A new character is emerging that I think is worth mentioning in this blog-site dedicated to British fictional secret agents. His name is Lucifer Box, a charismatic rogue who is described by his author as an “artist, bon-viveur, sexual athlete and wanted felon”.
I recently finished his 2nd adventure, entitled “The Devil in Amber”. When a novel starts with “He was American, so it seemed only fair to shoot him”, you know you are in for an entertaining read”. On the whole, Mark Gatiss does not disappoint, with the Wildean wit you have come to expect from the author of League of Gentlemen.
In Lucifer Box, we have a British secret agent with some notable differences. Whereas most secret agents are either rather macho, or certainly a lady’s man (a lá James Bond film), Box clearly has an eye for the male physique. Chapter 3 starts with:“At eight the next morning, I left the cosy embrace of young Rex (sucked off and buggered if you must know)..”, and later on, “he was a smasher with a cheeky grin and thighs upon which you could’ve landed a small aeroplane.”
Nor does he take too kindly to rescuing women in distress. Faced with the choice of leaving behind a woman who (like him) is trying to out-run the police armed with rifles, or fleeing the scene, Box chooses the latter, commenting that “chivalry’s all well and good but when a chap’s liberty at stake..”
There are also no hi-tech gadgets, KGB agents, or hard-hitting political dramas as found in most 20th century secret agent novels. Instead, Box’s 2nd novel takes place in the 1920s, some twenty years after the Edwardian adventures of `The Vesuvius Club' (Box’s first adventure) and follows the ominous rise of Trans-Atlantic Fascism, and Satanism.
Box is now middle aged and under threat from a new generation of younger secret agents. Assigned to observe the activities of a fascist leader, Olympus Mons, Box finds himself framed for a murder he did not commit, and fleeing the USA on a boat back to old Blighty.
In Mons, we find the sort of “over-the-top” baddy we often like to see in secret agent novels. He is a fascist Satanist who will stop at nothing to use the forces of darkness in his bid for world power. Prone to “Hitlerian rages”, Mons is portrayed as a psychotic, unhinged megalomaniac.
My favorite character in the book, however, is Mrs Croup, an aging, grotesque, and sex starved Australian obsessed with real life murders & collects newspaper cuttings to show it. She saves Box’s life a number a times ... but she never gets from him what she really wants (namely a night of unbridled passion).
The comic tone in `The Devil in Amber' runs throughout the novel, and many may describe the book as “a thoroughly ripping yarn”, but it has its sober moments too. Box is is a survivor of the First World War, and occasionally shows us moments of vulnerability and sadness - none more so than when he pays a visit to a lonely war memorial in the cold Swiss mountains.
The end of the book has too strong a flavour of the Occult for me (with Satan himself momentarily appearing), but if Gatiss continues to write more Lucifer Box novels of this quality, the charismatic Box might well joint the exalted few who make it as "Britain’s best fictional secret agents".
