Kyril Bonfiglioli Books In Order

Mortdecai Books In Order

  1. Don’t Point That Thing at Me (1972)
  2. Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976)
  3. After You With the Pistol (1979)
  4. The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery (1996)
  5. All the Tea in China (1978)
  6. The Mortdecai ABC (1999)

Anthologies edited

Mortdecai Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Kyril Bonfiglioli Books Overview

Don’t Point That Thing at Me

The deliciously nasty, highly entertaining, comic masterpiece of a thriller a cult favorite of Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes. A cult classic in the UK since its first publication there in the 1970s, Don’t Point That Thing at Me is the hilarious and dark humored crime thriller featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai: degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave about Piccadilly. With his thuggish manservant Jock, Mortdecai endures all manner of nastiness involving secret police, angry foreign governments, stolen paintings, and dead clients, all just to make a dishonest living while decked out in the most stylish garb and drinking the most bizarre alcoholic cocktails. Don’t miss the brilliant mixture of comedy, crime, and suspense.

Something Nasty in the Woodshed

Life always seems to be more complicated than it should be for Charlie Mortdecai: degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and confirmed coward. Something Nasty in the Woodshed finds Charlie exiled from London due to his growing unpopularity on account of some shady art deals. Taking refuge in a country estate on the Channel Island of Jersey, he embarks on a well intended hedonistic interlude. But his vacation soon morphs into a macabre manhunt, as Charlie seeks to expose a local rapist whose modus operandi bears a striking resemblance to that of a warlock from ancient British mythology known as The Beast of Jersey.

After You With the Pistol

Cult classics in the UK since their first publication there in the 1970s, Kyril Bonfiglioli’s wickedly fun mysteries featuring the Honorable Charlie Mortdecai degenerate aristocrat, amoral art dealer, seasoned epicurean, unwilling assassin, and general knave about Picadilly are favorites of Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes, among others. Charlie s back in After You With the Pistol, along with his new bride, Joanna, and his thuggish manservant, Jock. He s also still drinking too much whiskey and anything else he can get his hands on which makes it all the more difficult to figure out what the beautiful and fabulously wealthy Joanna is up to when she tries to convince Charlie to kill the Queen. Suffice it to say, Joanna is not quite what she seems. Don’t miss this brilliant mixture of comedy, crime, and suspense.

The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

Kyril Bonfiglioli’s final novel follows the Hon. Charlie Mortdecai from adventure to misadventure via Jersey and Moscow to a final showdown in a Buckinghamshire bungalow of unparalleled hideousness. Tackling en route an unhealthy sprinkling of well seasoned academics, a cryptic monk, an aristocratic Chief Constable, and more spies than you could shoehorn into a black stretch limo, Mordecai finds himself embroiled in another mission of international insecurity. Left unfinished at the time of the author’s death, the celebrated satirist and parodist Craig Brown supplies the penultimate, plot resolving chapter.

All the Tea in China

Kyril Bonfiglioli, the groundbreaking satirist whose writing The New Yorker described as ‘an unholy collaboration between P. G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming,’ was truly a writer ahead of his time. In this hilarious novel, Bonfiglioli takes us back in time to an ironical maritime romp Master and Commander by way of Monty Python.

Inspired by a shotgun blast in the seat of his breeches, young Karli Van Cleef quits his native Holland to seek his fortune. He arrives in early Victorian London and soon he is turning a pretty profit. But Karli sees that true opportunity flowers in India’s fields of opium poppies and the treaty ports of the China coast. So he takes a berth in an opium clipper hell bent for the Indies.

It is a journey beset with perils. Karli is confronted by the mountainous seas, high piled plates of curry, and the ferocious penalties of the Articles of War. He survives the malice of the Boers, the hospitality of anthropophagi, and the horrors of Lancashire cooking. En route he acquires some interesting diseases, dangerous friends and enemies, a fortune, and a wife almost as good as new.

Fans and newcomers alike will revel in this picaresque tale of the early years of one of the men who helped make Britain great for a consideration.

The Mortdecai ABC

The novels of Kyril Bonfiglioli have achieved something like cult status since they were first published in the seventies. Admired by writers as different as Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes, Susan Hill and Craig Brown, they portray an unsettling world where louche characters perform unspeakable deeds while maintaining a life of apparent ease and sophistication. But who was this writer who shared the same profession art dealing as his main character, Charlie Mortdecai, and professed to share similar tastes and talents too? What lay behind the smokescreen that he chose to throw up? He was, he said, ‘abstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco and talking’, ‘a dedicated marrier of beautiful women’ and ‘a fair shot with most weapons’. Using the ABC formula beloved by Kyril Bonfiglioli himself, Margaret Bonfiglioli his second wife has woven a fascinating portrait of this most enigmatic of writers and provided an intriguing guide to the books he wrote. The truth turns out to be scarcely more credible than the self descriptions. Of Italo Slovene descent, the son of a emigre antiquarian bookseller specializing in natural history, Bonfiglioli saw service as a regular soldier in West Africa before arriving at Oxford as a widower in the 1950s with two young children. After graduating, he set himself up as an art dealer in the city, at exactly the moment in the sixties brilliantly captured in the books when the art world was becoming truly trendy. It was then that he discovered his Tintoretto…
Margaret Bonfiglioli builds up a complex picture of a man who loved art and literature as much as he loved action, who fled from business to write books. As well as the ABC of his life and works, ‘The Mortdecai ABC‘ contains Bonfiglioli’s pungent editorials for ‘Science Fantasy’, the science fiction magazine he edited, a number of short stories that he never collected into a book, and some illuminating correspondence with his wife and children, and with his publishers. The result is a witty and unusual book that is the perfect guide, and tribute, to the world of Kyril Bonfiglioli.

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