Kim Newman - The Man from the Diogenes Club

[andydecker]

Kim Newman – The Man from the Diogenes Club (MonkeyBrain Books, 2006, 387 pages)

Content:

End of the Pier Show (1997)
You Don't Have to Be Mad ... (1999)
Tomorrow Town (2000)
Egyptian Avenue (2002)
Soho Golem (2004)
The Serial Murders (2005)
The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train (2006)
Swellhead (2004)
Kim Newman - Notes
Kim Newman – Afterword

A decade later re-issued (and expanded) by Titan Books, this is the first of three collections with the Diogenes Club stories. The Diogenes Club was created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes and later developed by other writers as a secret service beyond the other secret services. Nowadays there are countless versions of this, as are of Mycroft Holmes. Who is featured now and then in the pre-WWII stories of the Club's exploits.

As Newman uses a lot of his characters in different alternate settings, you have slightly different versions of some of the characters of the Anno Dracula novels like Charles Beauregard or the vampire girl Geneviéve in the spotlight here.

The stories here feature the 1970s and hero Richard Jeperson - an amalgam of John Steed and Jason King - and his trusty and mysterious assistant Vanessa. (Vulnavia was otherwise occupied.) There is some cross-over from the Dr. Shade universe and the usual pop culture kitchen sink approach in the stories. As Newman explains in his informative afterword, Jeperson is among the characters he created as a young lad but at the time never became publishable. This is one of those afterwords which I guess is made for Vault dwellers:

Also, the racks at W. H. Smith's were loaded with 30p-a-throw paperbacks mingling mystery and the occult, often with a vaguely counterculture tinge and inder 120 pages: Robert Lory's Dracula series (which began, like Richard Jeperson, with an installment called Dracula Returns), Frank Lauria's books about Owen Orient (Doctor Orient, Lady Sativa), Philip José Farmer's racy Image of the Beast and Blown, Peter Saxon's Guardian series [ ... ] anthologies edited by Michel Parry and Peter Haining, Demons by Daylight  by Ramsey Campbell. [...]  These were the things I read in the 1970s ...

Due to the changing times the notes are helpful in giving context. Terms like get yer hair cut will be as exotic to modern audiances as some of the monsters presented here.

[dem bones]

Kim Newman - The Man From the Diogenes Club (Titan, 2017)

End of the Pier Show
Moon Moon Moon
You Don't Have to Be Mad ...
Tomorrow Town
Egyptian Avenue
Soho Golem
The Serial Murders
Cold Snap
The Man Who Got Off the Ghost Train
Swellhead

Glossary
Afterword
Acknowledgements

Blurb:
CAN'T ELIMINATE THE IMPOSSIBLE? Send for the man from the Diogenes Club!
The debonair psychic investigator Richard Jeperson is the Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club, the least-known and most essential branch of British Intelligence. While foiling the plot of many a maniacal mastermind, he is chased by sentient snowmen and Nazi zombies, investigates an unearthly murderer stalking the sex shops of 1970s Soho, and battles a poltergeist to prevent it triggering nuclear Armageddon. But as a new century dawns, can he save the ailing Diogenes Club itself from a force more diabolical still?

Newman's ten mischievous tales, with cameos from the much-loved characters of the Anno Dracula universe, will entertain fans and newcomers alike.

That expanded version. I recognise some from various Stephen Jones' Year's Best Horror, and Egyptian Avenue is in Paula Guran's Mammoth Book of Mummies. Not sure I can take 700+ pages of Richard Jeperson and the threat of "much-loved" characters from the Dracu-verse bodes dire, but have made a start on The Soho Golem regardless — the lure of bloody murder and anti-porn riots on Old Compton Street during the early 'seventies being too powerful to resist.

