My good friend, Karen Bush, gave me this advice at regular
intervals:
“Read the Falco books.”
Karen, excellent editor and avid reader, put me onto many great reads:
most notably the ‘Song of Fire and Ice’ sequence by George R. R. Martin,
and the wonderful ‘Six Duchies’ books of Robin Hobb. Also, Hobb’s
lesser-known, but excellent ‘Soldier Son’ trilogy.
Karen and I often
exchanged notes about what we were reading (both of us were always reading something)
and then she’d demand, “Have you read the Falco books yet? No?— Well, read
them.”
Karen had
regularly proved that she knew a good book when she met it, but still, I
never got around to Falco.
I think I’d got it into my head
that they were an Ancient Roman version of the Brother Cadfael series:
that is, ‘murder-mysteries’ set in the past, with an historically accurate
background and a main character ingeniously solving crimes without any modern
forensic aids.
But, back off, Cadfael fans! I do not intend,
by this, any criticism of the Cadfael books. I’ve enjoyed reading most, quite
possibly all, of them. But then, I’ve always been interested in what might be
loosely called ‘the medieval period.’ I didn’t have - then - any equivalent
interest in Ancient Rome, and so the idea of ‘a Roman Cadfael’ didn’t much
appeal.
Then, very suddenly, unbelievably,
Karen died. And I miss her. It seemed
important to read the Falco books.
As usual, Karen was absolutely right. They are
cracking reads that I should have fallen headlong into years ago. There are
twenty books in the series. Twenty books! Twenty books worth of page-turning
and staying awake into the small hours to read the next bit. And the next bit.
And the next chapter…Or two...
Karen and I could have had our own Falco
book-club, as we did a Pratchett book-club. What a fool I was, not to have
immediately jumped to it and read Falco, when first ordered. If I had, I might
have shared the series with my father too, as I did Pratchett’s Discworld
books. He would have loved Falco as much as Captain Vimes.
Thing is, when I was dodging reading the Falco books, I thought they were
straight-forward 'Historical Crime.' I didn't appreciate how many
sides to them there are, or on how many different levels they work. They are
wonderful historical novels.
Rome itself comes to noisy, shoving, pushing,
stinking, crowded, mucky life, in all its filth, din, poverty, privilege,
injustice and lawlessness. And like all good fictional detectives, Falco loves
his city and misses it painfully when he’s forced to be away.
Mulsum and must cake, street cafes, temple sacrifices, low-life,
officialdom, boots that cause blisters and tunics with fish sauce stains and
fraying braid... All the details of everyday life are casually mentioned in
passing, raged about, laughed at, as if it was all just as ordinary, present
and annoying as life in the 21st Century.
In addition, the Falco books are a great laugh.
I wasn’t at all prepared for how funny the books are. Similar books may
have their amusing moments, but the Falco books are often laugh-out-loud
funny.
Falco narrates his own stories and Falco is a vivid presence, with a
wonderful turn of phrase. His wife doesn’t
like something he says and ‘shot me a look that would have skinned a weasel.’
The liveliness of the prose throughout makes other novels seem very flat.
There is not much of the cool,
classical, toga-clad Roman about Falco, raised, as he was, in the rough,
over-crowded, crime-pestered slums of the Aventine Hill (though he does
drape himself in a rather worn and tatty, second-hand toga occasionally, under
protest, when forced to look respectable, rather like a modern man changing his
jeans for a suit.) Forget classical Latin epigrams. Falco’s chat has more of
the stand-up comic’s one-liners about it.
Although set in the past and very funny, they
are certainly not ‘cosy crime.’ They're full of fights, plotting and general
vicious ill-will.
Nasty murders must be solved. Gangs of robbers create mayhem. Mafiosa
types are causing misery. Rome has, at last, the first half-way decent and sane
Emperor it’s had for years and what-d’ye-know, plotters are out to depose him.
Falco is usually in the thick of it all, dodging, weaving, thumping and getting
thumped.
"When the girl came rushing up
the steps, I decided she was wearing far too many clothes.
"It was late summer. Rome frizzled like a pancake on a griddleplate… People
flopped on stools in shadowed doorways, bare knees apart, naked to the waist—
and in the backstreets of the Aventine Sector where I lived, that was just the
women.
