Something Nasty in the Woodshed is the find instalment in the Mortdecai trilogy. Charlie and Johanna have decamped to the Isle of Jersey because certain authorities in London have suggested to Charlie that he not show his face in London for a long while.

The wife of one of Charlie's chums is assaulted and raped in her home. Soon after, another of the wives in their circle is also raped. Accounts indicate that the rapes may be linked to a practitioner of witchcraft. Charlie does the obvious thing and arranges for a Satanic Black Mass to entrap the miscreant.

The book has Bonfiglioli's usual quota of arch observations from Charlie, and the ending is good. However I simply could not go along with the idea of building a light-hearted caper story around women being raped. That may have seemed funny in the '70s when the book was first published, but it's far less so now.

I also think this final instalment would have been stronger if it was a continuation of the plot lines of the first two novels. One doesn't get the sense of a story being brought to a conclusion, rather than an additional yarn being tacked onto the end of a two-novel plot. ( )

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review of
Kyril Bonfiglioli's Something Nasty in the Woodshed
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 26, 2014

I enjoy reading crime fiction but doing so is a pretty low priority for me & I don't know enough about the authors to be able to pick out more than a handful that I've ever found very interesting. I like to think that this handful represent la crème de la crème but there may be all sorts of obscure crime fiction writers out there whose work I unjustly neglect. Judging the bk by its cover, Bonfiglioli seemed to have some potential to at least dangle from the edges of the handful - & that's where I place him now that I've read this bk.

The bk's cover led me to expect the protagonist, Charlie Mortdecai, to be an 'anti-hero' of sorts - a not particularly likable character who nonetheless (sortof) solves the crime (or whatnot).. &, yeah, that's what he was for me.. except that he wasn't quite as unlikable as I expected & the bits meant to make him that way weren't that convincing.

Bonfiglioli's actually a pretty literary writer, he's no Mickey Spillane. Each chapter begins w/ an epigraph: "The epigraphs are all by Swinburne, except one which is a palpable forgery." (p 6) "The Swinburne forgery is, in a way, signed." (p 7) I don't really know anything about Swinburne, I may've never read anything by him. The only association I have w/ him is thru a song on The Fugs First Album called "Swineburne Stomp" & attributed to "A. C. Swineburne [&] Ed Sanders". I don't know whether the extra "e" in the Fugs version was something done as a joke to turn "Swin" into "Swine" or a mistake or a way to avoid copyright infringement or what. I didn't try to figure out wch epigraph is the "palpable forgery".

The novel takes place in Jersey Island, a place I know next to nothing about but that interests me b/c it's an independent country that's under the protection of Great Britain but not part of it or a part of France - even tho it's right off France's coast - nor is it part of the European Union (not that that wd've mattered as of the time of this bk's writing). Making things even more politically tricky, I reckon it's more accurate to say that it's right off Brittany's coast - St Helier, Jersey being only an hr & 20 minute ferry ride away from St Malo, Brittany. Brittany being perhaps comparable to the Basque country insofar as its inclusion in France is similarly unpopular as the Basque country's inclusion in Spain is. Jersey has its own language, Jèrriais: "Seyiz les beinv'nus `à Jérri" translating into "Welcome to Jersey" & looking somewhat like French. A French version of the proceeding being something like "Bienvenue à Jersey" w/ "Jersey" probably being something else. Catalan, spoken by the Basque people, being like a mix of French & Castilian (what's generally known as Spanish). Ah! Independence (&/or attempts thereat)!

"Much more important (outside St Helier) are the Honorary Police, who are of course unpaid. They do not wear uniforms — you are supposed to know who they are. Each of the twelve Parishes has a Connétable; under him are the Centeniers, each of whom in theory, protects and disciplines a hundred families and leads five Vingteniers who guard twenty families each. These are all elective posts but elections rarely afford any surprises, if you see what I mean, and in any case there is little competition for these honours.

