A Vote for Murder by
David Wishart
pbk out September 03
(Coronet)
at £6.99
This is another of the Marcus Corvinus mysteries set in ancient Rome and
thereabouts in the reign of Tiberius, where his serial detective is a rather
laid-back patrician who sticks his Roman nose into various murders. The
author, who is a classics scholar with an encyclopaedic knowlegde of the
times of which he writes, has produced a string of previous books about
Marcus. The obvious parallel is Lindsey Davis's even longer series featuring
her sleuth Marcus Didius Falco, but although there are similarities, including
feisty wives for each detective, the two characters are quite different.
In A Vote for Murder, M. Corvinus is on holiday in the Alban Hills, visiting
his adopted daughter and his wife's formidable aunt Marcia. His habitual
lounging around a local wine-shop is interrupted by a nasty homicide, when
a local candidate for the imminent election for censor is found in his
summerhouse with his throat cut.
The local magistrate inveigles Marcus into helping with his enquiries and
the convoluted tale gets up and running from that point. The story is a
conventional who-dunnit and is entertaining and intriguing. The main thing
to say about the book -and the series, presumably - is the way in which it is
written. It has a whimsical, witty almost throw-away style and to this
reviewer's taste is a bit too far over the top when it comes to its modern
dialogue. I say this with mild guilt, for in my own historical novels about the
twelfth century, I always have a preface pointing out that the use of 'olde-
worlde' dialogue is unrealistic, given that the characters spoke Early Middle
English, unintelligible to us today. So in reality, David Wishart's folk
should be speaking Latin, which would be daft, thus they must speak
modern English. Yet I feel he takes this to extremes – probably deliberately
– in that his characters use '2003-speak' which jars somewhat on my
conventional old ears. Marcus addresses everyone as 'pal' and expressions
such 'you're a gent, ' bunch of bloody shysters, 'chinless wonders' and 'shit
hitting the fan' cause me repetitive mental stumbles when reading the book.
Still, as I often say when reviewing, it takes all sorts and the success of his
series shows that many readers like two-thousand-year old dialogue with a
touch of Ed McBain or Mickey Spillane.
(
Bernard Knight
ex Home Office Pathologist and author of the highly acclaimed Crowner John series)
A Vote for Murder by
David Wishart
