Excellent. Humorous. After watching the movie with Johnny Depp as Charlie Mortdecai the narration comes into my head with his voice and accent. The plot isn’t quite up to that of Don’t Point that Thing At Me. Nevertheless a good tale with the reprobate that is Charlie Mortdecai accompanied again by his trusty Jock.

Note: The book is the product of the 1970s and is clearly not sensitive to current views on political correctness from a sex or racial perspective.

I can understand people having a problem with this to some extent, but it’s no different from books of previous eras of other sorts (Haggard, Christie to name but two).

The prevailing stereotypes, attitudes, thoughts and behaviour at the time were not thought to be inappropriate. One has to take this into consideration when reading. It doesn’t take much intellectual capacity to sandbox the attitudes, appreciating them for a reflection of dated, less diverse sensibilities.

Well, that was weird.
Some call it Jeeves-and-Wooster crossed with James Bond. Maybe.
There's certainly some astonishingly clever wordplay.

I particularly admired, "Then the Countess rose and made her way with fragile dignity to the door, where she let out a fart of such frightening power and timbre that I feared she had done herself a mischief."

We come to realize that Mortdecai is very clever and capable, but perhaps not quite clever and capable enough. Let's just say that at the end he is in a very low position indeed, so low that one wonders how there could possibly be a sequel, or how the remarkable Jock could be in it.

But I intend to find out.

Recommended? I'm not sure. This book certainly isn't for everyone.
Maybe get it from a library rather than buying a copy.

This is a stupid, ridiculous mess of a book. I loved it.

#2 in the Mortdecai series, and it's probably better to have read #1 first. There are a few specific references back to #1, but mostly it's so you already know Mortdecai and Jock.

Note that this was written in 1979 (reissued 2014 in the form I read), so there will be a few things that are less politically correct than current readers expect. Not much though.

Mortdecai keeps getting manipulated - be several different people - into impossibly difficult situations; but each time the author has set it up more or less believably. And he's consistently just capable enough to keep himself alive. To be clear, he's against some rather heavy hitters, and we keep seeing that he is (or was) one himself.

Wodehouse meets secreat agent meets master thief, with complete disrespect for anything except fun. Read them all!

Genius.

I think I enjoyed this more having read the first recently and got used to the language. Its a lot less serious than the previous novel and more bawdy in tone and consequently I found this more enjoyable.

No.1 better

It was a little underwhelming, as I had higher expectations after the previous episode ("After you with the pistol").

It had been a couple of years since I read the first book in this series - and may be that's why I found this so discombobulating at first. This is a bonkers romp and once I got my head around it, I quite enjoyed it but I'm not sure I'll be reading the third one.