"No one is legally under arrest in Jersey until a Centenier has tapped him on the shoulder with his absurd, tiny truncheon of office (you can imagine how the Paid Police like that rule)" - p 13

"The Honorary Police of Jersey are used to being teased: all those whom I have had the pleasure of meeting are just, honorable, intelligent and can take a joke." - p 7

The only thing I can remember reading about Jersey prior to reading this novel was The Beast of Jersey, a 'true crime' bk about Edward Paisnel "by his wife Joan Paisnel" (as the bk cover has it) who (according to the bk's back cover) "was a Jekyll and Hyde figure who terrorized the island for eleven years, [who] in 1971 [..] was convicted of thirteen sex offenses against young children."

"Paisnel was obsessed with the powers of evil. In his Hyde moments he wore a hideous rubber mask and nail-studded bracelets. And at home he had a secret room filled with the ritual tools of Black Magic."

SO, I was further engrossed in Something Nasty in the Woodshed when, after the 1st of series of rapes that constitute the central crimes of the story, the similarity of the crime to those of "The Beast" are introduced by the character Sam:

"'The Beast of Jersey,' Sam explained. 'You know, the chap who terrorized the Island for a dozen years; used to creep into children's rooms, carry them out the window, do odd things to them in the fields — not always very nasty — then pop them back into their little beds. The police think that there may have been more than a hundred such assaults but naturally most of them were not reported, for reasons which you will, um, appreciate. He used to wear a rubber mask, most of the victims said that he had an odd smell and he wore bizarre clothes, studded with nails. Just before you moved here they caught a chap called Paisnel, who is now serving thirty years, rightly or wrongly.' - p 27

What the "not always very nasty" instances were, if any, I don't know. Looking thru Joan Paisnel's bk again all the assaults seem nasty enuf to be permanently traumatizing.

"'What was interesting,' Sam went on as I chewed my spleen, 'was that Paisnel kept on saying that it was "all part of something" but he wouldn't say what and he said that when he was arrested he was on his way to meet "certain people" but he wouldn't say whom.'

"'Perfectly obvious,' said George; 'the beggar was one of these witches or witchmasters. It all comes back to me now. The plumber told me all about it when he came in drunk just after Christmas. Seems it wasn't this Paisnel fellow at all, all the locals know who it was, including most of the Honorary Police . . . or did he say Paisnel was just part of it?'

"'That strain again,' murmured Sam, 'it hath a dying fall . . .'

"'Quite right. And this Paisnel had a secret room, hadn't he, with a pottery frog or toad in it and that was supposed to be "part of it " too. And there was one of those Papist Palm Sunday crosses in the car he was nabbed in and they say he screamed when they asked him to touch it.'" - pp 27-28

According to the Wikipedia entry on him, "Edward Paisnel returned to Jersey briefly following his release from prison but moved away due to the strength of local feeling against him. He died in the Isle of Wight in 1994." - ttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Paisnel

Something Nasty in the Woodshed being copyrighted in 1972, Paisnel must've been a fresh topic at the time. Bonfiglioli's choosing Jersey as a location & working The Beast into the plot were intriguing factors in my engagement w/ the bk. But if this had been only a rip-off of a disturbing true crime story I might not've liked it at all in the long run. Instead, Bonfiglioli manages to write a fairly rich tale. He sets the tome by beginning w/ this:

"Seven thousand years ago — give or take a few months — a great deal of water left the North Sea for good reasons of its own, which I cannot recall off-hand, and poured over the lower parts of on North-West Europe, forming the English Channel and effectively separating England from France, to the mutual gratification of both parties (for if it had not happened, you see, we English would have been foreigners and the French would have had to eat bread sauce)." - p 9

So Bonfiglioli works in some scholarliness & has a pretty good sense of humor. He's also pretty damned flippant considering some of the horrors of his plot. After George's wife gets raped, George is sitting in an armchair ruminating:

"' Bloody swine,' he growled. 'Raped my wife. Ruined my wistaria.'

