Don’t Point That Thing at Me.

Bonfiglioli, Kyril (author).

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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.