"I was standing in the Forum. She was running. She looked overdressed and
dangerously hot, but sunstroke or suffocation had not yet finished her off…
when she hurtled up the steps of the Temple of Saturn straight towards me, I
made no attempt to move aside. She missed me, just. Some men are born lucky:
others are called Didius Falco"
The Silver
Pigs, Lindsey Davis
The opening paragraphs of the first book, The
Silver Pigs. The girl is being chased by ‘two ugly lumps of
jail-fodder, jelly-brained and broad as they were high…’ Of course, Falco, our
hero, promptly deals with the ugly lumps and rescues the girl, because he isn’t
just handsome, witty and charming with a shaggy mop of black curls
falling over melting dark eyes. Oh no. He’s also an ex-legionary and
hard-as-nails street-fighter, packing an illegal dagger hidden in his boot. (It
was illegal for civilians to carry weapons on the streets of Rome.)
The books
are very tongue in cheek.
Raymond Chandler famously wrote:
“…down these mean streets a
man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is
the hero… He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He
must be…a man of honour—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it,
and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a
good enough man for any world.
“He will take no man’s
money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate
revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud
man or be very sorry you ever saw him…”
Since Lindsey Davis consciously took the
‘classic’ 1930s detective stories as a starting point for her Falco novels, I’m
sure it’s no accident that this could almost be a character sketch of
Falco.— If you add a good few laughs.
Almost. Falco is
honourable and honest and certainly proud (although he’d make a joke about it.)
He isn’t mean, but he is a bit tarnished and often— for good reason— afraid.
(The number of beatings he takes, it’s a wonder he makes it through five books,
let alone twenty. And even more of a wonder that he preserves his ‘Etruscan’
nose and good looks.)
But ‘a lonely man’? This has to be one
of Davis’ in-jokes. The classic 1930s ‘tec is lonely. He has no wife and
changes his women more often than his underwear. He is a childless bachelor,
seemingly without any close friends or relatives. All the better to be free
when Trouble comes calling. Off he wanders, down those mean streets, all on his
lonely lonesome, seeking out crime to fight and wrongs to right.
But Marcus Didius Falco is Italian. A Roman. He’d
probably love to be ‘a lonely man’ (at least once in a while, for a rest) but
he doesn’t stand a chance.
When we first meet Falco, in The Silver
Pigs, he does live alone, as every proper seedy Private Eye should. His
home is a tiny two-room apartment on the sixth floor of one of those flimsy
Roman tenements that were always on the point of falling down. (And frequently
did. And in one of the Falco books, does.) A typical, grimy, gritty, cheap
dive.
Alone — except that Falco’s fierce old mother
is always coming round to tidy up, collect his washing, leave him some
home-cooking, chase off any floozies Falco has mislaid and then give him Hades
about either them or something else. Falco lives in fear of her. Well, if not
fear, then certainly keen apprehension. Phillip Marlowe never had to put up
with this.
Falco also has five sisters, and quarrels with
most of them, most of the time, except his favourite, the youngest and closest
to him in age. He even quarrels with her sometimes. Nor is she ever slow to
tell him exactly what she thinks of him and his doings.
These five sisters have lumbered him with five
brothers-in-law, all of whom he hates and considers dead-beats. Together with
his sisters, they’ve produced an ever-growing number of nephews and nieces for
Falco to feel responsible for, because their fathers are so useless.
Oh, and Falco has a father of his own, Geminus,
an auctioneer, who ran away with a red-head when Falco was seven, leaving
Falco’s mother to bring up her children alone. People are always telling Falco
(to his great annoyance) that he is just like his father, in looks and
character, but Falco has never forgiven Geminus for his desertion and they
have a difficult relationship. If ever they seem on the point of becoming
friends, Falco manages to find some reason to fall out again. — But the reader
can see, between the lines, that whatever Geminus’ reason for leaving his
family, he is proud of his son and quite eager to help him out and
rebuild their relationship. Nevertheless, Falco hates having to accept anything
from him.
Also unlike the classic ‘30s PE, Falco has
friends as well as family. Among them is the old harridan who runs the laundry
on the ground floor of his tottering tenement and regularly screams friendly
abuse at him. There’s Thalia, the scary animal-trainer and snake-dancer (and
her even scarier snake); and there’s his best friend, Petronius Longus, a watch
captain of the Vigils (something between a fire-fighting squad and a police
force).
Falco and Petronius served together in
Britain at the time of the Boudiccan rebellion (and both heartily
detest the gods-forsaken, cold, wet place.) The experience left them
disillusioned with the glory that is Rome, but strongly bonded as friends. ‘Petro’
often seems to fill the place of Falco’s dead older brother, looking out for
him and admonishing him in an almost fatherly way. — Davis’ characters are
never simple, though. Petro is a loyal friend, a level-headed and
responsible Watch Captain, a doting father, and also a terrible
philanderer, always chasing some new mistress and expecting his wife to
tolerate it.
