In The Black Butterfly, Queen Elizabeth II has just come to the throne and Lucifer Box is being shoved off his as he has retirement foisted upon him.  In spite of this, he finds himself compelled to investigate when perfectly sensible public figures start dying in reckless accidents.  Who is the mysterious Kingdom Kum?  And who or what is the Black Butterfly?  But someone does not want him to find out.

As each book in this trilogy is set in a different era, Lucifer Box naturally ages as the books progress.  I love the idea of  the aging spy, and seeing how he adapts and changes with time.  However, in practice I didn’t really think it worked.  Although Lucifer complains about his reduced capacity for action, there seemed to be no material difference between his abilities in this book and the earlier ones.  The only difference is that he’s more curmudgeonly about it all.  The sharp wit that I loved so much in the first book was sadly lacklustre in The Black Butterfly.

The plot was as amusingly ridiculous as I have come to expect from a Lucifer Box story.  In particular, I thought that the link to the Boy Scouts was wonderful and really humorous.  However, the primary attraction of this series to me is the central character and I found him diminished in this novel, so consequently my enjoyment was also diminished.  At just over 200 pages long, I don’t feel the time spent reading it was time wasted as it was mildly entertaining.  However, it’s definitely my least favourite of the series and I’m quite glad it’s come to an end.

Black Butterfly by Mark Gatiss.  Published by Pocket Books, 2009, pp. 204.  Originally published in 2008.

I was hugely disappointed with this book. I enjoyed its predecessor ‘The Vesuvius Club’ so much that I raced through it in a day and went straight onto the second in the series. Unfortunately it suffers by comparison. A lot.

What made the first book such a good read was the dry humour of the narrative style and the characterisation of the delightfully bad Lucifer Box, but both of these key features were decidedly patchy in ‘The Devil in Amber’. It has moments of brilliance (who could fail to be drawn in by the fantastic opening line, ‘He was an American, so it seemed only fair to shoot him’?) but these are well-hidden among standard dross. Mark Gatiss seems to do a lot more telling the reader what was happening than letting us see it coloured through Lucifer’s disdainful perspective. It was like reading a book written to be made into a film rather than read and appreciated as a novel. It remains a fun read, but I sincerely hope that the third installment lives up to the standards of the first book and not the second.

The Devil in Amber by Mark Gatiss.  Published by Pocket Books, 2006, pp. 248.  Originally published in 2006.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.

Meet Lucifer Box: Equal parts James Bond and Sherlock Holmes, with a twist of Monty Python and a dash of Austin Powers, Lucifer has a charming countenance and rapier wit that make him the guest all hostesses must have. And most do.  But few of his conquests know that Lucifer is also His Majesty’s most daring secret agent, at home in both London’s Imperial grandeur and in its underworld of despicable vice. So when Britain’s most prominent scientists begin turning up dead, there is only one man his country can turn to for help.  (Goodreads Summary)

I liked everything about this book, from the bizarre but neatly self-contained plot to the delightfully improbable character names. Lucifer Box is an enjoyably depraved anti-hero with the louche, disaffected air of one of Oscar Wilde’s creations. His wry first person narrative style was amusing and easy to read, so I sped through this book in less than a day. The book was missing the final sparkle and wit of Wilde’s writing, but it seems unfair to criticise one author for not being enough like another, and this did not detract from what was a thoroughly entertaining mystery.

The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss.  Published by Pocket Books, 2005, pp. 240.  Originally published in 2004.

N.B. This is an old review written in 2010 and posted on Goodreads and LibraryThing before I started keeping track of all the books I read here at Old English Rose Reads.  I’ve decided to keep copies here so that this remains a complete record of my reading since I started reviewing books for my own pleasure.