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Sunday 28 July 2013

Oscar Wilde & the Candlelight Murders: Gyles Brandreth

I came upon this book while pursuing my favourite hobby to kill some spare time at my hand…browsing through a lovely bookstore, before settling for lunch at an adjoining café!! J

I am, like so many, fascinated with Oscar Wilde as a personality & will pick up anything that has his name inscribed upon it. So, I saw, this lovely cover art of fresh colours with Wilde’s name written upon it, which quite belied any cover art of any of the famous author’s own works, and picked it out of curiosity. The title & the book’s back cover synopsis suggested it to be a fictional murder mystery set in Wilde’s England, where Wilde steps out of his shoes as a celebrated author/poet/playwright & plays detective to unearth a murder along with his friends Arthur Conan Doyle & Robert Sherard!! The whole premise struck me as so outrageous & scandalous that I immediately picked it up to see what the book is all about.


It turned out to be a good experiment for sure. The author Brandreth has definitely studied the life of Wilde in great detail himself, and has thus taken a writer’s liberty at presenting him as a detective. It might seem outrageous in theory, but if you read a little bit about Wilde, you would surmise that the kind-hearted yet quirky soul that he was, he would definitely go through all motions in the book that Brandreth is making him go through.
To take you a little to the plot, Wilde, one fine day discovers the mutilated body of a young boy he knew very well. This propels him to investigate the case & discover the identity of the murderer, but is met with little help from police. The boy is poor & of low connections & does not interest police, who seems to be occupied with further important cases. Wilde takes it upon himself to solve the case with the help of none other than Arthur Conan Doyle (who can be better than the creator of Sherlock Holmes) & Robert Sherard (another author & poet at that time. A very close friend of Wilde in real life, and great grandson of Poet Laureate William Wordsworth, Sherard wrote five biographies on Wilde).

The novel is smart & has pace, yet takes full care to re-create the London of 1889 with significant detail. The London where Wilde, Conan Doyle and Sherard would sit in a posh café, drinking the best of champagne and eating lobsters for lunch discussing the plots of their new books & new characters that they pulled out of their imagination in such gatherings, and which would later become classics of World Literature!! This is interspersed continuously with the murder mystery as well. Brandreth has taken care to show Wilde not engaged in the case only but also writing his pieces of literature to make the story as realistic as possible. Wilde’s personal life has also been touched upon delicately & aptly; at the time of this novel (1889-90) his relationship with his wife Constance grows from affection to becoming more & more distant by the end, which was actually the case in Wilde’s real life. Even Conan Doyle’s marriage to his wife Touie & his own personal life has been touched delicately to maintain an aura of reality to the plot setting.
In its intent, Candlelight Murders (written in 2007) might seem a fun read, but from Brandreth’s point of view as an author, it was indeed a tough task. A little less detailing and the book might have slipped into absurdity. Maintaining a whodunit pace while maintaining realism in the lives of its focal characters (as they are not fictional, but real and celebrated)...yet not detailing too much of their real life wherein the focus might get lost from the main plot was a tall order & Brandreth succeeded in this. A few chapters lesser & this would be a perfect read.

Still, I would recommend this book for a fun time pass. The author has written a series of Oscar Wilde Murder Mystery books,that have fared equally well. Pick them up at your nearest bookstore or simply flipkart them.

TIP: Pick it up on a weekday, post coming back from work. The freshness of the book will appeal more J

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