Don't Point That Thing at Me - Kyril Bonfiglioli

Don't Point That Thing At Me, After You With The Pistol and Something Nasty in the Woodshed have all recently been re-released by Penguin with gorgeous new covers, just in time for the David Koepp directed Mortdecai movie starring Johnny Depp. For a long time prior to this, they were only available as a collected trilogy - the edition I am reading.

Now, tackling even just one book of a collected trilogy makes me feel nervous and inadequate. Even though I know I'm only reading essentially one third of the book on this occasion, it's still a fair tome with teeny tiny writing. Eeep! It's under 170 pages though so with a bit of will power I should manage it.

Three chapters in, and the prose is very very flowery, yet with a uneasy amount of violence loitering in the background. A back cover quote from the Sunday Telegraph (and indeed a front cover quote from the New Yorker on the latter editions) compares Charlie Mortdecai and his manservant Jock to Jeeves and Wooster, and there is a kind of faded gentry feeling to the pair, but I'm pretty sure Wooster never underwent arse torture in the opening chapters of a book.

The dialogue is often so snappy and Mortdecai unlike any character you've met before, save for maybe Withnail, it can sometimes read like a foreign language. Parts of the book feel like A Clockwork Orange, in that if you keep reading, your brain pieces together the conversation and you get the gist of what is being said, but if you actually think about it as you read, you understand maybe 40% of the words.

Having said that, it's dastardly and impish, and great fun. I just have to stop my brow from furrowing as I read. Premature wrinkles!

Read more about Charlie and Bonfiglioli in this Guardian article