Lindsey Davis's novels about the Roman informer Falco have always been ingenious in the way she sets up impeccably researched Imperial Roman equivalents of modern worlds and modern crimes. Ode to a Banker is one of the closest of her books to a classic traditional crime novel, in that it deals with a murder in a small enclosed world, with likely suspects whose motives have to be gone through by interrogation and legwork--the first of the bodies is even found in a library. Chrysippus was a banker and a publisher, owner of a minor scriptorium where not especially accurate copies of manuscripts are made by dictation; he is found with the centre rod from a scroll stuffed up his nose. Falco himself is momentarily a suspect--he had a row with Chrysippus who offered to vanity publish Falco's poems--but soon finds himself the official investigator, sub-contracting the job for his friends in the Watch. This is as elegantly picturesque in its portrait of the Emperor Vespasian's crowded metropolis as Davis has ever been; the soap opera of Falco's extended and disreputable family continues apace and amid all the snazzy puzzles, we get a real sense of a lively mind busy at work. --Roz Kaveney

2008-07-26 Falco 12: of poetry, bankers, builders, and murder

This is the twelfth in a series of excellent detective stories set in Vespasian's Roman Empire and featuring the informer Marcus Didius Falco. Informers in ancient Rome were something between a private detective and a government spy.

The full Falco series, in chronological order, consists at the moment of:

1) The Silver Pigs
2) Shadows in Bronze
3) Venus in Copper
4) The Iron Hand of Mars
5) Poseidon's Gold
6) Last Act in Palmyra
7) Time to Depart
8) A Dying Light in Corduba
9) Three Hands in the Fountain
10) Two for the Lions
11) One Virgin Too Many
12) Ode to a Banker
13) A Body in the Bath house
14) The Jupiter Myth
15) The Accusers
16) Scandal taks a Holiday
17) See Delphi and Die
18) Saturnalia

This book begins in July AD74. Falco and his partner, senator's daughter Helena Justina, are in the process of rebuilding the bathhouse of their new homes, and having dire trouble with incompetent builders. (Some things are eternal.) Meanwhile Falco gets asked to carry out a joint poetry reading with his old acquaintance Senator Rutilicus Gallicus. Domitian, the future emperor, attends the reading. The weathly greek banker and Patron of the Arts, Aurelius Chrysippus, initially offers to sponsor the publication of Falco's work. They have harsh words about the terms - and then Chrysippus is found murdered. To prove his own innocence Falco has to establish who really killed him ...

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is that, I think uniquely in the series, one passage refers to the events in the past tense and clearly infers that the story of this book is being told or written some twenty years later, e.g. about 94 AD. This came as rather a surprise to me because it implies that Falco survives the reign of Domitian Caesar as Emperor. Falco fell foul of Domitian in an earlier book and has so far avoided fatal consequences from this because he holds evidence incriminating Domitian in murder and treason. Which is fine while Vespasian and Titus are still around but may put Falco in even greater danger from about 80 AD ...

There were a very large number of people for whom being on the wrong side of Domitian during his reign had fatal consequences, so there may be an interesting future volume about how Falco survives this period of history. Leaving Rome for the most remote corner of the then known world sounds like a good bet, though perhaps the friendships with Rutilicus Gallicus and others established in this book may also give a few hints.


I initially tried this series because I had enjoyed the "Cadfael" mediaeval detective stories by Ellis Peters. Where Cadfael is excellent, Falco is brilliant. Ellis Peters herself (or to use her real name, Edith Pargeter) said of the early books of the series, 'Lindsey Davis continues her exploration of Vespasian's Rome and Marcus Didius Falco's Italy with the same wit and gusto that made "The Silver Pigs" such a dazzling debut and her rueful, self-deprecating hero so irresistibly likeable.'

Funny, exciting, and based on a painstaking effort to re-create the world of the early Roman empire between 70 and 76 AD.

If you have met and enjoyed either the Cadfael or Thraxas series, this is even better.

It isn't absolutely essential to read these stories in sequence, as the mysteries Falco is trying to solve are all self-contained stories and each book can stand on its own. Having said that, there is some ongoing development of characters and relationships and I think reading them in the right order does improve the experience.