The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery: The Fourth Charlie Mortdecai Novel - Softcover

Bonfiglioli, Kyril

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241970296 ISBN 13: 9780241970294

Publisher: Penguin, 2014

Synopsis

The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery - the fourth Charlie Mortdecai novel, soon to be a major film starring Johnny Depp

'Deliciously nasty ... An adventurously off-piste whodunit' Observer

'She was a Fellow and Tutor of Scone College and the world must learn that Fellows and Tutors of Scone College shall not be done to death with impunity.'

The Hon. Charlie Mortdecai (and his intrepid moustache) is invited to Oxford to investigate the cruel and most definitely unusual death of a don who collided with an omnibus. Though her death appears accidental, one or two things don't add up - such as two pairs of thugs who'd been following her just before her death. With more spies than you could shoe horn into a stretch limo and the solving of the odd murder along the way, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery is a criminally comic delight.

'Gloriously, infectiously funny' Guardian

'The result of stewing together PG Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler, lightly seasoned with Ian Fleming and Damon Runyon, then adding a jigger of Groucho Marx and a dash of the Marquis de Sade' Mail on Sunday

'A delightfully black comedy thriller - and it will tell you everything you need to know about onanism in fourth-century China' Observer

'Blissfully funny' Independent

Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England in 1928 of an English mother and Italo-Slovene father. After studying at Oxford and five years in the army, he took up a career as an art dealer, like his eccentric creation Charlie Mortdecai. He lived in Oxford, Lancashire, Ireland and Jersey, where he died in 1985. He wrote four Charlie Mortdecai novels, and a fifth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor).

About this title

Review:

Just read the first page of this book and try to keep a straight face. Then try to put the book down. You won't be able to do either one. This cult classic (the first of a trilogy), about louche, sybaritic Charlie Mortdecai, an art dealer largely untroubled by conscience, draws readers into its unpolitically comic world and keeps them there. The plot concerns Mortdecai's efforts to keep one step ahead of nemesis Martland, a policeman vested with the power to work outside the law, and to deliver a stolen Goya he has concealed in the headliner of his Rolls Royce Silver Ghost. The plot takes him to America (where is he much bemused by the locals, and they by him) and back again, ending in a most intriguing predicament. Wry and dry, picaresque and profane, a book like this can be so hard to describe that efforts to do so invoking some or all of P. G. Wodehouse, Kingsley Amis, Vladimir Nabokov, even Hunter S. Thompson and John Kennedy Toole give the impression that it's a Frankenstein's monster. Not true. Bonfiglioli's Mortdecai is a true original, and there's nothing quite so hard to describe as that "

A rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness

What are the books like?They are darker, stranger and more interesting than any film of them (or at least any film cleared for general release) could be The novels are extremely funny, first of all. They deal, like Wodehouse, in sentence-by-sentence sparkle, in gestures of grand insouciance.--Sam Leith"

Wonderfully offbeat...The often hilarious narrative voice owes something to P.G. Wodehouse (Mortdecai and his thug, Jock, are a through-the-looking-glass Wooster and Jeeves), but Bonfiglioli pays the debt by layering his homage with a loony blend of classical references, groan-worthy asides, and a playful dismantling of Golden Age detective novels.

What are the books like? They are darker, stranger and more interesting than any film of them (or at least any film cleared for general release) could be...The novels are extremely funny, first of all. They deal, like Wodehouse, in sentence-by-sentence sparkle, in gestures of grand insouciance.--Sam Leith

About the Author:

Art dealer and eccentric, Kyril Bonfiglioli was the author of the deliciously funny Mortdecai novels. He died in Jersey in 1985. Craig Brown writes weekly columns for the Mail on Sunday and Private Eye. He lives in Suffolk.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0241970296
• ISBN 13: 9780241970294
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176