Book Review | The Silver Pigs (Falco #1)

The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis is the first in the Marcus Didius Falco series. I reviewed the last in the series in 2018. I don’t often reread books, and this is, I think the first time I’ve reviewed one I first read before I started blogging. Since I was short of a review for today (I’m waiting for some feedback on an ARC I have problems with), I thought – why not?

And I did count this towards my total of Goodreads reads. I don’t count beta reads, or the number of times I read my own books (tempting though it was when I needed to read the Viridian trilogy–more than once!–to get the events right for my prequel), but I think other rereads, for pleasure, are fair game.

The Silver Pigs (Falco #1)

by Lindsey Davis

The Silver Pigs is Lindsey Davis’ classic novel, which introduced readers around the world to Marcus Didius Falco, a private informer with a knack for trouble, a tendency for bad luck, and a frequently inconvenient drive for justice.

When Marcus Didius Falco, a Roman “informer” who has a nose for trouble that’s sharper than most, encounters Sosia Camillina in the Forum, he senses immediately all is not right with the pretty girl. She confesses to him that she is fleeing for her life, and Falco makes the rash decision to rescue her—a decision he will come to regret. For Sosia bears a heavy [load?] as heavy as a pile of stolen Imperial ingots, in fact.

Matters just get more complicated when Falco meets Helena Justina, a Senator’s daughter who is connected to the very same traitors he has sworn to expose. Soon Falco finds himself swept from the perilous back alleys of Ancient Rome to the silver mines of distant Britain—and up against a cabal of traitors with blood on their hands and no compunction whatsoever to do away with a snooping plebe like Falco…. [blurb from the 2006 Kindle edition, cover from the 1989 first edition]

My Review

Stepping back in time to my first encounter with Falco, in the early 90s, is hard. Like most good characters you get to know them very well. Love them, even. But Falco is as interesting a character as ever, just trying to make a living in the murk and treachery that is the Roman Empire. He has few friends, most of whom are fellow ex-legionaries, survivors of the brutal battles with the Britons, foul pagans that they are. He has no intention of ever seeing that cold, dismal land again.

Inevitably, the only route to sort out the commission he has taken on is to return. He starts on a long, arduous journey, but nothing to compare to what he will encounter. In order to prove where the missing ingots have come from, or gone to, he gets himself sent to the mines of southwest England. Nobody treats slaves kindly. The author writes this brilliantly, and sometimes the treatment Falco receives is almost too much for this lily-livered reader. And after he exposes the crooks and the systematic embezzlement, he takes the assignment to accompany the haughty and disagreeable Helena Justina away from her broken marriage and back to Rome.

It’s a brilliant twist in the plot, and sets up most of the enjoyment that underlies the rest of the devilry that goes on in the rest of the series. Did Lindsey Davis know this was going to be a long series when she started? I don’t know. Maybe she was prepared for two or three books, since Bronze and Copper occur in the next two titles. But I doubt whether she expected to write twenty of them. I’m so glad she did.

The Silver Pigs was a breath of fresh air (smelly at times) in my reading matter at the time. Sometimes you just need old friends. I recommend you make friends with these people immediately.