‘I represent the Diogenes Club,’ Jeperson drawled, voice rich and deep as a BBC announcer. ‘A branch of government you won’t have heard of. Now you have heard of it, you’ll probably be required to sign the Official Secrets Act in blood. Our speciality is affairs like this, matters in which conventional methods of policing or diplomacy or defence come up short. I gather you are still reeling from the revelation that the world is not what you once thought it was.’
Had the man read his mind?
From “The End of the Pier Show”
Established late in the 19th century by Mycroft Holmes, the Diogenes Club is “a club for the unclubbable,” the majority of its rooms kept strictly silent, and so the perfect cover for a secret agency. The Club protects England and Her Majesty from the paranormal/supernatural and just plain weird by bringing into their fold certain gifted people, Talents, like Richard Jeperson, to battle threats to the nation, be they ghosties or ghoulies or long-legged beasties. Or Lovecraftian reality shifts, invaders from other dimensions or less trustworthy home-grown Talents.
The Man from the Diogenes Club is an extension of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula universe. While nowhere stated, the Titan edition (2017) essentially updates the similarly titled collection from MonkeyBrain Books (2006), each featuring the adventures of Jeperson, Most Valued Member of the Diogenes Club. At 711 pages, this trade paperback includes eight stories, most at or near novella length, a twenty-page glossary of British terms and allusions vital for most Yanks’ understanding of the by-play between the characters, and seven pages of Newman discussing the origin of the stories and series.
If you’ve read Anno Dracula or Alan Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen you’ll have a sense of the sources of these stories – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, Frankenstein, Dracula and other imaginative literature from the 19th century – to which Newman adds pulp fiction, comic books, movies and television shows like The Avengers (1960s tv show, no relation to Marvel Productions). I would even describe the tone as mostly the literary equivalent of The Avengers (not Marvel), light-hearted, even chatty mixed with snark in the service of preposterous and hugely entertaining premises.
The first six stories are set in the 1970s, Jeperson a dapper dandy with a crew of two, facing insurmountable odds and surmounting them. What makes it entertaining is how they surmount the odds: One aspect I noted, and liked, is that resistance to a threat isn’t always violent, but thoughtful; Jeperson aims to preserve life when possible and he tends to react to violence rather than initiate it.
The seventh story is darker and reflects the change in tone in England with the advent of the Thatcher years. The last brings Jeperson out of retirement post-Thatcher to face another threat.
I read this book early in 2021, while we were under a different kind of threat, and so my perspective may be warped by needing, and receiving, stories that carried me away from the here and now. I strongly suggest you let your perspective be warped, too. Abutting the horror genre and occasionally slipping over into it, these stories are something like comfort reading, often funny pulp adventure spiced with occasional seriousness, and good entertainment for a time of uncertainty.
THE MAN FROM THE DIOGENES CLUB by Kim Newman (2017; Titan Books)
711 pages
ISBN: 9781781165744
Review by Randy Money