"'I'll send me man round first thing in the morning to have a look at it,' said Sam. 'The wistaraia I mean. They're very tenacious things — soon recover. Wistaria,' he added; gratuitously, it seemed to me." - p 25

"A cold coming I had of it, I don't mind telling you, just the worst time of the year for a vigilante patrol. I believe I've already given you my views about the month of May in the British Isles. This May night, as I picked my glum way down to Belle Etoile Bay, was cold and black as a schoolgirl's heart and the moon — in its last quarter and now quite devoid of the spirit of public service — reminded me only of a Maria Teresa silver dollar which I had once seen clenched between the buttocks of a Somali lady who was, I fancy, no better than she should be. But enough of that." - p 159

These are apparently intended to reinforce the narrator's depiction as sexist. In one scene, Mortdecai's inner monologue runs like this:

"You see, we anti-feminists don't dislike women in the least; we prize. cherish, and pity them. We are compassionate. Goodness, to think of the poor wretches having to waddle through life with all those absurd fatty appendages sticking out of them; to have all the useful part of their lives made miserable by the triple plague of constipation, menstruation and parturition; worst of all, to have to cope with those handicaps with only a kind of fuzzy half-brain — a pretty head randomly filled, like a tiddly-winks cup, with brightly-colored scraps of rubbish — why, it wrings the very heart with pity. You know how your dog sometimes gazes anguishedly at you, its almost human eyes yearning to understand, longing to communicate? You remember how often you have felt that it was on the very brink of breaking through the barrier and joining you? I think that's why you and I are so kind to women, bless 'em. (Moreover, you scarcely ever see them chasing cats or fouling the footpaths.)" - p 59

Contrarily, in the author's prelude of sorts he says: "The fictional narrator is a nasty, waspish man: pray do not confuse him with the author, who is gentle and kind." (p 7) It's not too hard to interpret that as a bit tongue-in-cheek. In general, the perspective as presented thru the narrator is also pretty tongue-in-cheek:

"Nothing really had happened in the newspapers that day, either, except that some Arabs had murdered some Jews, some Jews had retaliated on some Arabs, some Indians had perfected an atomic bomb for dropping on Pakistanis and various assorted Irishmen had murdered each other in unpleasant ways. You really have to hand it to God, you know, he has terrific staying power. Jehovah against Mohammed, Brahma against Allah, Catholic against Protestant: religion really keeps the fun going, doesn't it. If God didn't exist the professional soldiers would have to invent him, wouldn't they?" - pp 44-45

Maybe they did.

The author's, Bonfiglioli's, literateness commingles w/ his dubiously separated narrator's: "Nerciat rubbed shoulders with D. H. Lawrence, the Large Paper set of de Sade (Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare)" (p 84) fits in well enuf as a description of the occultist Earl's library (complete w/ the Spare detail) - but I found the narrator's quoting Borges a bit far-fetched: "Borges remarks that we have chosen our own misfortunes. 'Thus,' he explains, 'every negligence is deliberate . . . every humiliation is penitence . . . every death a suicide.'" (p 101)

&, then: "('This is the last and greatest treason: To do the wrong thing for the right reason' sings Alfred Prufrock, if that's the right way round. And if it matters.)" (p 103) Bonfiglioli's being sly here by having his narrator's 'ignorance' twist the quote around: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason." - T. S. Eliot, from his play "Murder in the Cathedral" Ok, I reckon it's realistic enuf to have the educated narrator quote arguably the most famous poet in Britain, someone whose works he was probably forced to read somewhere along the line.

