After you with the Pistol - the second Charlie Mortdecai novel by Kyril Bonfiglioli, soon to be a major film starring Johnny Depp

'Some of the nastiest, funniest and most enjoyable crime writing of the last fifty years' Guardian

'Mr Mortdecai, why do you suppose I and my superiors have preserved you from death at very very great trouble and expense?'

Charlie Mortdecai - degenerate aristocrat and victim of his own larceny and licentiousness - has no idea. Until it is made clear to him that he must marry the beautiful, sex-crazed and very, very rich Johanna Krampf. The fly in the ointment is that Johanna thinks nothing of involving poor Charlie in her life-threatening schemes such as monarch-assassination, heroin smuggling and - worst of all - survival training at a college for feminist spies. Perhaps, it's all in a good cause - if only Charlie can live long enough to find out.

'A rare mixture of wit and imaginative unpleasantness' Julian Barnes

'Splendidly enjoyable. The jokes are excellent, but the most horrible things keep happening' Sunday Telegraph

'At least of Hammett-Chandler weight, and in many ways surpasses them' The Times Literary Supplement

Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England in 1928 of an English mother and Italo-Slovene father. After studying at Oxford and five years in the army, he took up a career as an art dealer, like his eccentric creation Charlie Mortdecai. He lived in Oxford, Lancashire, Ireland and Jersey, where he died in 1985. He wrote the three Mortdecai novels, a fourth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor), and left a fifth unpublished at his death.

All the Tea in China - a Mortdecai novel by Kyril Bonfiglioli, soon to be a major film starring Johnny Depp

'One of the funniest writers ever' Uncut

After committing a crime anyone but a close relative might forgive, Karli Mortdecai Van Cleef leaves Holland double-quick with his uncle's buckshot lodged firmly in the seat of his breeches. Discretion being the least-idiotic part of valour he decides to hide far away in London, among the tea shops and opium dens. On savouring these Eastern delicacies and knowing an opportunity when he sups upon one, young Karli throws in his lot with an opium clipper bound for China's high seas.

Life on the ocean waves, however, is full of perils for an officer and his sensitive digestive tract: mountainous waves, an encounter with a malodorous slave ship, the captain's wife's pulse-racingly brief wardrobe, several hordes of pirates, mutiny, the ship's cook's fondness for curry - to name but a few.

All the Tea in China is a swaggering, rip-snorting, buckler-swashing tale about one of the men who - for a reasonable fee - made Britain great.

'For those who have learnt to relish his elegant, nasty thrillers, Bonfiglioli is a name hard to forget. This farrago represents a change from the thrillers - a good clean salt-water yarn for the decadent' Irish Press

'Shows his customary inventive comedy and zest for language' Sunday Times

'Bonfiglioli deserves better than cult status' Independent

Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England in 1928 of an English mother and Italo-Slovene father. After studying at Oxford and five years in the army, he took up a career as an art dealer, like his eccentric creation Charlie Mortdecai. He lived in Oxford, Lancashire, Ireland and Jersey, where he died in 1985. He wrote four Charlie Mortdecai novels, and a fifth historical Mortdecai novel (about a distinguished ancestor).