The Best Insult Evah !
Kyril Bonfiglioli wrote only five books, including the Mortdecai Triology, — and I think these slightly decline as they go — yet to have any excellent comedic writing in the last half of the last century is rather rare, and at the top of his form he was brilliant.
Sometimes the wire recorder was on, sometimes not. Probably another was on all the time, inside one of the briefcases. I got the impression that they were becoming very bored with the whole thing, but I was by then so sleepy with food and liquor and exhaustion that I could only concentrate with difficulty. Much of the time I simply told them the truth — a course Sir Henry Wotton ( another man who went abroad to lie ) recommended as a way of baffling your adversaries. Another chap once said, ‘If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness.’ I wrapped, profusely. But you know, playing a sort of fugue with truth and mendacity makes one lose, after a while, one’s grip on reality. My father always warned me against lying where the truth would do; he had early realized that my memory — essential equipment of the liar — was faulty. ‘Moreover,’ he used to say, ‘a lie is a work of art. We sell works of art, we don’t give them away. Eschew falsehood, my son.’ That is why I never lie when selling works of art. Buying them is another matter, of course.
…
‘Tell me, Mr. Mortdecai,’ said one of them in an offhand, casual way as they rose to go, “what did you think of Mrs. Krampf ?’
‘Her heart,’ I said bitterly, ‘is like spittle on the palm that the Tartar slaps – no telling which way it will pitch.’
‘That’s very nice, Mr. Mortdecai,’ said one, nodding appreciatively, ‘that’s M. P. Shiel, isn’t it ?’
…
The sheriff came in and gave us back the contents of our pockets, including my Banker’s Special. The cartridges were in a separate envelope. He was no longer urbane, he hated us now very much.
‘I have been instructed,’ he said, like a man spitting out fishbones, ‘not to book you for the murder you committed yesterday. There is a cab outside and I would like for you to get into it and get out of this county and never come back.’ He shut his eyes very tightly and kept them shut as though hoping to wake up in a different time stream, one in which C. Mortdecai and J. Strapp had never been born.
We tiptoed out.
The deputies were in the outer office, standing tall, wearing the mindless sneers of their kind. I walked up close to the larger and nastier of the two.
‘Your mother and father only met once,’ I said carefully, ‘and money changed hands. Probably a dime.’
Kyril Bonfiglioli : Don’t Point That Thing At Me