[dem bones]

Soho Golem: (Ellen Datlow [ed.], Sci Fiction, 13 Oct. 2004). London W1, circa 1973. A killer dubbed 'Mr. Sludge' stalks Old Compton Street & environs, forming from thin air to tear apart porno barons and bent coppers, the latest and most high profile victim to date being D.I. Brian 'Boot Boy' Booth of the Obscene Publications Squad. His business done, the man of slurry simply fades out onto the astral — until next time. Scotland Yard hopelessly baffled. Another case for the Diogenes Club, specifically Richard Jeperson, Britain's most psychedelic psychic detective!
In the course of the investigation, Jeperson and - especially - DI Fred Regent (straight man sidekick) befriend Zarana 'Queen of the Nile' Roberts, a stripping snake-dancer and sometime glamour model. These three are soon thrown into conflict with Soho Porn Barons, Scotland Yard bung-takers, twitchy types in stained raincoats, and a militant anti-filth pressure group, the Festival of Morality, fronted by Algernon Arbuthnot Leaves, Lord of Leng, whose night rallies versus "Sin and sodomy, lust and lechery" (it's not a government initiative) successfully distract from his Lordship's hard core porno & blackmail racket.
Jeperson establishes that the main players in the drama, living or recently dismembered, were close acquaintances of the enigmatic 'Pony-tail,' film starlet and jazz mag icon, whose mysterious disappearance ten years ago is yet to be resolved.

It's a Newman novella, pop culture reference overkill mandatory, and this time around they've a high camp-sleaze factor (I would give much for a copy of Lesley Behan's Confessions of a Psychic Investigator, very much the book Timothy Lea's Confessions from a Haunted House should have been), and the dénouement fits. Turns out the man of slurry is the reanimated remnants of a former wrestler so insanely besotted with Pony-tail, he didn't even mind that she persuaded Mr. Big to have him buried beneath a flyover.


Read for yourself on JohnnyAlucard.com.

[dem bones]

The Serial Murders: (SciFiction, Oct. 2005). Jeperson, Vanessa, and Fred Regent confront the curse of The Northern Barstows, a dire TV soap set in rural-industrial Bleeds, Northshire, whose darker storylines trigger copycat murders even as they are broadcast. The show's influence is evident in a mass throat-slashing spree on the stock exchange; a 'locked room' mystery involving a minister and his secretary; the suspicious death of a gangland Mrs. Big who choked on a fishbone; and now, to the delight of the News of the World and the Daily Comet, the outrageous demise of champion jockey James Hepplethwaite, whose girlfriend, top model Ms. Della Devyne, saddled him up, dug in her spurs, and galloped him to death. In the face of conclusive evidence to the contrary, Jeperson insists Della is not responsible for lover-boy's death. Someone at Haslemere Studios is practising a deadly Black Magic!

The Diogenes club main man counsels Ms. Deyne; "Say that Jamie forced you to ride him, begged you not to stop. It was a sexy game that went to far." She does, and is almost trampled underfoot in the media frenzy to buy her story.

Knowing nothing of The Northern Barstows — he refuses to watch commercial television for fear of exposure to subliminal messages — Jeperson recruits Prof. Barbara Corri, a glam Uni lecturer who taught a course on the show at Brighton. Her familiarity with the history of all things 'Northshire' proves invaluable.

Fred Regent arrives at the studio to do the crucial everyday detective spadework. Vanessa - or "Victoria 'lovely legs' Plant" - joins the soap as a second Priscilla Hopkins (the actress who originally played her left when the character was written out). Vanessa's Priscilla, who bears no physical resemblance to her predecessor, has returned to Northshire to take revenge on the family matriarch, Mavis Barstow, played by the equally formidable June O'Dell, who co-runs the production company with ex-husband, Marcus Squiers. Also batting on Jeperson's team, Maria-Lou the wardrobe mistress and publicity agent Lionel Dikes, a bogus ultra-camp homosexual ("Can't get a job in telly PR unless you're bent as a twelve-bob note. 'sides, I like the frocks.") .

Aware the Diogenes Club are closing in, the death-dealer speed-writes two new characters into the show - a ghost-hunter and an attractive female academic who will die horribly in the following episode!