As well as
Falco’s one-liners, the books are full of sly, subtextual jokes you could
easily miss if you aren’t expecting them.
I think I did miss a lot because it took me a
while to grasp that I wasn’t reading a simple, straight-forward ‘whodunnit?’ I
suspect that many jokes flew straight past me. Still, maybe I’ll catch them on
re-reading.
Not wanting to spoil others’ fun, I’ll mention
just one. In ‘Last Act in Palmyra’ Falco joins a travelling
actors’ troupe. Short of cash, Falco unwillingly takes on the hack-job of
patching together bits of old plays to come up with something that the company
can present as new at their next stop. It’s a frustrating task, and since Falco
is an amateur (and unappreciated) poet, he soon concludes that he
could write a new play which would be just as good as, if not better than
anything in the repertoire.
So he writes a comedy called ‘The Spook Who Spoke’ about a young man who
meets the ghost of his father…
It seems there really was a Roman forerunner of
‘Hamlet.’ And Falco wrote it.
Throughout this book situations keep arising
which are oddly reminiscent of events in various Shakespearian plays. I daresay
I’d have spotted more if I knew more Shakespeare.
In the other books, hidden beneath the
story-line, there are many other jokes, and all the tropes of the classic
detective story are played with gleefully.
The twenty
books are one long, developing love story.
In the first book, the Emperor Vespasian sends
Falco on a mission to Britain. On reporting to Britain’s Governor, Falco
meets another visitor: Helena Justina Camillus,
the Governor’s niece and a senator’s daughter to boot.
Naturally, he and Helena hate each other on
sight. He, being a mere plebeian, is beneath her in every way, and she is right
out of his league: too beautiful, too rich, too high-caste. She proves
to be intelligent and well-read too, with a sharp wit and a cutting tongue. A
tart, snobbish piece, he thinks.
Naturally, after other adventures and
pummellings (and nearly dying), Falco ends up being hired as her bodyguard for
the long, hazardous journey back to Rome. And, naturally, they end up in bed
and begin a passionate, loving but sometimes fraught partnership that runs
through every one of the following nineteen books.
I don’t feel guilty about that Spoiler, because
anybody who’s read a few novels would see this coming a long way off. I mean,
what a cliché. The ‘meet-cute,’ the love-affair that begins with dislike and
misunderstanding on both sides and ends on the heights of dizzy romance and
happy (almost) ever after. Predictable, or what.
But it doesn’t matter at all. What makes
these books so good and compulsively readable is the sparkle of the prose and
the sheer power and conviction of the characterisation.
Did somebody commit a murder? Who cares? The
murder is just a maguffin, allowing Falco to have hairy adventures, and
allowing us to hang out with him and Helena, and have Petro drop by with an
amphora… An excuse for us to overhear another squabble with Falco’s sisters or
his father, or brother-in-law, or Helena’s brothers. (One Camillus brother
likes Falco and is pleased to see his sister happy with a man who is devoted to
her. The other is appalled by her scandalously living with such low-caste rough
trade because it might damage his own future in the Senate.)
Practically everyone who so much as crosses a
page is strongly characterised, with a vivid impression of what they look like,
how they speak and do their hair, what colour their tunic is, what they smell
like... The stray dog, Nux, who acquires Falco despite all the resistance Falco
can muster, is as lively a character as any of them. The reader feels that
Lindsey Davis has spent many hours observing the behaviour of mad, hairy little
dogs. Even a feral cat (Stringy) which hangs about a street food stall for all
of two pages is sharply drawn.
And although Lindsey Davis has said she prefers
dogs to children, Falco’s small daughters (when they arrive) are wonderfully
vivid portraits of children, from the games they play, to the way they crane
around the bedroom door to peer at Falco when he’s catching up on sleep after
one of his adventures. Having made sure that it is him, safely home
again, they run off, laughing. His hordes of nephews and nieces are, likewise,
individual, robust personalities, whether five years old, or twelve, or
fifteen. They are so recognisable, you feel that you’ve met them.
Helena Justina is every bit as vivid and
many-sided a character as Falco. As a senator’s daughter, she’s educated and
loves reading, so she’s always happy — indeed, eager — to help Falco with
research in libraries and archives. There’s a standing joke about her always
being curled up on every cushion in the house, with her nose stuck in a
scroll. (A joke made about her author, I wonder?)
