Fatal attractions

The Oxford Despoiler, by Gary Dexter
Twisted Wing, by Ruth Newman
Windows on the Moon, by Alan Brownjohn

The Oxford Despoiler is a collection of eight stories introducing Henry St Liver, a Victorian detective, and his biographer and assistant, Olive Salter. Henry is tall and lean, with a lofty bearing but the habits of the most dishevelled bohemian. Olive drifted to London and met Henry, and in very little time became his invaluable foil.

If it sounds familiar, it should, since this is in part a warm and cleverly observed pastiche of the Victorian detective genre and of the Sherlock Holmes stories in particular. Nods to Conan Doyle include the regulation half-witted policemen, the fact that many of the cases contain no real crime, and the trademark references to other investigations too shocking to be set before the public (such as ‘the affair of the Moist-Handed Madonna’ and ‘the strange case of the Fifteenth Ewe’). There are also some smaller hooks for the dedicated Sherlockian (for instance, Olive’s publisher, Drebber and Drebber, name-checks the first victim in the Holmes canon: Enoch J. Drebber, from A Study in Scarlet). Perhaps funniest of all is the way that Olive innocently draws regular attention to a wonderful absurdity in Doyle’s stories, namely that Holmes spends his time swearing secrecy in confidential cases and compounding justifiable felonies — only for the good Watson to inform the world about them.

The Oxford Despoiler takes on more than just Holmes, however; Gary Dexter’s wider target is repressed Victorian society itself — although here, as with the mimicking of Doyle, the satire is fuelled by affection rather than by disdain. Unlike Holmes, Henry is pretty unobservant; he relies instead on his position as England’s foremost ‘sexologist’, which gives him unequalled knowledge of matters concupiscent.