Yesterday I did some Christmas shopping in Jermyn and St James’s streets. The only gift that I know will be well received is my present to me.
Two things are surprising. First that whoever borrowed Kyril Bonfiglioli’s trilogy didn’t return it and secondly that I have never written about this author and his creation, Mortdecai.
Do you know each other? No? Then let me introduce The Hon Charlie Mortdecai – “degenerate aristocrat and amoral art dealer” – son of Bernard, First Baron Mortdecai of Silverdale in the County Palatine of Lancaster. Gosh you haven’t met Kyril either. Wiki can you make the introduction?
Kyril Bonfiglioli (born Cyril Emmanuel George Bonfiglioli; 29 May 1928 – 3 March 1985) was an English art-dealer, magazine editor and comic novelist. His eccentric and witty Mordecai novels have attained cult status since his death.
The New Yorker avers that the books are “the result of an unholy collaboration between PG Wodehouse and Ian Fleming” but that is wide of the mark. The Sunday Telegraph makes the same mistake: “Like Bertie and Jeeves, Charlie and Jock make an imperishable double act … funny, chilling and sometimes surprisingly moving”. In fact the genre is a witty and violent take on the novels of Leslie Charteris, Dornford Yates and Sapper.
There is an anti-hero, “I am Charlie Mortdecai. I like art and money and dirty jokes and drink. I am very successful.” There is his servant, Jock. “Jock is a sort of anti-Jeeves: silent resourceful, respectful even, when the mood takes him, but sort of drunk all the time, really, and fond of smashing people’s faces in. You can’t run a fine-arts business these days without a thug and Jock is one of the best … ”
There is a policeman who, natch, was at the same “goodish second-rate Public School” as Mortdecai: Extra Chief Superintendent Martland. ” Somewhere in the trash he reads Martland has read that heavy men walk with surprising lightness and grace; as a result he trips about like a portly elf hoping to be picked up by a leprechaun. In he pranced, all silent and catlike and absurd, buttocks swaying noiselessly.”
There was a disastrous film adaptation starring Johnny Depp in 2015. It is to be avoided at all costs. I am looking forward to re-reading the trilogy over Christmas to take my mind off Harold Nicolson’s diaries.