It is interesting how one book leads to another. Recently by
different routes I found myself immersed in Victorian England and in particular
the world of Victorian theatre. Just before Christmas the BBC showed “The
Invisible Woman”, a film depicting the relationship between a middle-aged
Charles Dickens and a young actress Ellen (Nelly) Ternan. It was based on a
biography of the same name by Claire Tomalin and having read her marvelous biography of Dickens I just had to read her life of Nelly Ternan. It did not
disappoint.
Which brings me to “Oscar Wilde and The Candlelight Murders”,
the first in a series of six novels by Giles Brandreth. Brandreth says, “What
makes Wilde particularly attractive as a character to write about is that he
was such a fascinating and engaging human being. What makes him particularly useful – and
credible – as a Victorian detective is that he had extraordinary access to all
types and conditions of men and women, from the most celebrated to society’s
outcasts, from the Prince of Wales to common prostitutes.” So, in The Candlelight
Murders Oscar Wilde has turned detective, taking on the mantle of Sherlock
Holmes who was just making his appearance in the stories of Wilde’s friend Arthur
Conan Doyle. Giles Brandreth has great fun playing with the Sherlock Homes
theme and gives Wilde his own Dr Watson in the shape of his friend and first
biographer Robert Sherard. Here’s part of the intro to the novel:
On the first page Wilde hurries to an appointment. He enters
a room expecting to meet someone but instead sees the naked body of young Billy
Wood, lying on the floor, illuminated by six candles and with his throat cut. Yet
when Wilde returns to the scene of the crime with Conan Doyle, the room is
completely empty and completely clean. Who murdered Billy Wood and why, are the
central mysteries of the novel? The police are strangely reluctant to pursue
the case; a vicious stepfather is an obvious suspect; who are the men who meet
at 23 Cowley St? Brandreth sets the puzzles early on and deftly merges the real,
yet fictitious Wilde with the wholly fictitious Holmes in this exchange:
The Candlelight Murders is an enjoyable romp through the
seedy Victorian underworld of rent boys and secret societies, heavily spiced
with Wildean wit and epigrams. Like all detective novels red herrings abound
and Wilde of course has worked out the main suspect while the reader is still
floundering among the fish. This is a highly readable and very enjoyable
story but despite the evocation of Wilde’s wit and the Sherlock Holmes persona not
in the top tier of detective fiction.
Giles Brandreth has been obsessed with Wilde since he was
young and he says: “One hundred and seven years after his death, I am still
having fun in his company and if you read Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders,
I hope you will, too. As Oscar once
said, ‘There is nothing quite like an unexpected death for lifting the
spirits.’”
Interview with Giles Brandreth
Writer, broadcaster, former MP and government whip, Gyles
Brandreth , makes his first foray into
detective fiction with OSCAR WILDE AND
THE CANDLELIGHT MURDERS , published by John Murray on 10 May 2007. The novel is the first in a series of
Victorian murder mysteries by Brandreth , each of them featuring Oscar Wilde as
the detective.
How did it come about?
Gyles Brandreth explains:
It’s a long story, so I will try to keep it short.
Since I was a boy, I have been an avid admirer of both the
works of Oscar Wilde and the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. (At school, my best friend was the actor,
Simon Cadell. He starred in my school
production of A Study in Sherlock.
Jeremy Brett was brilliant as Holmes, I grant you. But for me, Simon, aged twelve, was
definitive!)
Anyway . . . about ten years ago, in the late 1990s, by
chance, I picked up a copy of Memories and Adventures, the autobiography of
Arthur Conan Doyle, published by John Murray in 1924, and discovered, on page
94, that Arthur Conan Doyle and Oscar Wilde were friends. I was amazed.
It would be hard to imagine an odder couple.
They met in 1889, at the newly-built Langham Hotel in
Portland Place. They were brought
together by an American publisher, J M Stoddart, who happened to be in London
commissioning material for Lippincott’s Magazine. Evidently, Oscar, then 35, was on song that
night and Conan Doyle, 30, was impressed – and charmed. The upshot of the evening was that Mr
Stoddart got to publish both Arthur Conan Doyle’s second Sherlock Holmes story,
The Sign of Four, and Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and I
was inspired to write the first of ‘The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries’.
My story begins on the afternoon of the day of Wilde and
Conan Doyle’s first encounter. Oscar
calls on a house in Cowley Street, Westminster, expecting to meet up with a
friend – a female friend, as it happens, a young actress . . . Instead, in a darkened upstairs room,
fragrant with incense, he discovers the naked body of a boy of sixteen, his
throat cut from ear to ear.
Wilde, established poet and wit, ‘the champion of
aestheticism’, (and happily married to Constance and living in Tite Street,
Chelsea, with their two sons), turns to Conan Doyle, doctor and writer of
detective fiction, ‘the coming man’ (still practising as a general practitioner
in Southsea), for help - but Conan Doyle quickly discovers that when it comes
to the art and craft of amateur sleuthing Oscar Wilde has very little to learn
from Sherlock Holmes. Wilde is
overweight and apparently indolent (more Mycroft than Sherlock Holmes), but his
mind is amazing: his intellect is as sharp as his wit. Oscar Wilde, in his own way, is as brilliant
as Sherlock Holmes - and just as Holmes had his weakness for cocaine, Wilde has
his weaknesses, too.
