Mark Gatiss - The Vesuvius Club

«With its quaint dust jacket and Beardsely-inspired illustrations, the book feels like a visitor from a more elegant era; it has the smell of fin de siècle about it… [Lucifer Box] belongs to a lineage which stretches from Sherlock Holmes to the indestructible James Bond, via the queasy phantasmagoria of Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu stories… But Gatiss is more than a pasticheur; he has ambitions beyond literary ventriloquism. Midway through the story, Box is revealed to be bisexual, and we feel that this is a novel which Doyle, Stevenson, and Rider Haggard would not have been allowed to write. Giddily inventive and packed with delirious incident, it suggests a postmodern project comparable to Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White .»

— The Times Literary Supplement (London)

«Gatiss mixes in The League of Gentlemen ’s penchant for horror with large doses of arch wit and louche laying about. It’s Oscar Wilde crossed with H. P. Lovecraft… this could be the bit of fluff you’ve been looking for.»

— The Telegraph (London)

«It’s Gatiss’s impeccable lightness of touch and huge delight in wordplay that makes this a joy. Studded with epigrams, asides, such wonderful names as Strangeways Pugg and Everard Supple, this is a wickedly written romp to put a smile on the face of anyone amused by the strange alchemy of the words a peculiar horror of artichokes.»

— SFX magazine (U.K.)

«Plenty of sly comic detail (Box lives at Number 9 Downing Street „because someone has to“) and a surrealist narrative that fans of The League of Gentlemen will recognize…kidnapped scientists, poisonous centipedes, foggy chases through London by hackney cab, and a fiendish volcano-based conspiracy that provides the big SFX climax. It’s all great fun.»

— Time Out (London)

«The preposterous Lucifer is an entertaining hero and The Vesuvius Club is a hugely enjoyable romp.»

— Image magazine (U.K.)

«Self-deprecatingly subtitled A Bit of Fluff … Gatiss’s prose is upholstered in a rather superior grade of fluff: redolent of soft leather chairs in fine gentlemen’s establishments, and the cracking of whips in the basements beneath them… Set amid the decadent fleshpots of the Edwardian demimonde, the novel introduces the raffish toast of London society, Lucifer Box, leading portraitist of the age and undercover agent on behalf of His Majesty’s government… Box works his way dandyishly through a sequence of adventures which leads him to penetrate a secret Neapolitan crime ring, plus the willing rings of several secretive Neapolitans… perniciously addictive piece of escapism.»

— The Guardian (London)

«Lucifer Box, society darling and spy, investigates the secret Vesuvius Club. Brilliant stuff.»

— Heat magazine (U.K.)

«In the appallingly appealing Lucifer Box, Mark Gatiss has created an antihero for the ages. Watching the number of chapters, then pages, dwindle, was heartrending. No one has ever combined the seedy, the stylish, the rumbustious, the raffish, the egregious, the outrageous, the high, and the low with such wit and grace.»

— Stephen Fry, author of Revenge and The Liar

«Mark Gatiss has brought his customary wit and outlandish style to the page… sharp, witty and shocking.»

— Derby Evening Telegraph (U.K.)

«The kind of book that breaks the rules and gets away with it on the wings of genial invention and flawless execution… wonderfully oddball… If you’re the kind of person who laughs at phrases like „I have a peculiar horror of artichokes“ or, when describing London, „It smelled of roasting excrement,“ why then, I believe you’ve found your next purchase.»

— Rick Kleffel, The Agony Column

«If you’re going to have humorous pastiche, give me this any day, with its evocations of Edwardian melodrama and derring-do.»

— The Daily Times (London)

«Mark Gatiss’s debut novel is everything you would expect from one of The League of Gentlemen . Darkly funny and scintillatingly shocking… an array of weird and wonderfully entertaining characters living in a colorful past that is painted vividly by Gatiss… In Lucifer Box Gatiss has created a true rival to James Bond — a quintessential spy with the wit of Oscar Wilde and the detective skills of Sherlock Holmes.»

— Bristol Evening Post (England)

«A breathless caper… Although it’s humbly subtitled A Bit of Fluff it far more resembles the kind of monster fur ball you’d find lurking beneath the bed in a seaside hotel… A stylishly published volume.»

— The Observer (London)

«Gatiss’s delight in this fast-paced pastiche is obvious, his tone slyly knowing, packed with puns as he fleshes out his harum-scarum plot with a host of brilliantly bizarre baddies and goodies. Yes the adventure is ridiculous, but it’s all the more decadently louche for it.»

— The Daily Mail (London)

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2004 by Mark Gatiss

Illustrations by Ian Bass

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.

Published by arrangement with Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.

SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN: 0-7432-9119-0

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For Ian

My love, my life

Huge thanks to Ian Bass, John Jarrold (who lit the first Lucifer), Clayton Hickman, Darren Nash and my editor Ben Ball — honorary English gentleman.

I HAVE always been an appalling judge of character. It is my most beguiling virtue.

What, then, did I make of the Honourable Everard Supple whose likeness I was conjuring on to canvas in my studio that sultry July evening?

He was an imposing cove of sixty-odd, built like a pugilist, who had made a fortune in the diamond mines of the Cape. His declining years, he’d told me during the second sitting — when a client begins to thaw a mite — were to be devoted entirely to pleasure, principally in the gaming houses of the warmer and naughtier parts of Europe. A portrait, in his opinion (and his absence), would be just the thing to hang over the vast baronial fireplace in the vast baronial hall he had recently lavished a hundred thou’ upon.

The Supples, it has to be said, were not amongst the oldest and most distinguished families in the realm. Only one generation back from the Honourable Everard had been the less than honourable Gerald who had prospered only tolerably in a manufactory of leather thumb-braces. Son and heir had done rather better for himself and now to add to the title (of sorts) and the fake coat of arms being busily prepared across town he had his new portrait. This, he told me with a wheezy chuckle, would convey the required air of old-world veracity. And if my painting were any good (that hurt ), perhaps I might even be interested in knocking up a few carefully aged canvases of his ancestors?