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Vesuvius Club

Vesuvius Club
Vesuvius Club
By Mark Gatiss
This edition: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
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Description

Meet Lucifer Box: Equal parts James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, with a twist of Monty Python and a dash of Austin Powers, Lucifer has a charming countenance and rapier wit that make him the guest all hostesses must have. And most do.

But few of his conquests know that Lucifer is also His Majesty's most daring secret agent, at home in both London's Imperial grandeur and in its underworld of despicable vice. So when Britain's most prominent scientists begin turning up dead, there is only one man his country can turn to for help.

Following a dinnertime assassination, Lucifer is dispatched to uncover the whereabouts of missing agent Jocelyn Poop. Along the way he will give art lessons, be attacked by a poisonous centipede, bed a few choice specimens, and travel to Italy on business and pleasure. Aided by his henchwoman Delilah; the beautiful, mysterious, and Dutch Miss Bella Pok; his boss, a dwarf who takes meetings in a lavatory; grizzled vulcanologist Emmanuel Quibble; and the impertinent, delicious, right-hand-boy Charlie Jackpot, Lucifer Box deduces and seduces his way from his elegant townhouse at Number 9 Downing Street (somebody has to live there) to the ruined city of Pompeii, to infiltrate a highly dangerous secret society that may hold the fate of the world in its clawlike grip--the Vesuvius Club.

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Chapter 1
'The most delicious, depraved, inventive, macabre and hilarious literary debut I can think of. In the appallingly appealing Lucifer Box, Mark Gatiss has created an anti-hero for the ages. Watching the number of chapters, then pages, dwindle was heart-rending...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. More, I want more!'

Stephen Fry

'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 demi-monde, 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. A dandy and a bounder, 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'

GUARDIAN

'A breathless caper set in Edwardian London. 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...but beneath all the fuzz lies a genuine darkness'

THE OBSERVER

'With its quaint dust jacket and Beardsley-inspired illustrations, the book feels like a visitor from a more elegant era . . . Giddily inventive and packed with delirious incident, it suggests a post-modern project comparable to Michel Faber's pseudo-Dickensian 'The Crimson Petal and the White'. It is easy to imagine Oscar Wilde, on a chaise longue, smoking an absurdly expensive cigarette, reading THE VESUVIUS CLUB and laughing out loud at its playful decadence and wit. There can surely be no higher praise'

TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT.

'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

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

THE TIMES

'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

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

-- Heat magazine (UK)

"In the appallingly appealing Lucifer Box, Mark Gatiss has created an anti-hero for the ages. Watching the number of chapters, then pages, dwindle, was heart-rending. 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 (UK)

"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' 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' 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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