Review: The Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth

Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders by Gyles Brandreth

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Published in the US as 'Oscar Wilde and a Death Of No Importance', this is the first of Gyles Brandreth's 'Oscar Wilde Mysteries', and I liked it enough to want to read the second. For one thing, Brandreth has Wilde's conversation and mannerisms down to the T; for another, it celebrates the real-life unlikely friendship between Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, and that's right up my street!

The mystery surrounds the murder of a young rent boy, and the narrator is another of Wilde's real-life friends, Robert Sherard, who wrote several biographies of Oscar during the first half of the 20th century. Sherard himself doesn't come across as particularly likeable – he's a womaniser and a dimwit, and plays a very poor 'Watson' to Wilde's 'Holmes' – but he tells the story at a good pace, with an authentic late 19th century voice and with enough twists and turns and red herrings to satisfy. Conan Doyle appears only sporadically, but is sympathetically portrayed, modest about the success of his first Holmes story, 'A Study In Scarlet', and as kindly and tolerant as he reportedly was in real life.

But, but, but. There are two glaring problems. Firstly, Oscar just doesn't fit the role of an eagle-eyed, Holmes-like detective any more than Sherard fits the role of Watson (unless it's a bumbling, knuckle-headed Nigel Bruce-type Watson). You can't suddenly endow a literary, fantasy-prone, truth-embellishing, social butterfly with Holmes' encyclopaedic memory for facts, microscopic powers of observation and lightning deductive skills and expect the reader to swallow it whole. Brandreth does seem to realise this, and has Doyle make his new friend the model for Mycroft, but Oscar Wilde, super-sleuth, just doesn't do it for me.

No more does Oscar Wilde the ladies' man. Yes, he was absolutely charming, gallant and easy with the opposite sex, but Brandreth here presents him as a lover of women, devoted to his wife Constance and only aesthetically interested in young men. Again and again, he has Oscar praise the delights of heterosexual love, and the charms of womankind; again and again, he has Sherard insist that even though his friend may, 'on occasion, in moments of weakness, in the privacy of a darkened room ... succumbed to the sins of the flesh', his aesthetic appreciation of the masculine form was misunderstood at his trial and has been misrepresented ever since. It's such an extraordinary re-writing of Wilde's character that I'm left wondering just what the agenda is here.

But maybe as the series progresses, and Bosie Douglas enters stage left, things will change – if nothing else, I'm curious to see what Brandreth (or Brandreth's Sherard) makes of that particular relationship! So because of the good story, because of the meticulous period detail, and because I could genuinely hear Oscar's voice, if not recognise his character, in these pages, it's three stars from me, and a promise to read more.



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