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THE VESUVIUS CLUB
by Mark Gatiss
Scribner, October 2005
240 pages
$13.00
ISBN: 0743283945


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This book is subtitled, 'A Bit of Fluff', which describes it very well indeed, and it's nice to know the author won't mind my saying so.

There seems to be a new literary genre developing in Britain, one that involves a lot of madcap behaviour, a good deal of sex, and naughty characters who are just terribly, terribly clever. You can recognize these books by the fact that they all seem to contain characters with ridiculous names -- in this one, we have the hero, Mr Lucifer Box, and an array of other folk, among them the Honourable Everard Supple, Major Strangeways Pugg, Mr Jocelyn Utterson Poop, Mr Cretaceous Unmann, Professors Sash, Verdigris, and Quibble, Mr Midsomer Knight, and Charlie Jackpot.

Lucifer Box is an artist who resides at Number 9, Downing Street in the early years of the 20th century. Why this address? No particular reason, apparently, other than to be surprising. Mr Box lives more lavishly than his artistic success would seem to warrant, and it appears he has other strings to his bow.

He is, in fact, as we soon discover, an operative in His Majesty's Secret Service. In a meeting with his superior (which takes place in a mechanically-enhanced gentlemen's lavatory), he is informed that two English professors have died mysteriously in Naples, and the service's Naples operative has disappeared. Our hero must investigate, and when he does, he begins to uncover -- surprise, surprise -- a fiendish plot.

There is always a danger, when an author sets out to be amusing, that the intention will overpower the execution. This book, which is clearly meant to evoke something along the lines of a Victorian melodrama as written by PG Wodehouse channelling Aubrey Beardsley, strains every nerve to be witty and clever and frothy, but the result is, I'm afraid, rather dreary.

Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, September 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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