There is a huge market out there for historical crime novels and some of them are worth more of your time than others. They are a great way to pick up bits and pieces of historical knowledge without plunging into potentially dense and dry academic histories. I'm going to give pride of place to my favourite historical mystery writer Lindsey Davis and her Roman series based around the irrepressible rogue Marcus Didius Falco.
Lindsey Davis' Falco series has all the best qualities an historical mystery sequence should have.
They are incredibly well researched but she wears her learning lightly and never falls into the historical novelist's trap of providing lots of meaningless background details that do little to set the scene or advance the plot but do show just how much the author knows about the subject. In Falco she has created a well-rounded character full of humour and intelligence with just a touch of cynicism. His girlfriend/wife Helena Justina is bright, feisty and adept at surviving in a man's world. Their partnership gives the books an authenticity and domesticity that puts them well above many other mystery series.
The plots can centre around ordinary life such as in The Body in the Bathhouse where Helena and Falco have the builders in, or well-known historical events and places that add a touch of the exotic e.g See Delphi and Die. Enjoy your time in ancient Rome.
I must also give praise for C.J. Sansom's Matthew Shardlake mystery series. These books with their claustrophobic portrayal of Tudor society during the paranoid reign of Henry VIII are fascinating as well as disturbing with their modern parallels.
For those wanting a good historical read with a slight bent towards the supernatural, I recommend Elizabeth Kostova's "The Historian". This is a story of Vlad Drakul (yes, he was a real historical person), 20th century scholars and Eastern Europe as it used to be in the 1950's and 60's behind the Iron Curtain. It's all beautifully woven together and beautifully written, too. A slightly more serious read, but also very intriguing.
ReplyDeleteI also stumbled across this novel, "Dracula The Undead" by Dacre Stoker. Dacre is Bram Stoker's great grandson and Dracula the Undead is the sequel to Bram's original "Dracula" story. Apparently the Stoker family came across notes written by Bram pertaining to a sequel. But of course Bram passed away before anything could be penned or published.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough (and this is something I found very intriguing) Bram states in his notes that the Dracula story is about real people and real events that actually happened (although he declines to name the so-called real people) and that Jonathon and Mina Harker are psuedonyms for these supposed real people.
Does that also mean that Dracula himself (in his vampiric form) is also real? Fascinating! Either that or Bram was delusional.
Needless to say, Dacre has based the sequel story around these "real people".
I'm not sure if I liked Dacre's sequel that much, but it was more the Stoker family history that I found fascinating.