The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery: The Fourth Charlie Mortdecai Novel

by Kyril Bonfiglioli

Overview

"You couldn't snuggle under the duvet with anything more disreputable and delightful" —Stephen Fry

'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, the inspiration for the character in the film Mortdecai, starring Johnny Depp, 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.

Customer Reviews

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781468312935
Publisher:	The Overlook Press
Publication date:	11/10/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
Sales rank:	242,308
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928 – 1985) was an art dealer, accomplished fencer, a fair shot with most weapons, and a serial marrier of beautiful women. He claimed to be “abstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco, and talking,” and “loved and respected by all who knew him slightly.”

Editorial Reviews

09/07/2015
In the 1970s, Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) made a splash with Don’t Point That Thing at Me and two other humorous mysteries featuring Charlie Mortdecai, a former art dealer who’s often on the wrong side of the law. Completed by British humorist Brown (Hello Goodbye Hello) and originally published in 1996, this first U.S. edition of the witty fourth and final Charlie Mortdecai mystery centers on the death of Bronwen Fellworthy—a fellow and tutor at Scone College, Oxford, Mortdecai’s alma mater—who perished instantly when her motorcar collided with an omnibus. Mortdecai, who considers Fellworthy “perhaps the only wholly unacceptable woman I have encountered in a long and varied experience,” gets involved in the investigation thanks to, among others, Det. Chief Insp. Albert H. Sermon, who makes him a “Special Detective Inspector with Detached Duties.” Fans of Jonathan Gash’s Lovejoy mysteries (The Judas Pair, etc.) will find a lot to like. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

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.

Booklist (starred review)

A rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness

Julian Barnes

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