THE OSCAR WILDE MYSTERIES BY GYLES BRANDRETH

Who needs Twitter troll psychopaths? When viciously abused, words are lethal weapons, so no wonder the pre—web phrase ‘poison pen letters’ arose!

 

Ah, but sensitively deployed, words can spark passion, desire, and – most beguilingly – mystery, the promise of pleasures yet to come. After all, what terminal romantic doesn’t fall for sweet, seductive speech?

So, it’s doubly satisfying, then, that Oscar Wilde – a self-proclaimed ‘Lord Of Language’ – has been co-opted as a fictional detective in an ongoing series of novels by the unbelievably silken-voiced royal correspondent, TV presenter and occasional drag performer, Gyles Brandreth.

Marrying Stephen Fry erudition to an urbane flamboyance, Brandreth’s arguably the ideal choice to re-imagine Wilde in the vein of Guy Ritchie’s quirky Sherlock Holmes franchise, though mercifully, lacking the pantomime dame idiocies.

Instead, what unfolds through the series is a taut, thrilling, pre-prosecution Wilde at the height of his aesthetic and hypothetical powers, a man so tuned to London’s social nuances that the slightest, suspicious aberration draws his rapt, unfailing analysis.

Better yet, each novel’s leavened with neo-Wildean bon mots and epigrams that read as if freshly dripped from the tongue of the master himself. It’s mental mimicry par excellence, on a par with Wilde contemporary Robert Hitchens’ verbatim, near-libellous fictionalisation of Oscar in his landmark, 1890s novel, The Green Carnation.

And the eerie coincidences get spookier still – Brandreth just happens to be playing Lady Bracknell in a musical version of The Importance Of Being Earnest, now running at Hammersmith’s Riverside Studios until December 30th. Now normally, of course – especially remembering Section 28 – I’d find the very concept of a Tory MP exploiting the legacy of legendary socialist Oscar repellent, but – just this once – I’ll overlook privileged bigotry for the sake of Brandreth’s glorious, aesthetic brio. After all, didn’t Oscar himself state that ‘all art is immoral’ in the opening epigrams of Dorian Gray?

Exactly. So why quibble with the master? Brandreth’s simply grabbing the immoral ball with brilliantly perverse success.

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