flemmings | (no subject)

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I have a bad habit of many years' standing of frittering my autumns and winters away reading mystery series. They aren't always time wasters but frequently are enough so, that I get scratchy about my inability to do anything but read about various Inspectors (Rutledge, Barnaby, Ben Ross, Mitchell and Markby, Campbell and Carter) or Flavia deLuce or Wells and Wong or the much abused Sebastien St Cyr. Or Nero Wolfe, which one should read at least once, or Sarah Caudwell ditto, or Hazel Holt or Christianna Brand. (I don't count Gladys Mitchell in this. Mitchell is an immersive experience.)

Anyway, I'm trying not to be sucked into wise guy private Roman eye Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and his wine snobbery, but it's a losing battle. Especially when my alternate Littrachure reading is the oogey-making Lincoln in the Bardo, which finished today thank goodness.

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LOL I hear you, I just got sucked back into the Leaphorn and Chee books, feeling oddly homesick for NM I guess. I tried the Alex Cross books but he has a bad habit of withholding things from the reader that annoyed me.

wise guy private Roman eye Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus and his wine snobbery

That does sound TEMPTING. I have all the Cadfael books too but was resisting those because I just know I'll really get sucked into all of them.

I had to give up on Cadfael because I found them annoyingly repetitive. Character-wise, not plot-wise. Nobody agrees with me-- when they first came out, all my medieval studies friends were gaga about them-- so YMMV. But I'm not a fan of romance interfering with my whodunits and I believe Peters was a romance writer first.

That said, Cadfael is a very fast read.

I am fond of Valerius Corvinus too. Falco as well, but Helena Justina's name always niggled ( I had to mentally tell myself that 'Helena' was a nickname...)

I am not sure whether I should be rubbing my hands and cackling, or regretting that I have been an enabler here...

Yeah, getting around the fact that all of a man's daughters had the same name in Rome isa challenge for modern writers. As my Roman Comedy prof said, 'Oh, the family probably called them Piggy or something.' Or like English boarding schools, Molesworth one, Molesworth two, etc.

Oh, rub and cackle away. I'm always glad to be enabled in the cause of a good book series.

I'm also a great reader of mysteries and had somehow never come across the Corvinus series. The first is now winging its electronic way to me. Many thanks for the rec!

Thank oursin who put me on to them. Though 'laddish' (as the blurb describes Marcus) I find too kind to that bumptious young man. OTOH he doesn't make the kind of bonehead decisions Marcus Didius Falco does, so there's that.

I find Falco's decisions more explicable when I remember his class background. Unlike Corvinus, he 's a pleb who married far above his station and fought his way up, against all odds including his own insecurities.

Edited 2023-10-01 02:46 (UTC)

Ah yes, that makes sense. I'll cut him some slack. Though it would be great if Falco could give half his insecurities to Corvinus, just for balance.

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