Don't Point That Thing at Me - Hardcover

Bonfiglioli, Kyril

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0297995200 ISBN 13: 9780297995203

Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd, 1973

Synopsis

A thriller about an art-dealer. A scarce book which is becoming increasingly difficult to find.

About this title

Review

"A rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness" Julian Barnes

"You couldn't snuggle under the duvet with anything more disreputable and delightful" Stephen Fry
"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." "Booklist" (Starred Review)
"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, "The Guardian""

About the Author

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 the three Mortdecai novels, a fourth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor), and left a fifth unpublished at his death - later completed by Craig Brown under the title The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery. All are published by Penguin.

Edition details

• Publisher: Littlehampton Book Services Ltd
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0297995200
• ISBN 13: 9780297995203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176