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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Louche Talk, 16 April 2003
The Mortdecai Trilogy by Kyril Bonfiglioli may be a bit of a mouthful but it's a tonic. It's a one-volume edition of three novels about the crooked art dealer Charlie Mortdecai, all of which were published in the 1970s (Bonfiglioli, who despite the name was English, died in 1985) and go under the "interesting" individual titles of Don't Point That Thing At Me, After You With the Pistol and Something Nasty in the Woodshed. Also available but "uncollected" (as they say) are All the Tea in China and an unfinished book, completed by arch-parodist and literary ventriloquist Craig Brown, called The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery.
Unfinished novels being completed for publication? I hear you cry. Surely that was only done for the likes of P.G. Wodehouse? How good is this guy exactly? Well, if you'll let me answer one at a time... In fact Wodehouse is a pretty fair starting point, and if I were a lazy journalist I would say something along the lines of "like Wodehouse on acid!!!" The comparisons are in the style, which is dense with wit and seems funny even when it's not actually telling jokes (shades of Howard Jacobson there too). And similarly with Wodehouse, there is a very definite milieu for the books: instead of country houses, bossy aunts and gentlemen's clubs, Mortdecai has gangster's lairs, bent coppers and sinister Chinamen. And the fallen Madonna with the big boobies. Where it differs from Wodehouse is primarily in the presence of sex and violence - although it's all done with a cheery sort of innocence, so even then we're in similar territory - and in the plots, which are completely unfollowable, unlike P.G.'s which were carefully worked out to be precisely logical but entirely implausible.
Anyway the best thing for you to do is go and read them immediately. Here is an extract which might even persuade you, seeing as how it had me laughing myself stupid in bed at the weekend. No, I really didn't see this punchline coming..."Is your eye, er, badly hurt?"
"It's gorn," he said cheerfully. "You put the leather smack into it and I was wearing me contack lenses. The nurses like me patch, romantic they call it. I'm not having no glass eye, bugger that, me uncle had one and swallowed it, never got it back."
"Goodness," I said feebly, "how was that?"
"He put it in his mouth, see, to warm it up and make it so it would slip in the socket easy, then he hiccupped, having been on the piss the night before. Down it went. Cured the hiccups but he never saw the eye again."
"I see." How the other half lives; to be sure. There was a long and happy silence.
"*Never* got it back?" I wondered aloud.
"Nah. Me uncle even got the croaker to have a look up his bum but he said he couldn't see nothink. 'Funny,' says me uncle, 'I can see you as clear as anythink, doctor.'"
"Jock, you're a bloody liar," I said. Bravo!
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by Kyril Bonfiglioli
by Stieg Larsson
by Kyril Bonfiglioli
by Donald E. Westlake
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