The Vesuvius Club: A Lucifer Box Novel (BBC Radio Collection: Crimes and Thrillers)

by Mark Gatiss

An Extraordinary and Death-Defying Tour of Edwardian Low Life and High Society, accompanied by our host Lucifer Box Esq - artist, dandy, rake ... and lethal secret agent.

Lucifer Box is the darling of the Edwardian belle monde - society's most fashionable portrait painter is a wit, a dandy, a rake, the guest all hostesses (and not a few hosts) must have.

But few know that Lucifer Box is also His Majesty's most accomplished and daring secret agent. Beneath London's façade of Imperial grandeur and divine aesthetes seethes an underworld of crazed anarchists, murder, and despicable vice, and Box is at home in both.

And so of course when Britain's most prominent scientists begin turning up dead, there is only one man his country can turn to.

Lucifer Box ruthlessly deduces and seduces his way from his elegant townhouse at Number 9 Downing Street (all his father left him), to private stews of London and the seediest, most colourful back alleys of Italy, in search of the mighty secret society that may hold the fate of the world in its claw-like hands - the Vesuvius Club.

• ISBN10: 0743483790
• ISBN13: 9780743483797
• Publish Date: 4 July 2005 (first published 31 October 2004)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Imprint: Simon & Schuster
• Format: Paperback
• Pages: 256
• Language: English

Reviews

[wyvernfriend]

With some nods to some of the genre formulas in the Gentleman Adventurer, but in this case bringing the homosexual/bisexual subtext into some detail. This is Edwardian adventuring for the 21st Century and I don't know that it hasn't lost a certain amount in the transition. Lucifer Box lives in 9 Downing Street, is apparetnly an artist and dandy but is also a spy. Lucifer straddles that fine line between psychopath and patriot.

Full of nods to the genre and full detail of the period underworld it owes a firm debt to Alan Moore. However in parts it feels laboured and as if the writer had a cool idea that he couldn't not include so it was shoehorned in.

Honestly not someone's work I would hunt up but also not a book I regret reading.
The main character is very full of himself and certain that his place in the world is to be admired and loved. This is some of his charm and also a source of some of his errors.