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The Mortdecai ABC by Kyril Bonfiglioli (Hardcover, 2001)

World of Books Ltd (10367588)

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Admired by writers as different as Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes, Susan Hill and Craig Brown, they portray an unsettling world where louche characters perform unspeakable deeds while maintaining a life of apparent ease and sophistication.

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The novels of Kyril Bonfiglioli have achieved something like cult status since they were first published in the seventies. Admired by writers as different as Stephen Fry and Julian Barnes, Susan Hill and Craig Brown, they portray an unsettling world where louche characters perform unspeakable deeds while maintaining a life of apparent ease and sophistication. But who was this writer who shared the same profession -art-dealing - as his main character, Charlie Mortdecai, and professed to share similar tastes and talents too? What lay behind the smokescreen that he chose to throw up? He was, he said, abstemious in all things except drink, food, tobacco and talking , a dedicated marrier of beautiful women and a fair shot with most weapons . Using the ABC formula beloved by Kyril Bonfiglioli himself, Margaret Bonfiglioli - his second wife - has woven a fascinating portrait of this most enigmatic of writers and provided an intriguing guide to the books he wrote. The truth turns out to be scarcely more credible than the self-descriptions. Of Italo-Slovene descent, the son of a emigre antiquarian bookseller specializing in natural history, Bonfiglioli saw service as a regular soldier in West Africa before arriving at Oxford as a widower in the 1950s with two young children. After graduating, he set himself up as an art dealer in the city, at exactly the moment in the sixties - brilliantly captured in the books - when the art world was becoming truly trendy. It was then that he discovered his Tintoretto...Margaret Bonfiglioli builds up a complex picture of a man who loved art and literature as much as he loved action, who fled from business to write books. As well as the ABC of his life and works, The Mortdecai ABC contains Bonfiglioli's pungent editorials for Science Fantasy , the science-fiction magazine he edited, a number of short stories that he never collected into a book, and some illuminating correspondence with his wife and children, and with his publishers. The result is a witty and unusual book that is the perfect guide, and tribute, to the world of Kyril Bonfiglioli.