He is tall, pale, curly-haired, thickening a little and a trifle older than me. Let us say fifty.

On the Other Hand

His wife is tiny, sweet, silly and called Violet, if you’ll believe it. Sam calls her The Shrinker. She does, indeed, shrink from most things; I’ve watched her often. Sam treats her with amused tolerance but secretly adores her, if I may quote from the women’s weeklies. She is nervously vulnerable and can blush and even faint, just as they used to in the olden days.

On rare occasions she is an inspired cook but most of the time she burns or otherwise ruins food but, luckily, Sam is not greedy and can cook. I must not pretend to any knowledge of their nuptial relationships but I should think on the whole probably not. He treats her with a courtesy so elaborate that you might be forgiven for thinking that he hated her, but you would be wrong.

There is something vaguely mysterious about Violet’s mother who is always referred to as ‘poor mummy’. She is, I suppose, either potty or an alcoholic or kleptomaniac or some such nonsense and there are times when I wonder a little about Violet herself: her verbal habits are odd and she tends to say things like ‘rabbits breed like hot cakes’.

And Now, For My Last Trick

This is the narrator, or, if you’ll pardon the accidence, me. My name is Charlie Mortdecai (I was actually christened Charlie: I think my mother was subtly getting at my father) and I’m a Honble because my father used to be – and my brother (God rot his soul) is – a Baron, which is a kind of failed Viscount, you might say, if you cared about that sort of nonsense. As my father did.

For the time being I live just a few furlongs across the fields from the two houses in half of a lovely mansion (a mansion, according to estate agents and other housemongers, is a house with two staircases) called Wutherings with my absurdly beautiful new Austrian-Jewish-American wife, Johanna, and my equally unbelievable one-eyed, one-fanged thug, Jock. (I’m by way of being an art-dealer, you see, which is why I have to keep a thug.) I’m not here permanently; I haven’t enough money to make it worth while dodging taxes and my wife has too much of it to bother. I really live in London but, although I’m not exactly persona non grata there, a particular branch of the police sort of prefers me to live outside the place for a while. You wouldn’t be interested in the reason and there’s nothing in the fine print that says I can’t be a little shady, is there?