The Dandy Boys Mysteries are the cast of Downton Abbey trying to prove that Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a figment of Mina Harker’s imagination.
This gothic mystery tale styles itself a publication of excerpts out of the journals of Friedrich Von Helsing, and some related documents. Von Helsing is a member of the Fellowship of Adventurer Scholars for the Revelation of Mythology and the Advancement of Natural Philosophy, a group of young and aristocratic members of the Royal Society who take upon themselves the task of debunking apparently supernatural phenomena.
The result is a series of adventures, each centered around an occult phenomenon progressively harder to debunk than the last. Boyett and Wacks write in an early nineteenth century voice, and the stories are larded not only with the physical and cultural paraphernalia of the past, but also with the ideas of the time: Bentham and Byron, empirical reasoning and discovery.
The Dandy Boys Mysteries is a fun read. Best of all, I understand that more books in the series are coming.
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