Of All the Bloody Cheek: Volume 1 in the Commissions of Augustus Mandrell

Meet Augustus Mandrell – but be careful when you do… Mandrell Ltd. is a specialist firm for whom no ‘commission’ – providing the remuneration is considerable and forthcoming – is impossible. Success and complete discretion is assured by the company’s most efficient and experienced (in fact, only) Augustus Mandrell. Mandrell Ltd. always guarantees satisfaction in their one and only sphere of business – murder – but if you are thinking of hiring their expertise, be careful. No one is sure who Augustus Mandrell is, where he came from or where he will turn up next. He is a man of many disguises and expert assassin and he doesn’t leave witnesses. Written with tongue firmly in cheek in a haughty English ‘voice’ (as if P.G. Wodehouse had turned to the Dark Side) but actually by an American, Frank McAuliffe, the three volumes of the ‘Mandrell Commissions’ became instant classics of comic crime-writing when first published between 1965 and 1971.