Mark Gatiss writes for the multiaward-winning British television comedy The League of Gentlemen, on which he portrays a debt collector, a cursed veterinarian, a dog cinema owner who has recently branched out into VHS and DVD rentals, and a Knight Rider fan, among many other characters. He also stars in the feature film The League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse and has written episodes for the rejuvenated Doctor Who television series. He lives in a laboratory with a stuffed cat
"Darkly erudite and fiendishly unputdownable -- Lucifer Box is the
most likeable scoundrel since Flashman."
-- Jasper Fforde, author of The Big Over Easy and The Eyre
Affair
"Gatiss mixes in The League of Gentlemen's penchant for horror with
large doses of arch wit and louche laying about. It's Oscar Wilde
crossed with H.P. Lovecraft....this could be the bit of fluff
you've been looking for."
-- The Telegraph (London)
"In the appallingly appealing Lucifer Box, Mark Gatiss has created
an anti-hero for the ages. Watching the number of chapters, then
pages, dwindle, was heart-rending. No one has ever combined the
seedy, the stylish, the rumbustious, the raffish, the egregious,
the outrageous, the high and the low with such wit and grace."
-- Stephen Fry, author of Revenge and The Liar
"It's Gatiss's impeccable lightness of touch and huge delight in
wordplay that makes this a joy. Studded with epigrams, asides, such
wonderful names as Strangeways Pugg and Everard Supple, this is a
wickedly written romp to put a smile on the face of anyone amused
by the strange alchemy of the words 'a peculiar horror of
artichokes'"
-- SFX magazine (UK)
"Lucifer Box, society darling and spy, investigates the secret
Vesuvius Club. Brilliant stuff."
-- Heat magazine (UK)
"Mark Gatiss has brought his customary wit and outlandish style to
the page...sharp, witty and shocking."
-- Derby Evening Telegraph (UK)
"Plenty of sly comic detail (Box lives at Number 9 Downing Street
'because someone has to') and a surrealist narrative that fans of
The League of Gentlemen will recognize...kidnapped scientists,
poisonous centipedes, foggy chases through London by hackney cab,
and a fiendish volcano-based conspiracy that provides the big SFX
climax. It's all great fun."
-- Time Out (London)
"Self-deprecatingly subtitled A bit of Fluff...Gatiss' prose is
upholstered in a rather superior grade of fluff: redolent of soft
leather chairs in fine gentlemen's establishments, and the cracking
of whips in the basements beneath them....Set amid the decadent
fleshpots of the Edwardian demi-monde, the novel introduces the
raffish toast of London society, Lucifer Box, leading portraitist
of the age and undercover agent on behalf of His Majesty's
government....Box works his way dandyishly through a sequence of
adventures which leads him to penetrate a secret Neapolitan crime
ring, plus the willing rinfs of several secretive
Neapolitans....perniciously addictive piece of escapism."
-- The Guardian (London)
"The preposterous Lucifer is an entertaining hero and The Vesuvius
Club is a hugely enjoyable romp."
-- Image magazine (UK)
"With its quaint dust jacket and Beardsely-inspired illustrations,
the book feels like a visitor from a more elegant era; it has the
smell of fin de siecle about it....[Lucifer Box] belongs to a
lineage which stretches from Sherlock Holmes to the indestructible
James Bond, via the queasy phantasmagoria of Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu
stories...But Gatiss is more than a pasticheur; he has ambitions
beyond literary ventriloquism. Midway through the story, Box is
revealed to be bisexual, and we feel that this is a novel which
Doyle, Stevenson, and Rider Haggard would not have been allowed to
write. Giddily inventive and packed with delirious incident, it
suggests a post-modern project comparable to Michael Faber's The
Crimson Petal and the White."
-- The Times Literary Supplement (London)
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