Reading Make-Believe and Artifice, the new short story collection by Rose Biggin, I often found myself thinking about confectionary. Looking at the reviews, it seems I wasn’t the only one. Runalong The Shelves calls the book “a pure delight of storytelling.” Nick Hubble describes it as “an irresistible chocolate box of artful confections.” Some of this can be chalked up to the book’s literal contents—in these fifteen stories one finds, among other things, a talking chocolate cake and a “dashing gentleman thief” named Gelato Parlour. But more important than the individual details is the book’s overwhelming mood of joyful fantasy. Even the darker moments feel like they add depth of flavour to a frothy, toothsome whole. Of course, any baker worth their sugar will tell you that creating a satisfying sweet is harder than it looks. While it’s easy to be swept up in the delight of these stories, their sweetness and light belie Biggin’s fundamental skill.
As good as the individual stories are, I find myself wanting to assess Biggin’s craft at the individual sentence level. This is a book where lime tarts glow “like the finest arsenic wallpaper”; where a smug man looks “like the cat who had obtained access to an entire dairy”; where a relieved actor can proclaim: “Thank goodness we got through the rest of the play without any drama.” These are sentences which embody a historical period; which crack open an idiomatic phrase and allow it to expand like a frying egg; which are just plain fun to read. Biggin’s jokes are rarely less than chuckle-worthy, and even the more ostentatious puns raise a smile for their sheer cheek. My favourite comes in “The Diamond Twenty Thousand Times Bigger than the Ritz,” when the protagonists approach the mansion of a wealthy eccentric:
I heard Pearl laughing as I gasped with recognition. That neat grid of numbers and letters, the Table I’d been familiar with all my life, was suddenly rising up before me — transformed into the front plan of a building.
“How often does he host the Elemental Ball?” I asked, finding my voice again.
“Oh, you know, now and then,” she said. “Periodically.”
These inventive, finely worked sentences are the foundation on which all Biggin’s stories are built.
Almost all the stories in this book make use of pre-existing characters, from Helen of Troy to Chanticleer the rooster to Frankenstein’s monster. These frequent literary riffs, combined with the loving wordplay and Biggin’s stated background as a performer, sometimes make the book feel like a natural extension of the sketch show. Make-Believe and Artifice is the sort of book one can imagine John Finnemore enjoying, if not actually writing. Like Finnemore, Biggin demonstrates a deep love for the traditional ghost story, even as she exploits its comic potential. In “The Ghost of Cock Lane,” a séance-cum-murder trial is attended by Samuel Johnson (described as “that pedantic bloke who knows about spellings”), who manages to turn the tables on a charlatan landlord seeking to frame his own tenant. It’s a well-plotted little caper, made especially memorable for being narrated by a ghost, who describes themselves as “so tempted to deliver a single knock” and throw off Johnson’s rationalist trap, and who signs off with the exhortation: “Beware landlords!”
Similarly sketch-like is “Miss Scarlett,” which delves into the inner life of the titular Cluedo character. Trapped with her chromatic companions in a murderous, endlessly repeating game, the story starts out amusing (“Look at her, in that lipstick: no doubt she could love and kill the same person on the same night”) but becomes sadder and more existential as it goes on. The characters’ motives can never be fathomed, even by themselves, and soon enough things start to feel downright Beckettian: “Why is a black hole around which the suspects all spin, pulled along by its gravity, unable to reach a centre. They can never know each other that way.” This is what the best sketch comedy does: defamiliarise the popular culture we take for granted, allowing us to see it, and enjoy it, anew. Of course, there’s also the simple pleasure of repetition. “The Gunman Who Came in from the Door” takes Raymond Chandler’s advice for crime writers and stacks up repetitions of “A man came through the door with a gun in his hand,” until pretty soon it’s standing room only. It’s an efficient, sprightly piece, which builds up to an absurd punchline; pure pleasure to read.
