All the Tea in China

'Never before had I seen, glaring from the eyes of another man, the clear intention to kill me and the certain knowledge that he could. There is no lonelier terror.'

After an act of lechery anyone but a close relative might forgive, Karli Mortdecai Van Cleef leaves Holland with his uncle's buckshot lodged in the seat of his breeches. Discretion being the least-idiotic part of valour he hides out in teeming London's tea shops and opium dens. And knowing an opportunity when he sups upon one, young Karli throws in his lot with an opium clipper bound for China's high seas. So begins a swaggering, rip-snorting, buckler-swashing tale about one of the men who - for a reasonable fee - made Britain great.

'You couldn't snuggle under the duvet with anything more disreputable and delightful.' Stephen Fry