The beetle is a rare specimen found by Philip Erskine, an entomologist with an interest in eugenics. It is 1934 and Sinner’s amazing boxing record has caught Erskine’s interest. If, as eugenics tells him, Jewish people are a feeble race how to explain this “exquisite sporting prowess”?
It’s “like a peach tree growing from a plague pit”, which is one of dozens of inspired similes. We also meet many memorable supporting characters, including Judah Kolmel, a boxing coach whose nose for sweat is so strong he could “taste flu before your first sniffle”, Erskine’s mother, who was “indifferent to politics except when she wanted to justify her large donations to the poor”, a butler “born with a rare neuropathic disorder… which dulled his sense of pain” and the explorer Ferdinand Silkstone, “a cheerful burly man whose laughter could have torn the stitches out of a straitjacket”.
The reader’s present-day guide is Kevin Broom, cyberspace loner and collector of Nazi memorabilia. On the orders of his sometime employer and fellow-collector, the property developer Horace Grublock, Broom visits the fl at of a private investigator. He finds him dead and also finds a letter from Hitler to Erskine.
He sets about discovering what connects the corpse and the letter. His efforts to do this are hampered by a Welsh hitman and Broom’s own bad health. He suffers from trimethylaminuria (the cause for his nickname Fishy), asthma, eczema, cystic acne, irritable bowel syndrome.
This makes him an unlikely adventurer-hero but he does a creditable job while the toxicity of his urine and his bodily stench even come in handy. Some readers may find the book’s scatological humour and sexual references unsettling.