Bonfiglioli revisited

It strikes us as rather coincidental that Leo Carey’s appreciation of the writer of the Charlie Mortdecai novels appears in the New Yorker a mere day after scouring the bookshelves at the local Big Box and checking out the three-volume edition from Penguin. Suffice it to say that after reading this long treatise, we’re going right back to the chain store and picking up that omnibus. Here’s some hint as to why:

One reason that Bonfiglioli’s books have never quite found the readership they deserve is that, although they are ostensibly crime novels, they are far too badly behaved—too full of improbability and capricious digression—to please crime fans. The plot of “Don’t Point That Thing at Me” (first published in 1973) is too complicated to be properly explained, and much too silly. Briefly, Mortdecai arranges the theft of the Goya for an American oil tycoon who has also become involved in blackmailing someone high up in the British government. Pretty soon, the secret services of Britain and America, and maybe even the associates of the tycoon, want Mortdecai dead, for various reasons. As chaotic as it is, this plot looks positively Aristotelian compared with that of the sequel, “After You with the Pistol” (1979), a teetering construction involving Chinese tongs, white slavers, and a plot to kill the Queen of England.

Demented and weird. Just what we like.