Famously, Wilde was a brilliant conversationalist. He was, also, by every account, a careful
listener and an acute observer. And he
had a poet’s eye. He observed: he
listened: he reflected: and then – with his extraordinary gifts of imagination
and intellect – he saw the truth . . .
What makes Wilde particularly attractive as a character to write about
is that he was such a fascinating and engaging human being. What makes him particularly useful – and
credible – as a Victorian detective is that he ad extraordinary access to all
types and conditions of men and women, from the most celebrated to society’s
outcasts, from the Prince of Wales to common prostitutes.
Dr Arthur Conan Doyle is central to Oscar Wilde and the
Candlelight Murders – as he will be to the sequels in the series – but, in my
book, he is not Wilde’s Dr Watson. That
role falls to one Robert Sherard, a journalist, poet, ladies’ man, and Wilde’s
first, most frequent and most loyal biographer.
Sherard first met Wilde in 1882 in Paris and, throughout their
friendship, which lasted until Wilde’s death in 1900, kept a detailed journal
of their time together.
Oscar Wilde – dandy, detective, playwright, and, eventually,
convicted corrupter of young men - died at about 1.45 pm on 30 November 1900 in
a small, dingy first floor room at L’Hotel d’Alsace, 13 rue des Beaux-Arts,
Paris. He was just 46. Exactly one hundred years later, in the same
hotel, in the same bedroom (now expensively refurbished), a band of devotees -
twenty or so of us: English, Irish, French, American - gathered to honour the
man whose greatest play, according to Frank Harris, was his own life: ‘a five
act tragedy with Greek implications, and he was its most ardent spectator.’
It was at 1.45 pm on that Thursday afternoon in Paris that I
decided I wanted to write ‘The Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries’. It was a memorable occasion. An Anglo-Catholic clergyman - a Canon of
Christ Church, Oxford: he was tall and blond, called Beau and came from
Cincinatti: Oscar would have approved - lit a candle and led us in prayer. There was a minute’s silence and some tears
and, later, as we toasted the shade of the great man in champagne (absinthe is
now outlawed in France), much laughter.
We gazed in wonder at the huge turquoise peacocks decorating the wall
above the bed and recalled Oscar’s last recorded quip: ‘My wallpaper and I are
fighting a duel to the death. One or
other of us has to go.’
Oscar Wilde has been a figure of fascination to me for as
long as I can remember. I was born in
1948 in Germany, where, in the aftermath of the Second World War, my father was
serving as a legal officer with the Allied Control Commission. He counted among his colleagues, H Montgomery
Hyde, who, in 1948, published the first full account of the trials of Oscar
Wilde. It was the first non-fiction book
I ever read! (In 1974, at the Oxford
Theatre Festival, I produced the first stage version of The Trials of Oscar
Wilde, with Tom Baker as Wilde, and, in 2000, I edited the transcripts of the
trials for an audio production starring Martin Jarvis.) In 1961, when I was thirteen, I was given the
Complete Works of Oscar Wilde and read them from cover to cover - yes, all
1,118 pages. I can’t have understood
much, but I relished the language and learnt by heart his Phrases and
Philosophies for the Use of the Young – eg: ‘Wickedness is a myth invented by
good people to account for the curious attractiveness of others.’
As a child I felt close to Oscar for another reason. I was a pupil at Bedales School, where, in
1895, Cyril, the older of the Wildes’ two sons, had been at school. The founder of Bedales, John Badley, was a
friend of Wilde’s, and was still alive and living in the school grounds when I
was a boy. Mr Badley told me (in 1965,
at around the time of his hundredth birthday) that he believed much of Oscar’s
wit was ‘studied’. He recalled staying
at a house party in Cambridge with Oscar and travelling back with him to London
by train. Assorted fellow guests came to
the station to see them on their way. At
the moment the train was due to pull out, Wilde delivered a valedictory quip,
then the guard blew the whistle and waved his green flag, the admirers on the
platform cheered, Wilde sank back into his seat and the train moved off. Unfortunately, it only moved a yard or two
before juddering to a halt. The group on
the platform gathered again outside the compartment occupied by Wilde and
Badley. Oscar hid behind his newspaper
and hissed at his companion, ‘They’ve had my parting shot. I only prepared one.’
When I told this story to the actor, Sir Donald Sinden, he
volunteered that, in the 1940s, when he knew him, Lord Alfred Douglas had told
him, too, that much of Oscar Wilde’s spontaneous wit was carefully worked out
in advance. Never mind how he did it -
he did it. Bernard Shaw said, ‘He was
incomparably the greatest talker of his time - perhaps of all time.’
John Badley told me, ‘Oscar Wilde could listen as well as
talk. He put himself out to be
entertaining. You know, he said,
“Murder is always a mistake. One should never
do anything that one cannot talk about after dinner.” He was a delightful person, charming and
brilliant, with the most perfect manners of any man I ever met. Because of his imprisonment and disgrace he
is seen nowadays as a tragic figure.
That should not be his lasting memorial.
I knew him quite well. He was
such fun.’
One hundred and seven years after his death, I am still
having fun in his company and if you read Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders
I hope you will, too. As Oscar once
said, ‘There is nothing quite like an unexpected death for lifting the spirits.’
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