"Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-): When Myth Becomes His-Story"

Within the recent trend of fictionalizing the life of writers, Gyles Brandreth’s Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries (2007-) prevail as the most innovative. A real work in progress (with three novels published so far and six more to come), this series, taking Oscar Wilde as its sleuth, is a genuine historical game of finding out the truth (in a Sherlock Holmes fashion) not only about murders but – implicitly, progressively and more significantly – about Oscar Wilde himself. Conscious that truth about any human being – let alone a figure from the past – can only be elusive, Brandreth’s novels each exhibit various facets of the historico-mythical Wilde that cannot legitimately appear in any factual biography. This paper will show how these novels – in which “almost all” of the story is true (G. Brandreth, ‘Acknowledgements,’ in Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile, 2009, p. 363) – make the reader not only glimpse at the real-life Oscar Wilde, but conjointly at his ultimate enigma. Peppered with self reflexive implications about make-believe, myth and character, the Oscar Wilde Murder Mysteries are not, as this paper will examine, so much compelling because they/there are mysteries as because we need and ‘miss stories’ about those biographical subjects who made up history and, incidentally, their own story.