Review: The Man from the Diogenes Club

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.