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01/25/2006 Archived Entry: "The Judgment of Caesar"

When grandson R----- and I went to the downtown library with our friend Luke, I had a chance to actually look for some books for myself. I found the most recent Rome Sub Rosa novel by Steven Saylor, The Judgment of Caesar. What fun! Saylor has a good protagonist in Gordianus the Finder, and this outing includes Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, and her brother Ptolemy. This Twenty Questions interview has a lot of background on Saylor's life and career. "When I realized I was going to write a series, the one thing I didn't want to do was write the same book over and over and over, because I don't like reading those kind of series, and I thought it would be really boring [to write]. So I try to do something new, in some way, with each book, and come up with some new angle. And when you're writing mystery fiction, that becomes a real challenge after eight or nine books, because how many ways are there to conceal something? And when you're writing mystery fiction with a first-person narrator, that becomes an even bigger challenge because in the third person there are all kinds of places to hide the story, but with the first-person narrator, it's all through one point of view."

I talked about Saylor before.

(tags: StevenSaylor, Mysteries, RomaSubRosa)