furthermore, the political ramifications of the intrigues didn’t surface properly until something that felt like an epilogue towards the end, although they were simmering beneath the surface all the time.

However, the main plot wasn’t exactly what I’d call uninteresting. Saylor managed to drop just enough hints to constantly keep me at least a little bit curious about what was about to happen, and the final revelations, although a bit awkwardly revealed and kinda heavily foreshadowed, did in fact come as at least something of a surprise to me. Additionally, this is basically a repetition of Roman History 101, written by something resembling a scholar, who tries to keep things as historically accurate as possible. After all, this is not just a murder mystery; it is also a historical novel, to reverse the order of the elements in the author’s warning in the afterword.

All in all, I guess I’d recommend Roman Blood to anyone who’s more than averagely interested in Roman history and at the same time doesn’t mind murder mysteries. However, I’d advise any such creatures who feel their curiosity itching to watch this space and read the upcoming reviews of Arms of Nemesis and Catilina’s Riddle first. 7.5 out of 10.