Sejanus!

Our book today is Sejanus, a 1998 corker by a writer we’ll be meeting again in this Mystery Monday cavalcade: English mystery author David Wishart, whose whodunits are set in ancient Rome and star leisured, inquisitive, and smart-mouthed Marcus Corvinus and his equally-inquisitive wife Perilla. The books sport titles like Ovid, Nero, and Germanicus, so readers of I, Claudius and Claudius the God can expect plenty of familiar names to crop up – but one of the things I’ve always liked best about these books is how little they seem to care about the shadow of Graves’ monuments. These books owe a lot more to Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane than they do to Graves’ beloved Tacitus and Suetonius; Wishart takes the conversational ease and contemporary feel of Lindsey Davis’ Falco novels and amps it up a dozenfold. As his sleuthing duo confer over wine and choice delicacies, they sound like downtown relatives of Nick and Nora Charles.

Sejanus, obviously, centers around the arch political operator of by that name, the feared emissary of self-exiled old emperor Tiberius. Sejanus is hated by most of the Senate in Rome to the exact same extent that he’s blindly trusted by Tiberius, in whose name he runs the empire and rules the City. At the beginning of the book, some senators approach Corvinus to sound him out on the possibility of digging up some dirt on the man, and unbeknownst to those senators (and to Corvinus himself, for a while), he has an added reason: a letter from the deceased empress Livia, urging him to help bring down Sejanus.

Corvinus agrees to snoop, which means sifting through mountains of Senatorial records. Apparently mundane developments like that always give Wishart, a classics scholar, prime opportunities to work in some of the factual exposition he does so well:

Okay so far. There was one other possibility, that the records had been tampered with physically. Senatorial records, like normal books, are made up of standard-sized sheets glued together top to bottom and wound on a spindle. If someone wanted to lose a piece of text at the start of finish of a sheet all they’d have to do would be detach the page, cut it across at the appropriate point and glue it back along the new edge. Taking out a passage in the middle of the page would be more difficult, and so easier to spot; at the very least there’d be traces of rubbing, maybe signs of a different hand or a different colour ink in the necessary filler if the forger wasn’t all that competent.

But it’s the personalities that make these books, of course: Wishart has a gift for cutting characters in fine detail – including, in this book, inevitably, one of the toughest characters in all of Roman history, th much-misunderstood, much-maligned Tiberius himself. When most of the fireworks and plot twists are over in Sejanus, Corvinus finds himself sharing a skin of wine with the terrifying old man, and Wishart gives him a little personal summation that’s better than any of the long-winded justifications he got in Graves:

‘Oh yes, the rumours.’ The yellow teeth flashed in a snarl. ‘That I indulge my depraved tastes with a constant round of perversions. That I live on aphrodisiacs and bugger painted children in the open air.’ I said nothing; I hadn’t known that he knew. ‘Fools can believe what they like, Corvinus. I’ve never cared about their opinion. And so long as my writ runs and I hold the empire here‘ – he held out a clenched fist – ‘I’ll take Capri and slander over Rome and the petty squabbles of her fawning lickspittle Senate any day. In the end I’ll be judged on my actions and not on wineshop gossip. And if I’m not then the future can go and fuck itself. Clear?’

Clear enough! God I love these books.