The Secret Files of the Diogenes Club - [Diogenes Club 02]

by By Kim Newman

  VANESSA. No last name known. Latterly, Mrs. Alexander Coates. Richard Jeperson’s closest associate, well-remembered by everybody who ever met her. See The Man From the Diogenes Club. Rumour has it that Mrs. Coates is the current Chair of the Ruling Cabal—though the Diogenes Club supposedly closed its doors for the last time in 1984, shortly after the reelection of Margaret Thatcher.

  THE UNDERTAKING. More is revealed about these mystery men, “the undertakers in smoked glasses,” in “Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch.” Officially, out of business. Then again, officially, they were never in business. They maintained the Mausoleum, a museum-cum-prison on Egdon Heath.

  HEATHER WILDING. Derek Leech’s executive assistant appears in “The Serial Murders” (inThe Man From the Diogenes Club) and “Going to Series.” Along with her twin sister Priscilla, she’s in The Quorum too. She was manager of the Free Martha Stewart campaign fund.

  EDWIN WINTHROP. WWI veteran-cum-manipulative-psychic investigator Edwin Winthrop first appeared, with his girlfriend Catriona Kaye (q.v.), in the play My One Little Murder Can’t Do Any Harm (1981), in which he was played by me and exposed a villain by feigning his own death during a séance. He is a leading character in The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918, and shows up also in Jago, Jack Yeovil’s Demon Download, Seven Stars (an account of his death can be found in the episode “The Biafran Bank Manager”), and “Sorcerer Conjurer Wizard Witch.” Little-known fact: He finally shot down Hans von Hellhund, the Demon Ace, in a dogfight over Molesey Reservoir in 1938.

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