Customer Reviews

All Roads Lead to Murder: A Case From the Notebooks of Pliny the Younger

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

If a writer wants to introduce a new series in the somewhat crowded field of Roman mysteries, he'd better have a unique twist. Albert Bell has done that. Instead of fictional sleuths, he uses historical characters, Pliny the Younger and the historian Tacitus, in the first of what promises to be a fine series. Bell combines historical knowledge, witty writing, and a plot with just enough complications and suspects to lead to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion. Pliny and Tacitus have to find out who murdered a man travelling with them while also protecting a beautiful young slave girl who may be the killer's next victim. I can't wait for the next one!

The field of mysteries set in ancient Rome is a bit crowded, with Davis, Saylor, and Roberts, but this new entry deserves to take its place at the head of the line. It features an historical character, Pliny the Younger, with his friend the historian Tacitus playing the Dr. Watson role. While traveling back to Rome in a caravan in 83 AD, they stop overnight in Smyrna. The next morning they discover that a member of the caravan has been brutally murdered. Suspects abound: a gambler who was in debt to the victim, a group of women who may be involved in occult practices, an abused slave, and several others. With no Roman magistrates on the scene, Pliny takes charge of the investigation. He soon realizes that the case is more complicated than at first appears. He must find the killer because he himself may have been the intended victim. First rate!

High Country Publishers has won another great author from the larger publishing houses. Albert Bell asked an Internet mystery-discussion board for the name of a publisher for his sixth book, a historical mystery set in the Roman Empire of the first century CE [although the tone of this book begs the more traditional AD]. Bell found HCP's Senior Editor, a Roman history buff, and HCP is bringing out ALL ROADS next year.

Bell, an internationally published biblical scholar, writes historical mystery fiction for fun. His present book is more than fun.

Our sleuth is the Roman epistolist and administrator Pliny the Younger, backed up by Tacitus the historian, both at the beginnings of their careers, on the road home from their first political posts. For safety, Pliny and Tacitus join a larger group of travelers, who, it turns out, have come together not entirely by coincidence. Cornutus, traveling with a crowd of domestic help, catches our attention immediately by threatening to strike a clumsy slave. Nobody would notice if Chryseis weren't young, beautiful and blonde. When Cornutus is found dead in his bed in a Smyrna inn, with the heart cut out of his chest, everyone's mind goes back to that incident on the road.

Bell treats us to a complex confection of intrigue served up with blood-red herrings and social questions, in an authentic ambiance of Roman imperial politics. Modern sensibilities are catered to by young Pliny's doubts about the ethics of public executions and slave ownership--doubts that the historcial Pliny expresses in his oeuvre--set against the fact that in his time, no major culture in the world had yet questioned either institution seriously. For this purpose, Bell includes a pair of Christians among the travellers, a Christian household where Chryseis finds a hiding place, and a mass execution scene in Smyrna's amphitheater.

Bell's success with this story comes partly from knowledge of his topic, and partly from storytelling choices and engaging characters.

"All Roads Lead to Murder" has some interesting story ambitions--the murder of a wealthy traveler in Smyrna to be solved by two prominent figures in Roman history before they achieved their fame. A sub-theme is the contrast of two religions of the period--the cult of Hecate and the growing cult of Christianity, the latter featuring the Apostle Luke.

Author Albert Bell develops a plausible, if somewhat convoluted, plot, but is less adept in his portrayal of believable characters. He aims to make the dialogue between his characters snappy repartee, but somehow they don't often come off that way. I suspect that this partly because he has chosen to put his protagonists, Pliny and Tacitus, in their early twenties. They seem to lack both consistent wit and gravitas. The secondary characters are also given less than credible dialogue and personalities as well.

I couldn't help but compare this book to Lindsay Davis' excellent Marcus Didius Falco series which takes place in roughly the same time period, but somehow makes murder and humor work well together. In this book, Pliny does not touch the hem of Falco's tunic.

A later book in the Pliny series is better, in my judgement, than "All Roads...". I would start with that book and skip this one.

Bell has come up with an interesting story line but downright silly character development. He presents Pliny as some sort of modern day "touchy-feely" metrosexual and this spoils what could have been a good historical mystery. Pliny's attitudes toward slavery, Roman justice and his falling for a slave girl are an excellent example of the worst sort of writing error - giving a first century Roman character a 21th century mentality and ethos. Honest to goodness, by the time I was halfway through the book I expected Pliny to be spouting theories of modern forensic science, DNA testing and possible slavery "reparations." This book doesn't even begin to compare favorably with the writings of Davis and Saylor.

