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) executive: 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. American reviewers praised their ‘brazenly outrageous gallows humour’ as ‘hilarious and offbeat’ and Augustus Mandrell was described as having ‘the elusiveness of the Scarlet Pimpernel, the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes, the assassin soul of James Bond and the raffish charm of Raffles.’ The most distinguished American critic Anthony Boucher called the books ‘audacious and amusing’ and although not widely published in the UK, the ‘Mandrell Commissions’ acquired at least one dedicated British admirer, the internationally-bestselling thriller writer Lee Child who describes them as: ‘Exciting, hard-edged, full of tradecraft, whimsical eccentricity and rough-hewn philosophy.’ Now the first three volumes of the Augustus Mandrell saga, each containing four inter-linked ‘commissions’ set in the closing stages and immediate aftermath of World War II, are available simultaneously as Top Notch Thrillers. —