A part of what makes Something Nasty in the Woodshed as entertaining as it was for me is the way he does manage to squeeze in a variety of topics in a sufficiently plot-consistent way. EG: He has the defrocked priest who's come to conduct a black mass to scare the hypothetically occultist rapist bring up this:

"'Well, two years ago I read a book by a man called Konstantin Raudive. It's a perfectly respectable book and endorsed by respectable scientists. Raudive claims, indeed proves, that he heard gentle chattering and muttering coming from the unused intervals of tape from his recorder. I had had the same experience but had put it down to the random wirless reception . . . er, radio?'" - p 111

It's amazing to me the ways in wch Raudive's theories crop up now & again in my life - thru my own experimenting w/ them in the '70s (probably thanks to Chas Brohawn); to conversation between myself, Alan Lord, & Istvan Kantor (Monty Cantsin) about them in an igloo in Montréal in February, 1983, as part of the 6th International Neoist Apartment festival; to incorporating Raudive recordings into my movie about Franz Kamin: DEPOT (wherein resides the UNDEAD of Franz Kamin) in 2010.

I also found it interesting the way the narrator's & the defrocked priest's description of the state of mind necessary for paranormal experiences jives w/ my own personal experiences:

"I could have told him, had he the wit to ask, that the necessary conditions were that we should have been playing a real game for several hours, that I should have ingested perhaps a third of a bottle of brandy, that I should have been slightly ahead of my table-stakes by virtue of the ordinary run of cards and that, in short, I should have been in that sort of drowsy euphoria where I was effectively asleep in all bodily departments except my card-sense.'

"'You couldn't have put it any better!' cried Eric. 'All the conditions were there, you see: mild fatigue, mild euphoria, mild depression from the brandy — I'll bet your alpha-waves were at something very like ten cycles per second.'" - p 114

Furthermore, my own experiences w/ excessively drinking Pernod jive wonderfully w/ the following:

"For years I had believed that these lines:

'Shot? So quick, so clean an ending?
Oh that was right, lad, that was brave;
Yours was not an ill for mending,
'Twas best to take it to the grave'

were about a horrified young Edwardian who had discovered that he was homosexual. I am in a position to correct literary history in this matter. The lines are about a horrified chap in early middle age who has discovered one morning, that he has not head for Pastis. This, you see, was not the common hangover of commerce, it was a Plague of Egypt with a top-dressing of the Black death." - p 119

Ok, my really bad hangovers have been w/ whiskey but my excess of Pernod mixed w/ water is the only instance of my drinking that I know of that resulted in an almost immediate outbreak of herpes 2. I've never drunk it since.

Is it largely peculiar to mysteries that the main character is obsessed w/ food? Or does such obsessiveness constitute a subgenre across all literature?

"How you deal with the tongue of an ox is as follows: you bid the butcher keep it in his pickle-tub for a fortnight, brushing aside his fanciful pleas that it should be taken out after eight days. Then you rinse it lovingly and thrust it into the very smallest casserole that will contain it, packing the interstices with many an onion, carrot and other pot-herb. Cover it with heel-taps of wine, beer, cider and, if your cook will let you, the ripe, rich jelly from the bottom of the dripping-pot. Let it ruminate in the back of your oven until you can bear it no longer; whip it out, transfix it to a chopping-board with a brace of forks and — offer up grateful prayers to Whomever gave tongues to the speechless ox." pp 127-128

All in all, a good read in the category of fun-to-read-distracting-not-very-important. In other words, I was, once again, distracted from the loneliness of daily life. ( )

Though the subject of rape is definitely not one for amusement, it’s the only sensible choice to make the plot of the third Mortdecai book work, though it tarnishes an all too easily worked out (for me at least) implausible plot filled with tangents. Still, I continue to love Mortdecai’s manservant/bodyguard, Jock, most of all, and if you’re one upset by politically incorrect classism and sexism, then none of these books are for you. Anyone who’s reached book three knows how antisocial and pretty much anti anything except booze, Mortdecai is. Take him as he is or don’t. There are some classic lines, as always. There are two other books (one finished by another writer when the author died and murmurs are only one is worth a read) but for the moment I’m unsure if this is where I will stop. ( )

The third in the Charlie Mortdecai trilogy is good, and necessary devouring if you've started from the beginning, but still doesn't live up the the standard set by the original, Don't Point That Thing At Me. ( )