Set in the world of the first century Roman Empire, Pliny the Younger teams up with his friends Taciiitus the historian and the Christian physician Luke who is composing the story of his crucificed god Jesus, to solve an horrific murder in the ancient community of Smyrna. Superbly illustrasted with 30 line drawings by William Martin Johnson that original appeared in the firrst edition of Lew Wallace's 19th Centuryt novel "Ben Hur", and supplemented with a glossary of terms for the use of modern readers, All kRoads Lead To Murder is a superbly crafted, wonderfully written murder mystery that treats the reader to a thrilling detective story meticulously backgrounded with accurate historical detail. Author Albert A. Bell, Jr. (Professor of History at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill) has drawn upon his considerable expertise and imagination to craft one of the best antiquarian murder mysteries published to date. Also very highly recommended is his earlier antiaurian historical novel, Daughter of Lazarus; and his nonfiction work Resources in Ancient Philosophy (co-authored with James B. Allis) and Exploring The New Testament World.

Hope this author writes a few more, I enjoyed this one, and wil nread the next ones too.

It can be hard, being a fan of Pliny the Younger, who, having left us a collection of dainty and gentlemanly correspondence and an embarrassingly fulsome panegyric of the emperor Trajan, has long considered the lightweight of early second century Latin prose.

It is even more difficult for would-be Plinyists in that Pliny himself makes much of his friendship and literary co-equality with Tacitus: next to that hard-nosed and cynical chronicler of imperial Roman history and the decline of the senatorial class, Pliny, with his loving catalogs of his villas and careful cultivation of aristocratic friendships, only looks worse.

I spend so much time on this background because it is the best way to understand Albert Bell's rather startling premise for his mystery series: Bell's young Pliny the Younger is actually a brilliant sleuth à la Sherlock Holmes; his sidekick Tacitus is a rather dim, superstitious, and conventionally loutish exemplar of the Roman upper class, a surprise to anyone who has read even a translation of any part of the historian's works!

Bell uses the conceit of "lost notebooks" of the Elder Pliny (he of the "Natural History" to give his hero (the Younger Pliny) access to forensic ideas and techniques that would never have occurred to an ancient amateur detective, but he turns backflips in order to present Pliny as older, wiser, more socially prominent, and more advanced in his career than Tacitus (the opposite appears to have been the case, to judge from the (admittedly) scanty evidence of Pliny's own letters).

The mystery itself involves murder, missing wills, long-lost heirs, and -- for Bell is by profession a scholar of early Christianity -- encounters with St. Luke and a party of Christians. Here, too, Pliny turns out to be surprisingly interested and accepting of Christian doctrines, when one compares his attitude here to the one expressed in his famous Letter on the Christians. The mystery is not as clever as many, and, while there is a great deal of attention to period details of life and mental habits in many respects, Bell too-often drops out the 1st century when he really wants to make Pliny shine with modern virtue.

It is not surprising, then, that one turns to the acknowledgments and finds that Bell is proud to tell us how much his friends compare him to Pliny the Younger! And indeed, this sort of casual, apparently obliviously-naive self-promotion of quite mediocre and unexceptional "virtues" is precisely the version of Pliny that Bell is fighting against.

Of all the novels I have read, this may be the worst. In the style of "Columbo" type TV shows you find out pretty quick who our detective thinks is the killer, the only surprise is how he catches him. The author also has a common but bad habit of endowing his protagonist with the sensibilities and morals of a 21st Century "moral majority" type Republican.All this makes for characters that are stiff as a board and a plot that is an extra.

I am interested in classical civilization and i have enjoyed previously the spqr series. I thought i'd give this author a chance. I'm sorry i did. There is absolutely no mystery involved; rather, the author uses this as a vehicle for a set-up plot: Pliny the Younger and young Tacitus (The Clueless, or perhaps The Hardy Boys) meet the Christians (Luke and Timothy, no less) and together vanquish the Bad Guys (various pagan Romans). Every single plot point is telegraphed and Pliny and Tacitus behave in ways that have little resemblence to what might have been expected of young men of high Roman birth in the first century. The jokes are lame and much of the book involves Pliny pining for his father's books, thinking beautiful thoughts about the Christians, or having dinner conversations whose only purpose appears to be to delineate differences between Roman and Christian practices.

All that having been said,if you are a young Christian, say about 19, and have no knowledge of the period, this could be a valuable starting point for a more serious investigation into the early history of your faith. If so, I give you all best wishes for a happy journey.

atlee