I don't often blog about what I am reading except for the book club choices, but I have just finished reading In at the Death by David Wishart. It is a political detective story set in the closing months of Tiberius' reign as emperor, and obviously very thoroughly researched. I had picked it up in the hope of finding something like Lindsey Davis' Falco novels. It wasn't.

I'm not saying that it wasn't an entertaining read, but the way in which it was written really bothered me on two counts. Our hero, Valerius Corvinus, belongs to an aristocratic 'narrow stripe' family, yet the author sees fit to put the f word into his mouth all the time including in front of ladies. Now, I'm not particularly prudish about swearing and such words used at a moment of great stress can be a very effective tool in writing, but used constantly they lose impact and are merely offensive.

We are also told that David Wishart is a classical scholar, and we must therefore assume an educated man. However at three points in this book he uses a double negative. These double negatives were not put into the mouths of slaves or low-lifes but were a part of the narrative of Valerius Corvinus who is, as I said, a member of the upper classes and would not make such a mistake. This means that the error must be the author's and has passed unnoticed through all the proof reading. Now I seem to recall - and my recollection could easily be wrong as Latin was never exactly my strongest suit - that in Latin there is a use of a double negative to emphasise the negativeness rather than, as in English, the one negative cancelling out the other. Could it possibly be that Mr. Wishart was using it in this way? I don't really think so, do you?