Helena’s high social standing gives her entrance to many grand homes
where the slaves would drive Falco off with sticks, and she can gossip with and
ask questions of, people he would never get near. Even when making inquiries
among the lower orders, she can use her status and classy charm to wheedle
information from aspiring snobs who would tell him where he could go.
It's unusual, of course, for a senator’s daughter to hob-nob with a
plebeian, but when Helena met Falco, she had already tried conventional
marriage within her own class. Her husband proved to have no interest
in her whatsoever beyond her money. So, bored, lonely and miserable, she
divorced him— which I was surprised to learn Roman women could do. But I’ve
learned an awful lot about the Roman Empire from the Falco books. In fact, I’m
now quite interested in Roman history. More than I ever was before.
After her divorce, Helena decides that perhaps there’s more to life
than obeying convention, and, on finding a handsome bit of rough who
adores her, she allows him some very hands-on adoring. Her high-ranking
family just have to put up with it. Some of them find this easier than others.
Falco’s first impression was correct: Helena is very intelligent,
well-read and often scathingly sharp and outspoken. But he learns that she’s
also compassionate and loving, fair-minded and quick to stand up both for
herself and others.
She is also quite jealous. Knowing that Falco’s eye is always drawn to a
beautiful woman (and that women’s eyes are often drawn to him), she frequently
insists on accompanying him on his investigations, so she can both size up the
opposition and fend it off. Or even sneaks off by herself to meet with and
interview female suspects.
Helena is, convincingly and enjoyably, Falco’s other half.
As for Falco, I think he is the most masculine
detective created by a woman that I’ve ever come across. Possibly this is
because he isn’t simply a cartoon ‘hard man’ — in fact, in many ways he’s
anything but ‘hard’. He’s warm, affectionate, protective and funny. (The
acknowledgements in one book thank Richard for ‘keeping things masculine.’
Richard did a good job.)
Other fictional male detectives may take
cocaine and play the violin to help them solve crimes, or cudgel the little
grey cells while they drink tea, or droop and muse in an aristocratic manner.
Falco prefers to do his deepest thinking with his hand down the front of
Helena’s dress.
Falco thinks about a lot of things besides sex—
food, poetry, wine, his sore feet, his mother, his sisters, money or lack
of it— but his thoughts do turn to sex a lot. However, his readers know what
Helena Justina cannot know— that he is utterly besotted by her and always
afraid that she will leave him. (Everyone he knows is always telling him that
she will.)
When she’s angry and berates him, he’s thrilled because if she didn’t
care about him, she wouldn’t be angry. When she makes fun of him, he’s
thrilled, because that means she notices what he does. When she’s jealous, he's
thrilled, because it means she sees him as her property and he’s very happy to
be that. He loves to see her disconcert other people, who expect her to be
silent and self-effacing, as a well brought up, modest, quiet Roman matron
should be. He’s as proud of her as she is of him.
So, let’s see, that’s an adventure story, set
against a brilliantly recreated Roman background, with lots of action,
crackling prose, brilliant dialogue, superb characterisation, lots of laughs...
Plus lots of hidden jokes, and, even in the
midst of the adventure, send-ups of all the detective story tropes...
— oh, and a murder to solve thrown in.
The Falco books are, like the Cadfael series,
excellent ‘historical detective stories’ — but they're an awful lot more at the
same time.
Instead of each story being a
self-contained puzzle, there’s a strong, continuing story-line from book to
book, with Falco and Helena becoming older, having children, prospering a
little... It’s a good idea to read the books in sequence, so you can follow the
progress of a substantial cast of characters.
In between reading Falco books, I happened to
read a couple of other detective novels, both from highly praised, best-selling
authors, whose books have been turned into television series. I won’t name the
writers or series here because, I’m afraid, compared to Falco, I thought them
dead ducks. The books turned entirely around their less than fascinating ‘murder
mystery’ while characterisation seemed perfunctory. They seemed written by
numbers. I turned back to Falco with delight and relief.
Falco and Helena— I think I’m in love with both
of them. Certainly, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a series of books
that I’ve enjoyed so much. The story-telling and the prose crackles. The
dialogue is about as good as dialogue gets. The characters kick their legs over
the edge of the page, jump out of the book, stick the kettle on and hunt
through your cupboards for biscuits.
Thank you, Karen.
“Read the Falco books.”
%20(1).jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
