A little while ago, I reviewed
“Angels of Music”, also by Kim Newman, now I want to follow it up with yet
another book not obviously connected to Newman’s well-known “Anno Dracula”
series. “The Man from the Diogenes Club” is, naturally, not about a guy who
spends all his time at a club for, as Sherlock Holmes told us, ‘the unclubables.’
In this series, as in “Angels of Music” and, presumably, also in “Anno Dracula”,
the Diogenes Club is more than just a place where men can go to escape their wives.
Most of “The Man from
the Diogenes Club” takes part in the 1970s (all except for the last two
stories, the first of which has a frame in the 80s and is set in the 60s, while
the last of the book is set in 2004) and captures the era quite well (although
I was grateful for the glossary in the back listing the specific British and/or
1970s expressions).
While former ‘Most
Valued Members’ of the club are mentioned, main character of the stories
collected in the book is Richard Jeperson, ‘Most Valued Member’ aka ‘main agent’
of the club at that time. Most people working for the Diogenes are Talents -
people with specific metal or physical skills. Jeperson is an empath and a very
strong one at that who can sense other people’s emotions and past emotions
stuffed into a place. He’s also a man with a big hole in his past: freed in
1945 from a concentration camp as a small boy, he has no memories of before
that day. He was raised by a member of the Diogenes and joined the club as a
young man (his first big adventure is recounted in “The Man who got off the
Ghost Train”, the story with the framing device I mentioned above). By the time
we as the audience join him for the first time, he is established and we are
introduced to him and the club by another character: Fred Regent, a young
policeman who was almost killed by something not of this world.
“The Man from the
Diogenes Club” doesn’t even pretend to be anything else but a collection of
well-told pulp stories. The adventures Richard and his colleagues go through
are weird to say the least (ghosties and ghoulies and long-legged beasties
absolutely exist in this reality). That, however, is what makes the book so
enjoyable. The 1970s backdrop with its wild colour schemes and clothing styles
(Richard is an absolute fashion addict and Newman takes the time to tell us
what he’s wearing at any given time, too) fits very well with the wild variety
of supernatural occurrences the reader is introduced to.
No story is like the
one before it, there’s no clear scheme or formula used, which makes the stories
all the better. While it’s relatively sure that Richard will survive the
stories, given he’s the ‘Man from the Diogenes Club’ himself, it’s not always certain.
The last story brings Richard very, very close to death (albeit as an old man -
it’s set in 2004, after all, and Richard was around ten in 1945).
There are stories
about ghosts, there are stories about psychological training (brainwashing, to
a degree), there are stories about monsters. There are stories where the moon
is inhabitable as long as nobody lands on it (because then all stories about
the moon will be invalidated by hard facts). The book delivers a lot of
interesting reading material and it’s fun to spend a couple of hours with it,
reading through the stories, enjoying the weirdness and utter 1970s-ness.
“The Man from the
Diogenes Club” would fit well with 1970s TV series like “The Saint” or “The
Avengers” (Mr. Steed and Mrs. Peele, not the people from Marvel). As a matter
of fact, should the stories ever be adapted, I would really hope for them to be
adapted in this style. They would work out fabulously.
Is there anything
about the book I didn’t like? Well, not really. Sometimes, the stories seem a
little disjointed, but that’s not much of a surprise, given that most of them,
according to the notes at the beginning of the book, are reprints which have
been printed in magazines and suchlike first. The book wasn’t planned as a
book, it’s an anthology of stories written before and published in various
different media. That shows every now and then, but the style of the stories is
coherent and none of them denies something which happened in another, so they
can be read in this format, as an anthology of stories belonging together due
to their main character. They are surely less well connected than the five
stories in “Angels of Music”, but certainly just as well as the stories in “Moriarty:
The Hound of the D’Urbervilles”, one of my other favourites by Kim Newman, read
and reread over and over again.
Some days, you want a
long novel with a lot of plot twists, on other days, you just want to spend an
hour or so with a good story and enjoy that it’s more or less self-contained.
That’s why I also like some of the Johannes Cabal short stories so much - and
wish there was a way to get “The Ereskigal Working” as an e-book in addition to
the audio book.
It seems a little
weird that the author chose the Diogenes Club, a club mentioned for the first
time within the Sherlock Holmes canon and founded or co-founded by Holmes’
brother Mycroft, as the place from which the British government has all the
supernatural things investigated. Yet, just because Sherlock Holmes didn’t
believe in the supernatural doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist (after all, he also
didn’t care about the build of our solar system). Perhaps, Mycroft knew better.
Yet, the Diogenes Club
of the stories is not that Diogenes Club any longer - it has a woman on top,
which was far from usual in the 1970s, especially given the woman has been a
member for a long time. It employs women very much equally to men - because it
employs all agents according to their talents. The women we meet in the stories
are not helpless damsels waiting to be rescued, they can very well rescue
themselves and, sometimes, the main character alongside them. Even though I’m
not quite sure whether “The Man from the Diogenes Club” would pass the Bechdel-Wallace
test, it definitely doesn’t just give us the pretty lamp (aka the female love
interest with no ambitions or agency).
“The Man from the Diogenes Club” is a great book and a lot of fun to
read. You don’t even need to know any of Newman’s other books to enjoy it, I’m
sure. While characters know from other books are mentioned, they’re not
mentioned in a way which makes it necessary to have read about them before. If
you like pulpy stories and good adventure yarn, “The Man from the Diogenes Club”
will provide you with a few fun hours and, due to its anthology nature, you can
read the stories whenever you want.