A Very Private Gentleman is a novel written by British author Martin Booth, published in 1990. It is a tragedy following events in the life of a gunsmith who sells his services to assassins. The style is also partly in the form of classic confessional writing, as the protagonist seeks to explain the relevance of his choice of profession.

The time of the story seems to be late 20th century, more or less similar to the year of publication. The story is written in the first-person narrative from the point of view of the main character, who is known as Edmund or Signor Farfalla. He lives in a small hill town in the north of Italy.

The protagonist makes his living custom-making firearms specified for individual assassins' needs. To the townsfolk he puts on the role of a painter of butterflies, which can be found in diverse and rich measures in the hilly and forested areas around the village. The protagonist is reserved and very skilled at keeping his real job a secret. Edmund is a foreigner, and although he does not reveal his origin to anybody (not even the reader), he pretends to be an Englishman. This is not far from the truth, since he admits to having stayed in the English countryside for a very long time at an earlier stage in his career. Although his profession has demanded that he move location from time to time, he has developed a fondness for the Italian village, in particular a young woman, and has decided that he wants to stay. However, a person described as a "shadow-dweller" starts showing up in the mountains spying - or threatening - Signor Farfalla. While finding out who he is, Signor Farfalla must decide whether to face his opponent or escape and leave his home once more.

Martin Booth (7 September 1944 – 12 February 2004) was a prolific British novelist and poet. He also worked as a teacher and screenwriter, and was the founder of the Sceptre Press.

Booth was born in Lancashire, but was brought up mainly in Hong Kong, where he first attended Kowloon Junior School, the Peak School then King George V School, and left in 1964.

He made his name as a poet and as a publisher, producing elegant volumes by British and American poets, including slim volumes of work by Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. His own books of verse include The Knotting Sequence (1977), named for the village in which Booth was living at the time. The book features a series of lyrics in which he seeks links between the present and the Saxon past, and the man called Knot who gave his name to the village. Booth also accumulated a library of contemporary verse, which allowed him to produce anthologies and lectures.

In the late 1970s Booth turned mainly to writing fiction. His first successful novel, Hiroshima Joe, was published in 1985. The book is based on what he heard from a man he met as a boy in Hong Kong and contains passages set in that city during the Second World War.