Kyril Bonfiglioli was born on the south coast of England of an English mother and Italo-Slovene father. After studying at Oxford and five years in the army, he took up a career as an art dealer, like his eccentric creation Charlie Mortdecai. He wrote three Mortdecai novels, of which this is the second, a fourth historical novel about an ancestor of Mortdecai, and left a fifth unfinished at his death in 1985.