Forget Johnny Depp in Mortdecai: read the much funnier Bonfiglioli novels

The Charlie Mortdecai thrillers are darker and stranger than any film of them could be. Sam Leith raises a glass to the original Bon vivant

Twenty seconds or so into the trailer for his new film, a moustachioed Johnny Depp introduces himself: “Eigh em Lord Chally Mortdecai!” His accent is somewhere between Terry-Thomas and Inspector Clouseau; his moustache appears to have been glued on with Araldite. High camp is, it seems, the way the producers have decided to go in adapting Kyril Bonfiglioli’s sequence of novels for the big screen.

Adapting them in the first place is an idea so startlingly bizarre as to make you wonder if anyone actually read them before green-lighting the project. These four sort-of-comedy sort-of-thrillers about a cowardly and unprincipled art spiv called Charlie Mortdecai and his thuggish manservant Jock were backward-looking even when they came out in the 1970s, with their exultant snobbery, conspicuous streak of misogyny, and their backing cast of stereotypical Jews, funny-talking Chinese people, boilerish lady academics and inbred natives of the Channel Islands.

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