He immediately sold it for pounds 40,000 - a not inconsiderable sum that could buy you quite a few rounds back in the Sixties.As his widow, Margaret, has pointed out, that Resurrection, or ideas vaguely inspired by it, tends to crop up again and again in his fiction. Both Charlie and Jock, for example, appear to die at the conclusion of Don't Point That Thing At Me, but bounce back - Jock minus one eye - for the sequel. Shame there's no room here for the one about Bonfiglioli, the IRA hard man, and the pub that wouldn't serve our hero a drink.Bonfiglioli - "Bon" to his loved ones - was the sort of man to whom extraordinary things happened with disconcerting regularity; his biographer will have a lot of fun Here, let one anecdote stand for dozens of others. Let's be frank: he was rather too vigorous and relentless a bon viveur, and his last years, passed mainly in Jersey and the Irish Republic, were often drunken and often sad, though seldom lacking in incident. He was also, among other things, a soldier in West Africa (where he became a sabre champion and first-class shot), a mature student of English at Balliol, an assistant at the Ashmolean (where he astonished the staff with the precision of his eye and the range of his visual memory), a columnist for the Oxford Mail, a lecturer on antiques, the editor of a science-fiction magazine, and a stout-hearted, stout-framed bon viveur.

Bonfiglioli underlined the point by prefacing his first Mortdecai novel with the admonition: "This is not an autobiographical novel: it is about some other portly, dissolute, immoral and middle-aged art dealer.""Art dealer" was just one of Bonfiglioli's callings. Far more importantly, all the usual Bonfiglioli elements are present and correct: Charlie's chronic guzzling of rich foodstuffs and hard liquors, particularly of the 12-year-old variety ("We burst in, fell upon the nutritious fluid with beastly snarls - Hogarth or Rowlandson would have whipped out their sketchbooks in a trice..."); Charlie's unsettlingly copious store of out-of-the-way knowledge ("I said that my first problem concerned the `tierced in pairle reversed' of the von Haldermanstettens: a famous heraldic crux..."); Charlie's caddishness and misogyny ("I was not going to take that sort of thing from any mere sex-object, least of all the wife of my personal bosom..."); and Charlie's faithful thug-cum-manservant, the psychopathic Jeeves to his depraved Bertie, the terrifying Jock Strapp: "He is not quite sane and never quite sober, but he can still pop out seven streetlights with nine shots from his old Luger while ramming his monstrous motorbike through heavy after- theatre traffic..."Shrewd readers will no doubt have guessed by now that, fantastical and downright damn-fool as Charlie's exploits generally are, the character himself has rather more than a faint tincture of autobiography in his makeup. Still, credit where it's due and so forth: thanks to Craig Brown, the world of letters is richer by one ripe new comic confection.I'll leave it to the reviewers to tangle with the job of explaining the plot, which (as usual) is an outlandish, Heath Robinson affair which serves more as an excuse for jokes and set-pieces than your standard suspense machine.Let's just say that it deals mainly with the suspicious death of an Oxford "she-don", boasts various sinister capers involving Russian spies and Dominican monks, and that the only mysterious thing about the facial growth referred to in the title is the enigma of why Mortdecai continues to cultivate the unsightly thing so stubbornly despite his (gorgeous, fragrant etc ) wife's refusal to resume conjugal negotiations until he has shaved the offending article off. Those who have sung, muttered or typed his praises include the likes of Julian Barnes, Stephen Fry and the noted parodist Craig Brown; it's the last of these worthies who has finally come to our rescue by completing the fourth and final part of what may now be called a tetralogy, The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery.Actually, this was a somewhat less than epic job of reconstructive pastiche for Mr Brown, since Bonfiglioli had completed 20 out of the 21 chapters which make up this shortish book; it seems somehow expressive of his idiosyncratic working methods that the unfinished chapter in question was not the final, but the penultimate one. He wrote them out of narrative sequence.) He was also the author of a knockabout historical novel concerning one of Charlie Mortdecai's more raffish ancestors, All The Tea in China (1978), plus a few short stories and assorted literary oddments, and that was about it. Those of us who are unhealthily obsessed by Bonfiglioli's juicy, succulent prose - part PG Wodehouse, part Raymond Chandler, part Alan Clark's Diaries, seasoned well with some dashes of recondite learning, served chilled with a long, thin slice of pure horror - have thus far had to content ourselves with endless re-readings of the so-called Mortdecai Trilogy.Bonfiglioli, by the way, enjoys a nicer class of fan. (And, before you set indignantly quivering pen to paper: yes, I am aware that these titles look as if they're listed in the wrong order.

At the time of his death, Bonfiglioli had published just three Mortdecai books - Don't Point That Thing At Me (1973), After You With the Pistol (1979) and Something Nasty in the Woodshed (1976). Charlie Mortdecai is the improbably named protagonist of a series of nasty, brutish, short and blissfully funny thrillers by the yet more improbably named Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928-1985; yes, he really existed; no, this article is not a spoof). For this is the week in which Charlie Mortdecai rises from the grave Allow me to expand a little. This week, we will be greeting the dawn - notwithstanding our hard-won hangovers - with a forgiving smile playing about our lips, a blithe ditty in our hearts and a gentle fizz of excitement in our glands.

This week, we will be as merry as an Aristotelean perusing his spanking new edition of the long-lost second book of the Poetics (the one about comedy), of a Shakespearean waiting for the curtain to go up on the immoderately delayed premiere of Love's Labour's Won, or - rather closer to the mark - of a diehard Conan Doyle fan panting over the hitherto unknown caper in which Sherlock and his omniscient brother Mycroft team up to track down Hannibal Lecter. THIS week, hundreds, possibly even thousands of true and not-so true Brits will be strolling the streets and lanes of our green and pleasant land with a noticeably jauntier gait. The unknown glitters like an Eastern toy, teasing and elusive. Touching without understanding corrupts, she explains at one point. It is sobering to realise that if this is true, we are doomed to corrupt almost everything we explore.. "Contempt for those who merely contemplate", she says of those who cannot escape from "might" to "do". "We affect each other, one might even say afflict each other," she reveals, describing the relationship between her family members.