Forrest Leo's The Gentleman (Tuesday Intros & Teaser Tuesday)

It's Tuesday again which means it's time for another round of teasing! "First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday Intros" is the first paragraph (or two) of a book being read now or in the future and is hosted by Bibliophile by the Sea. "Teaser Tuesday" from Books and a Beat asks for a random line or two from anywhere in the book currently being read.

Since I finished the amazing Come Hell or Highball, I decided to take a break from my typical genres of choice and try something new. I had completely lost track of it on my ever-overflowing NetGalley shelf. Luckily it hasn't been archived yet so I could still grab it. After all, the description compares it to Monty Python and P.G. Wodehouse. It's either awesomely hilarious ... or the description writer has no idea what they're talking about. So far the description writer is spot-on and I'm loving it. Granted, I'm not quite half-way through yet but Leo would have to totally botch the second half.

If nothing else, I already want to own the actual hardcover version of the book just because of the artwork by Mahendra Singh that I've seen bouncing around Twitter. SO amazing. 

An illustration for The Gentleman by the amazing @mahendra_snark . pic.twitter.com/EWscI5DAwe

— Forrest Leo (@forrestrleo) August 18, 2016

And now, the teasers:

(FYI: Lancaster is Lionel's brother-in-law and Lizzie is Lionel's sister. And, yes, I know that Teaser Tuesday says a line or two and I did oh-so-much more but I couldn't help it. You could claim the Dev'l made me do it!)

Amazon Description 

A funny, fantastically entertaining debut novel, in the spirit of Wodehouse and Monty Python, about a famous poet who inadvertently sells his wife to the devil--then recruits a band of adventurers to rescue her.

When Lionel Savage, a popular poet in Victorian London, learns from his butler that they're broke, he marries the beautiful Vivien Lancaster for her money, only to find that his muse has abandoned him. 

Distraught and contemplating suicide, Savage accidentally conjures the Devil -- the polite "Gentleman" of the title -- who appears at one of the society parties Savage abhors. The two hit it off: the Devil talks about his home, where he employs Dante as a gardener; Savage lends him a volume of Tennyson. But when the party's over and Vivien has disappeared, the poet concludes in horror that he must have inadvertently sold his wife to the dark lord. 

Newly in love with Vivian,  Savage plans a rescue mission to Hell that includes Simmons, the butler; Tompkins, the bookseller; Ashley Lancaster, swashbuckling Buddhist; Will Kensington, inventor of a flying machine; and Savage's spirited kid sister, Lizzie, freshly booted from boarding school for a "dalliance." Throughout, his cousin's quibbling footnotes to the text push the story into comedy nirvana.

Lionel and his friends encounter trapdoors, duels, anarchist-fearing bobbies, the social pressure of not knowing enough about art history, and the poisonous wit of his poetical archenemy. Fresh, action-packed and very, very funny, The Gentleman is a giddy farce that recalls the masterful confections of P.G. Wodehouse and Hergé's beautifully detailed Tintin adventures.