Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile, 3: A Mystery

Following his American tour (see OSCAR WILDE AND A GAME CALLED MURDER).Wilde sails home to England on the SS Bothnia in December 1892; musing that he still is all style and substance though solving a homicide does add luster. On board with the playwright is the French acting troupe, La Compagnie La Grange. In Liverpool, customs officer find a dead poodle inside a trunk filled with dirt that Wilde thought were books. Soon afterward on the way to Paris, members of the troupe become victims of a serial killer with an obvious grudge or perhaps that person disdain Hamlet. Wilde and his companion journalist Robert Sherard investigate La Compagnie La Grange in order to uncover the identity of the murderer. The third Oscar Wilde mystery (see OSCAR WILDE AND A DEATH OF NO IMPORTANCE) is a fabulous late Victorian whodunit with several neat plot devices including the star sending the mystery to Doyle in 1890. The story line is fast-paced from the moment Wilde meets the actors and never slows down. With Sherard, who was a real friend of the author and his biographer, adding realism to the mix, Gyles Brandreth provides a superb entertaining historical murder mystery. Harriet Klausner

This was an intensely enjoyable book. Not only is it a mystery murder but it brings Oscar Wilde to life in such a real way. It begins with Wilde's tour of America and the interesting persons he meets along the way, i.e., P.T. Barnum and Jumbo the Elephant, not to mention the sharpshooter Eddie Garstrang. But the action really begins on Wilde's return trip to England where he meets and becomes friends with the theatre family, the La Granges. First there is the death of Maman La Grange's pet poodle and then while Oscar is in Paris translating Shakespeare's Hamlet, Monsieur La Grange's dresser is found dead in his dressing room. Meanwhile Oscar Wilde and his friend Robert Sherard are busying partying and carousing Paris, meeting more interesting and intriguing persons while trying to figure out what exactly is going on with the La Grange theatre family. Wilde and Sherard become friends with the actress Sarah Bernhardt and attend many of her parties. There they meet the painter Jacques-Emile Blanche and the poet Maurice Rollinat. It is a decadent time in France and Wilde and Sherard join in on all the fun but spend the majority of their time at the theatre with the actors. To solve the crimes and unravel the mystery, Wilde risks his life. This is an amazing book which I highly recommend.

Having greatly enjoyed Louis Bayard's "The Pale Blue Eye" (featuring Poe as a detective during a mystery at West Point) I thought it might be enjoyable to read a similar book featuring Oscar Wilde. The layout of this book is much like a Sherlock Holmes mystery: Wilde and his Watsonian sidekick, Robert Sherard, are dining at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum with, in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle. They discuss a murder mystery that Oscar was instrumental in solving a few years previously, and at Wilde's behest, Sherard gives Conan Doyle a copy of a manuscript about that mystery. The main section of the book is the mystery, written from Sherard's point of view, and the epilogue is the recap of the mystery at another dinner with Conan Doyle. The book has a fairly slow start. It seemed like the author was simply plugging the narrative with every Oscar Wilde quote I ever heard, but setting it in a scenario appropriate to the context of the quote. La Grange's description is very crudely done: a lot of blunt sentences starting with "He was" or "He looked" or "He had." Very awkward to read. However, once we get to the point where Wilde is in Paris, things start to even out, and the book is quite good from that point on. I did stay up late to finish it. There is one big glaring thing that confuses me, though. During Wilde & Sherard's recap with Conan Doyle at the end of the book, they discuss the murders that took place. One of these took place on the boat coming back from America. Wilde emphasizes that a set of four murders had been planned, after which point all the killing would be finished. (We had learned about this "set of four murders" much earlier in the book, but here he recapitulates for the benefit of Conan Doyle.) However, at this point of the story when the first murder is committed, before the boat docks in England, there is not yet a motive for any of the three future deaths. The criminal mastermind has no reason to kill until much later in the book. So are we to believe that the mastermind simply wanted a set of four arbitrary deaths, just to show off, and that conveniently, this person later learns that there are people nearby who need to be killed? I may reread it tonight to see if I misunderstood that part, but it seems to me that is a pretty glaring mistake. Otherwise, this story hews very closely to the format used by Bayard, where the famous person and his non-famous sidekick work out the mystery to the gratification of the local authorities, and then in a closing chapter the famous person turns the explanation around and shows that it actually happened differently. I really hated this when Bayard did it, but it doesn't bother me in this book, and I don't know why that is. The book was a satisfying read, and by the second third of the book I was quite content with its narrative and progression. There was a little bit too much about Sherard's personal life, which was slightly detrimental to the story, but these sections

Murder mysteries are not usually my favorite books, but I ordered _Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile_ because I love the works of Oscar Wilde. Gyles Brandreth does a superb job of using Wilde as a character; the authentic Wilde urbanity, charm, and kindness permeate every page. Although I recognized some of the classic witticisms, they are worth reading again. The incidents are believable and for readers who know something about Wilde's life and works, meaningful. For example, there's an incident regarding a bag with dubious contents deposited at Victoria Station, and Wilde visits a prisoner in Reading Gaol. Historical characters other than Wilde include Sarah Bernhardt and Arthur Conan Doyle. Brandreth also does a superb job of conveying a late Victorian atmosphere, and his language contains no jarring modernisms. He's clearly done ample research. Unlike many murder mysteries, the emphasis, especially in the beginning, is on events unrelated to crime or detection, and the narrative exudes a pleasant sense of leisure. The first murder does not occur till the end of the third chapter. As in many murder mysteries, the victim is someone everyone hates--a highly obnoxious little dog. The dog belongs to the matriarch of the La Grange acting family, who are returning from America to France. Oscar Wilde is accompanying them to do an English-to-French translation of "Hamlet" for their upcoming performance. Oscar's curiosity is aroused by the dog's death, but it's hard to tell how serious Oscar really is. After the La Granges return to the Paris theatre they own, the plot becomes increasingly Shakespearean (or Websterean). Aided by his friend and narrator Robert Sherard, Oscar unobtrusively but intelligently pursues a series of peculiar and often violent occurrences related to the La Granges until all the mysteries are unfolded. I'll be buying the two previous Oscar Wilde mysteries, and any future ones that are published.

I initially found the fact that this "mystery" is 369 pages rather daunting, but it's highly readable, and quickly drew me into it: a hundred pages had passed before I realized it! It gives you a vivid picture of what Paris was like during la décadence, along with an entertaining semi-fictionalized treatment of Wilde's 1882 American tour. As is typical in books like this, the murder mystery plot is really just an excuse (though I found it clever, if a bit far-fetched). The book is really about what it would be like to have a wit like Oscar Wilde as a friend, and what life was like in the circles he moved in. There are two earlier books in the same series (it's coming out at six-month intervals) which I missed, and which I plan to read as soon as I can. Brandreth is a Wilde student, and a student of the period, and he certainly has it down cold. He sometimes seems to be challenging his reader to say "hey, that's an anachronism." He makes half a dozen references to Lucky Strike cigarettes, for example, but a little research shows that they were indeed popular in the period. If Brandreth made any slipups, I couldn't catch them. Surprisingly, Wilde's homosexuality isn't mentioned at all, except for a couple of vague hints. The reason is that the story is told through the eyes of Wilde's friend Robert Sherard, a real person, best known for his later Wilde biography which soft-pedals this aspect of Wilde's life (astonishingly, Sherard claimed to be ignorant of it until the scandal broke in 1895). This is the third of nine (!) books promised in this series, and I look forward to seeing what happens in the later books when Oscar starts feasting with panthers.