Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile: A Mystery (Oscar Wilde Mysteries) [Paperback]

Gyles Brandreth (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009 | Series: Oscar Wilde Mysteries

One of the shining stars of historical crime fiction returns with this eagerly anticipated addition to the series that Booklist hails as “pitch-perfect” and the Toronto Globe and Mail calls “a lot of fun.”

In Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile, the famous playwright and raconteur leaves England for a lecture tour in the United States, where he meets P.T. Barnum, sees Jumbo the Elephant, becomes involved in a saloon shoot out, and entertains Broadway’s brightest stars. But soon Wilde becomes entangled with the LaGrange acting dynasty, whom he befriends aboard an ocean liner. Things are not what they seem with this family, and Oscar’s shrewd curiosity may get the better of him as he investigates their hardships. Once the troupe arrives in Paris to perform Hamlet, the tragedies mount. As Oscar digs deeper into these seemingly random events, he will discover a horrifying secret…one which may bring him closer to his own last chapter than he could ever imagine. Gyles Brandreth has crafted another enchanting entertainment that is as intelligent as it is beguiling.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Oscar Wilde once again makes a convincing detective in Brandreth's excellent third whodunit to recreate the late Victorian age (after 2008's Oscar Wilde and a Game Called Murder). Framed as a puzzle posed by Wilde to his friend Arthur Conan Doyle in 1890, this adventure concerns a series of mysterious deaths plaguing a French acting troupe, the Compagnie La Grange, which Wilde encounters aboard ship in 1883. The first death is of a poodle, Marie Antoinette, whose body a customs officer in Liverpool unearths in a dirt-filled trunk that Wilde believed to be full of books he was bringing home from America. Human victims follow, forcing Wilde and his Watson, real-life journalist and Wilde biographer Robert Sherard, to untangle the complicated nest of emotions at play among the members of the Compagnie La Grange. John Dickson Carr fans will be gratified to find echoes of his style in several places, including the use of false endings. (Sept.)
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Review

"Immensely enjoyable, one of the best in the canon of literary mysteries." -- The Philadelphia Inquirer

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Product Details

• Paperback: 365 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone; Original edition (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416534857
• ISBN-13: 978-1416534853
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #926,212 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING WILDE, September 30, 2009

By 

Red Rock Bookworm (St. George Utah) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile: A Mystery (Oscar Wilde Mysteries) (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Author Gyles Brandreth's latest Oscar Wilde mystery takes the reader on a journey that begins in the wild west of Leadville, Colorado circa 1882, and continues with an ocean voyage on which Oscar becomes acquainted with the LaGrange family, well known for its hundred year history in the theater. Invited by the senior LaGrange to add his personal touch to the script of Hamlet, Oscar follows the family to Paris. It is in this venue that Mr. Wilde encounters murder most foul and the reader is introduced to Mr. Wilde's inner circle.......a treasury of the famous and the infamous ranging from Sarah Bernhardt, complete with her animal menagerie, to Arthur Conan Doyle and James Russell Lowell. Complicit in this tale and cast as the narrator/chronicler of the story is Wilde's friend and compatriot, poet Robert Sherard.

Clever and unusual murders and the solution to the mystery aside, the historical aspects of the novel are engaging as are the salacious peeks into the dark underbelly of late nineteenth century Paris. Known to one and all for his pithy witticisms as well as his ability to regurgitate the equally amusing social observations of others, Oscar comes across as a varitable warehouse of pronouncements arrived at following intelligent scrutiny of the human animal, i.e., "The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions", or "In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking", or "Journalism is unreadable and literature is not read".

While the story does address Wilde's flamboyant style of dress and his preference for large amounts of absinthe and laudanum (opium/morphine) it neatly skirts his questionable sexual orientation and presents him as a man completely enamored of Constance Lloyd (the woman whom he later married). This is a forgivable sin, since Brandreth's Oscar is as completely captivating and entertaining a protagonist as one could ask for.

