Black Butterfly

There is nothing better than starting a series of books and hating that first book, completely unaware that by the time you read the last one, you'll be sorry to have reached the end.

I really enjoyed this. It was so utterly ridiculous and enjoyable. I can't quite believe how much I've come to like this character whom I loathed in the first installment. He's still insufferably smug in this, but time has mellowed him out somewhat and the humour is more self-deprecating, making him rather endearing (which he would probably hate). Also, there were characters like Kingdom Kum, not to mention names like Kingdom Kum, who entertained me to no end. There was the cheeky ending too, not to mention all the other cheeky bits elsewhere.

I just so utterly enjoyed this romp of a novel. And, can't believe I'm saying this, I will totally miss Lucifer Box and really hope Mark Gatiss might feel like writing another one. Now, I'll go finish eating crow. ( )

Good solid fun. ( )

Black Butterfly is the last Lucifer Box novel, and Gatiss has pushed his setting forward again to the early fifties, making Box quite an old man. Having moved to the very top of the spy game, Box is on the verge of retirement, but he has one last adventure in him--and that adventure begins with his investigation into what he believes are mysterious circumstances surrounding an old friend's death. The plot takes a while to get going in this one, but once it does, it trips along fairly well. This entry in the series is lacking a bit in both the humor and the heart of the earlier two books, though the ways Gatiss plays with and deals with Box's old age are interesting and impressive. A slightly disappointing ending to the Box books, if perhaps only because the first two do what they do so very well, but absolutely worth the read if you've followed Lucifer through his first two adventures. ( )

This book was fun - what one would call a forgetable romp I suppose - but not as much fun as the first two. Lucifer Box should have stayed in the fin de siecle where his androgynous good looks and camp bisexuality fitted right in. An old Lucifer [with a son called Christmas what's more] is just wrong, especially when his old frineds start dying unexpectedly, killed off by the appallingly named assassin Kingdom Cum.

Mark Gatiss is openly gay himself so his gay love scenes are more convincing than his heterosexual ones and Lucifer is not altogether convincing as a straight Don Juan. Nor is the cold war his metier - I wish Mr Box had been left to particpate in the Great Game when the Empire was at its hieght, when Victoria was on the throne and Oscar Wilde was alive instead of being forced to grow old as others grow old... I suspect the vain Lucifer would have prefered that too. ( )

'Now, Now, Delilah,' I said, sipping gingerly at the brandy. 'You're sounding petulant again.'
'Well,' she drawled, 'not like the bloody old days, is it? Stuck behind desk fiddling with paper-clips. I bet you'd give a year of your life just for a nice juicy assassination!'
I shook my head. 'Time to bring down the curtain, Delilah.'
But scarcely had the words left my lips when I felt a sudden heat on mt cheek, and my smeary glass exploded as a 9mm bullet slammed not the bar.

For the third book in the series, we have skipped forwards to 1953 and the end of Lucifer's career. Lucifer has risen to be "Joshua Reynolds" (the pseudonym of the spy master in charge of the Royal Academy), but he is facing retirement and the Royal Academy is about to be absorbed into MI6. When an old friend dies in a car crash due to uncharacteristically risky driving, and a pillar of the establishment suddenly goes crazy, firing a gun in a crowded bar and stealing Lucifer's car, Lucifer follows a suspect to Istanbul and gets drawn into one last case.

It was quite funny, but I don't think the plot hangs together as well as in the first two books. ( )