Naturally, some pieces are more pleasurable than others. Among the less successful stories is “A Map to Camelot,” a Pratchettesque travel guide for would-be fantasy protagonists. While there are, as ever, some lovely jokes—under the heading “On Breaking Curses,” for instance, the reader is instructed to “[a]sk yourself: do you really feel cursed, or are you merely succumbing to a placebo?”—the overall effect is rather dry. “Helen/Hermione” presents a bittersweet dialogue between Helen of Troy and her daughter, and though the character dynamics are touching, the piece is a shade too slender to make the most of its concept.
At the opposite end of the spectrum is “The New Woman.” At forty-eight pages, it is by far the longest story in the book, and its premise is a doozy. In “[t]he final days of the nineteenth century,” a lesbian couple comprising a doctor, Christine, and an artist, Frances, set out to reanimate the corpse of a burlesque dancer, creating a bejewelled female version of Frankenstein’s monster. Of course, they decide to call the creature Eve. Tensions are heightened when Eve shows a greater degree of trust in Frances than in Christine. Things are further complicated by a visit from the original Frankenstein’s monster, and by plans to show Eve off at a new year’s party. As that summary implies, this story has a lot going on. Add in a self-consciously eclectic set of inspirations including Oscar Wilde, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and things start to feel decidedly heady. It’s not that any one of these components is bad in itself, but—ironically, given the longer page count—the piece feels overstuffed. A novella or even a novel might have proved a better container for such a rich set images and incidents. As it is, the plot moves along too quickly, and the story’s ending aims for tragedy but winds up feeling arbitrary. For a story long on human hubris, it’s perhaps fitting that the result feels like a sadly failed experiment.
The book’s most memorable stories, on the other hand, are unambiguous successes. Make-Believe and Artifice contains two pieces adding to the Sherlock Holmes canon, “The Modjeska Waltz” and “The Chandelier Bid” (the latter co-written with Keir Cooper). Both stories are taken “[f]rom the private papers of Irene Adler.” As this choice of protagonist suggests, both provide sly commentary on a man’s world of crime. In “The Modjeska Waltz,” Adler is approached by a brilliant but socially awkward man named Professor Moriarty. Moriarty wants to infiltrate a high society ball where he can steal a precious stone of outstanding mathematical interest. The wrinkle comes when he explains why he needs Adler’s help:
“I need to get to the Ball, Miss Adler, and I need to remain there long enough to acquire the brooch. I need to appear to belong at the ball. Miss Adler, I need to know the Modjeska Waltz.”
I waited for more, but he sat back … and waited.
Finally, the ha’penny dropped. “Professor Moriarty,” I said, “are you asking me for ... dancing lessons?”
Moriarty’s education in choreography is one of the story’s many pleasures. The richest, though, is that Adler manages to get one over on the Professor, just as she did with his archrival.
Said archrival makes an appearance in “The Chandelier Bid,” along with a self-consciously bumbling Watson. Holmes enlists Adler to help investigate a fraud in the art world; lacking any aesthetic sense himself, he is forced to rely on Adler’s “artistic eye.” It’s a solid comic foundation for a story that builds to a clever Doylean reveal, and there are several touches that will please a long-term Holmes fan. When Holmes lays out his plan to Adler at an art auction, she says “I understand.” This flummoxes Holmes, who hastily replies: “My apologies … Usually I’m speaking with Watson and that’s not the response one generally receives.” Later, when Holmes complains about Adler throwing off his concentration, she tells us that “Watson caught my eye and winked. We both knew that if Holmes wanted to focus, even the auction house catching on fire would not have stopped him.” These small beats in both stories demonstrate a real affection for the characters, as well as serious thought about how to get them to do novel things in the framework of a pastiche. They help to make the two Irene Adler stories the most pleasing of a collection already filled with pleasing stories.
Like any tray of sweets, Make-Believe and Artifice may be best enjoyed in moderation. After 227 pages, I felt satisfied rather than desperate for more. But with stories as artfully constructed as this, it’s difficult to feel bad. For any lover of fantasy or comic fiction, this book is a treat to be savoured.