After You with the Pistol

After you with the Pistol - the second Charlie Mortdecai novel by Kyril Bonfiglioli, soon to be a major film starring Johnny Depp

Some of the nastiest, funniest and most enjoyable crime writing of the last fifty yearsGuardian

Mr Mortdecai, why do you suppose I and my superiors have preserved you from death at very very great trouble and expense?

Charlie Mortdecai - degenerate aristocrat and victim of his own larceny and licentiousness - has no idea. Until it is made clear to him that he must marry the beautiful, sex-crazed and very, very rich Johanna Krampf. The fly in the ointment is that Johanna thinks nothing of involving poor Charlie in her life-threatening schemes such as monarch-assassination, heroin smuggling and - worst of all - survival training at a college for feminist spies. Perhaps, its all in a good cause - if only Charlie can live long enough to find out.

A rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness Julian Barnes

Splendidly enjoyable. The jokes are excellent, but the most horrible things keep happeningSunday Telegraph

At least of Hammett-Chandler weight, and in many ways surpasses themThe Times Literary Supplement

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the three Mortdecai novels, a fourth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor), and left a fifth unpublished at his death.