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The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery by Kyril Bonfiglioli and Craig Brown
The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery by Kyril Bonfiglioli and Craig Brown
The art of the black comedy thriller is a particularly difficult
one to bring off successfully: err too much on the side of the
parodic, and the whole edifice collapses. But the reader has every
right to expect bitter humour along with an outrageous narrative,
and here Bonfiglioli (posthumously assisted by Britain's top satirist,
Craig Brown) delivers satisfyingly. The Hon Charlie Mortdecai
(hero of the wonderful Mortdecai trilogy) is back, answering a
call from his old Oxford college who have asked him to track down
the killer of a little-liked "she-don". As Charlie (and
his burgeoning moustache) barrel through Jersey, Oxford, Moscow
and London to a hideous Buckinghamshire bungalow, the reader is
in for a hilariously bizarre cast of characters and suspects from
cryptic Dominican monks to implausibly aristocratic chief constables.
The ridiculously lengthy catalogue of the book's many uses printed
on the jacket (including "Onanism in 4th Century China, Lavishly
Unillustrated") gives a good indication of the quirky humour
in this delightful parody of the mystery novel.
