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OSCAR WILDE AND THE VATICAN MURDERS
by Gyles Brandreth
Simon & Schuster, May 2012
337 pages
$14.00
ISBN: 1439153736


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

The team of Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle return for their fifth case in Gyles Brandreth's series, which plays with the conceit that Wilde in modeling himself upon Sherlock Holmes actually provides Doyle with many of his ideas for the character and his lines. For the first time Doyle is here the narrator of the entire case, looking back from the winter of 1928 to those perplexing days in Rome in July 1892 when the two were handed a puzzle missing every ingredient one normally has in a mystery, knowing only that there is a mystery.

The game is actually set afoot in Bad Homburg, where Oscar is supposed to be taking a cure and where Arthur has escaped to try to catch up on all his Holmes correspondence. Oscar offers to help; one of the first envelopes addressed to the detective (postmarked in Rome) contains a severed hand. Yet another similar envelope has what appears to be a lock of hair (it turns out to be lamb's wool), and a third has a finger wearing a rose-gold ring with the keys of St. Peter inscribed inside the band. Oscar determines that the two should depart for Rome posthaste. Someone in the Vatican is obviously reaching out for help. Their job is to find out who.

The novel is more leisurely paced than previous cases. The reader gets glimpses of the Vatican, the Anglican community, and some few Romans, mostly street urchins ("the Rome Irregulars"). One meets the usual mixture of real and fictional characters. Part of the fun is figuring out which is which. There is more local color than I remember in the earlier novels. Our two amateur sleuths spend much of their time walking or riding through the streets and out into the countryside. Oscar makes much of Keats, his death there, and his burial site. Vatican politics are touched upon, and one learns a bit about what goes on with the election of a new pope.

It is not till late in the novel that the focus firmly returns to the mystery: Who was killed? Why? And why has someone appealed to Sherlock (or Doyle) for help? Actually, it turns out that clues have been dropped all along the way, though none is obviously such at the time. By the end, the ring, the wool, and Keats have all come together in a very satisfactory and unexpected manner. In setting up the final unveiling of the perpetrator, Brandreth takes delight in playing games with one of the hoariest cliches of the genre.

Lovers of Sherlock Holmes and Oscar Wilde have the most fun reading the novels. As before, the author has Oscar supplying Arthur with lines that he will use in his Holmes stories and picking up lines, either from his own improvised conversation or the comments of others, that he will use in his later plays. Of Wilde's five great plays, in July 1892 only "Lady Windermere's Fan" has been staged. There are now fourteen Holmes stories. In addition to the quotations from Keats (and Shelley), one gets an added bonus in this novel: Mark Twain. Oscar is avidly reading his travelogue THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, paying specific attention to the chapters on Rome. Twain, in fact, supplies a major clue to what happened to the victim's body.

Arthur admits that there are many similarities between Holmes and Wilde, notably the fact that "each ... has a strain in his nature that put him beyond the accepted mores of his times." But he denies allegations that Holmes is modeled on Wilde. He does tells us that he soon plans to introduce Sherlock's brother, Mycroft, and that he will be drawn in part upon Wilde. One rare anachronism occurs, I think. One of the people that Oscar and Arthur meet, on the train heading to Rome and thereafter in the city, is Irene Sadler. From the start, she flirts with the married Arthur, though seemingly in an innocent way. Oscar insists her character is anything but guileless. Surely, we are expected to think that she is the model for Irene Adler; otherwise, the similarities of the name would have been commented on. But Adler's sole appearance in the canon occurred exactly a year earlier.

The cases, whose titles all begin OSCAR WILDE AND ..., (with sometimes a variation between the British and the American title), have not been published in the order in which they supposedly occurred. I've reviewed them all for RTE, so anyone who wants to work out the chronology can go to the individual cases and easily do so. Brandreth's ingenious mingling of fact and invention, if perhaps not quite so dazzling as at the beginning of the series, continues to intrigue.

§ Drewey Wayne Gunn is professor emeritus at Texas A&M University-Kingsville. Scarecrow Press will bring out the second edition of his book The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film later this year. Meanwhile, he is delighted to find that he has become a character in a graphic novel: the police detective in the ongoing series Corpus Christi, created by his former student Trent Westbrook.

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, March 2012

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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