I missed a great deal of excellent adventure fiction by failing to stumble across John Maddox Roberts during the last quarter of the twentieth century. I don’t know why our writing/reading paths did not cross: I was reading this stuff during the same period he was writing it, and his output was precisely in my wheelhouse.
I’ve picked up the first couple volumes of his S.P.Q.R. series. I’ve completed the first and am about a quarter of the way through the second. I’d have gotten further, but yesterday I took MBW and the HA a mile north to Fredericksburg, TX, toured a portion of the Admiral Nimitz complex of museums, had lunch at a brewpub, then returned home in time to watch college football. So, I was busy.
Anyway, S.P.Q.R. follows the sleuthing adventures of Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, told in classic, first-person detective-fiction narration. Please note that I devoured every one of Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels. Falco is a private investigator (or “informer”) working in the later third of the first century AD, in the time of the Flavian dynasty. And I have read one of Steven Saylor’s Sub Rosa novels, and liked that as well. So a series set during the declining years of the Republic (like Sub Rosa), was bound to grab me.
And it did. The first book was terrific. Roberts includes many of the big names of the period as characters/suspects/plot devices, including Julius Caesar, Pompey the Great, Cicero, and Crassus. Unlike the lower class Falco (who only with great reluctance eventually reaches Equestrian rank) Decius is highborn, just beginning his climb the ladder of offices. Though a junior official, he still rubs elbows with the great, and provides the reader with a somewhat different point of view. Both Decius and Falco are still cut from the same cloth, however; the fabric woven by American detective story writers during the first half of the last century.
Roberts seamlessly works in period coloration, from minutiae about gladiatorial weapons and armor, to clothing, to toilets, and so on, easing the reader comfortably into the quotidian details of life in Rome. The mystery is satisfying enough. Roberts allows the reader to figure out the identity of an essential character before the narrator does — and thus feel smug — while Decius pieces together the broader conspiracy. A conspiracy which, in the tradition of noir detective fiction, he can do nothing about.
Good stuff. I’m sure I’ll pick up the rest of the books in due course. I’m going to need more shelves.
And it doesn’t help my shelf space that I keep getting novels published. (Poor me, I know.) I got the final proofs in yesterday from Cirsova for Cesar the Bravo (a solid, chunky 350 pages.) That should be available for purchase sometime in early or mid-November. It also appears another publisher has accepted a three-book series of mine (currently going by the title Twilight Galaxy.) I will have more information about that later, but it is early days still. If you’d like to read something of mine in the meantime, I would suggest picking up the economically priced, four-book Semi-Autos and Sorcery series. The collection is available in digital and audio. Or you can pick up the print editions separately.
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