For anyone who enjoys their historical fiction liberally peppered with recognizable names coupled with an amusing, relatively easy read, OSCAR WILDE AND THE DEAD MAN'S SMILE are well worth your time.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Slow start, but an OK read, July 31, 2009

By 

Delamaine "Formerly Belacane" (Seattle Eastside) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile: A Mystery (Oscar Wilde Mysteries) (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Having greatly enjoyed Louis Bayard's "The Pale Blue Eye" (featuring Poe as a detective during a mystery at West Point) I thought it might be enjoyable to read a similar book featuring Oscar Wilde. The layout of this book is much like a Sherlock Holmes mystery: Wilde and his Watsonian sidekick, Robert Sherard, are dining at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum with, in fact, Arthur Conan Doyle. They discuss a murder mystery that Oscar was instrumental in solving a few years previously, and at Wilde's behest, Sherard gives Conan Doyle a copy of a manuscript about that mystery. The main section of the book is the mystery, written from Sherard's point of view, and the epilogue is the recap of the mystery at another dinner with Conan Doyle.

The book has a fairly slow start. It seemed like the author was simply plugging the narrative with every Oscar Wilde quote I ever heard, but setting it in a scenario appropriate to the context of the quote. La Grange's description is very crudely done: a lot of blunt sentences starting with "He was" or "He looked" or "He had." Very awkward to read.

However, once we get to the point where Wilde is in Paris, things start to even out, and the book is quite good from that point on. I did stay up late to finish it. There is one big glaring thing that confuses me, though. During Wilde & Sherard's recap with Conan Doyle at the end of the book, they discuss the murders that took place. One of these took place on the boat coming back from America. Wilde emphasizes that a set of four murders had been planned, after which point all the killing would be finished. (We had learned about this "set of four murders" much earlier in the book, but here he recapitulates for the benefit of Conan Doyle.) However, at this point of the story when the first murder is committed, before the boat docks in England, there is not yet a motive for any of the three future deaths. The criminal mastermind has no reason to kill until much later in the book. So are we to believe that the mastermind simply wanted a set of four arbitrary deaths, just to show off, and that conveniently, this person later learns that there are people nearby who need to be killed?

I may reread it tonight to see if I misunderstood that part, but it seems to me that is a pretty glaring mistake.

Otherwise, this story hews very closely to the format used by Bayard, where the famous person and his non-famous sidekick work out the mystery to the gratification of the local authorities, and then in a closing chapter the famous person turns the explanation around and shows that it actually happened differently. I really hated this when Bayard did it, but it doesn't bother me in this book, and I don't know why that is.

The book was a satisfying read, and by the second third of the book I was quite content with its narrative and progression. There was a little bit too much about Sherard's personal life, which was slightly detrimental to the story, but these sections are mostly skim-worthy.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile: A Mystery (Oscar Wilde Mysteries), December 30, 2009

By 

W. Carter (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man's Smile: A Mystery (Oscar Wilde Mysteries) (Paperback)

(What's this?)

Maybe my expectations were too high! I read the first two installments of Mr. Brandwreth's Oscar Wilde mystery series and was quite amused and entertained. Therefore, I had high hopes for this third in the series.

Let's go back to the beginning. Mr. Brandwreth is a very good writer and has demonstrated the ability to spin an admirable yarn. That being said, I found Dead Man's Smile to be disappointingly long and tedious. Even the storyline grew hazy at times. There are a multitude of characters and although many are well depicted, too many characters can easily slow a book's pace.

I will concede that sometimes I am not in the mood for a specific type of book and/or writing style and this may have been the case; however, I found Oscar and Robert Sheridan's slow moving investigation somewhat irksome. Perhaps I missed the uniqueness of Mr. Wilde's campy sense of humor and unparalleled wit. To me, this installment presented him as being somewhat pedestrian, if not downright pedantic. Where was the "fun" that the first two books captured and presented so easily?