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Book review: MURDER ISN'T EASY (1936) by Richard Hull

6/14/2016

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Synopsis:
As a tale told in a roundelay of secret journal entries by its office employees, it becomes immediately clear that all is not rosy in the halls of the NeO-aD advertising agency. We first meet Nicholas Latimer, copy writer and founding member, bitterly noting the shortcomings of his co-workers. In particular, he cannot stand salesman Paul Spencer’s teasing tone and rash business decisions, such as creating a marketing campaign for a canning company before a client is even signed. Spencer also chides Latimer for his frequent office naps and his penchant for starting every advertisement with the words, “And now, the new…” regardless of the product for sale.


When a promising client from Rumania arrives, hoping to sell the British public a chemical that, while highly poisonous, manages to make treated glass surfaces water- and fog-resistant, Latimer sees the potential for this versatile product. He devises a plan to introduce some of these crystals into Spencer’s afternoon tea and make it appear an accident, but by the end of the day, more than one employee has permanently retired from the agency.

The precise and bottom-line-minded Mr. Barraclough also shares observations of his colleagues – he might or might not be implicated in a separate incident in which Paul Spencer narrowly avoided being hit by a car. The unassuming office secretary Miss Wyndham and product artist Percy Thomas (whose appealing drawings of fruits and vegetables for the prospective client Greyfields Canning Latimer tears to pieces) also offer a perspective on the curious affair. Ironically, the only person not invited to share a commentary on events is Inspector Hoopington, who is either a dull-witted plodder or a clever ally, depending on whom you believe.

Review: Richard Hull’s 1936 offering Murder Isn’t Easy is highly enjoyable and proves a fine example of the author’s talent for delivering amusing characterization and a dryly satirical touch. As the story unfolds through the viewpoints of four different characters, the reader is invited to weigh the (often critical) remarks that each has of his fellow colleagues with what is said or insinuated about him in turn. It is a great pleasure, for example, to read Latimer’s justifications for his frequent absences from the office, as the excuse rings too defensive and speaks volumes about his character:
“How am I to write good copy, to get new ideas, to keep my brain fresh, if I do not see [by attending a weekday trade show] the work which other people are doing, the way in which they decorate their stands at such an exhibition for instance – in short, if I do not keep in touch with modern sales methods?”
Hull works well when he uses what I call “chamber piece plotting,” meaning that a finite number of characters, such as four or five, play together in an enclosed setting to develop variations on a theme. The previous year’s Keep It Quiet works similarly, involving only a few key members of a much larger London club. And as with that story, Hull changes the playing field here at the halfway point. While the mystery plot is agreeable, it also feels secondary to the real entertainment provided by the comic characterizations and petty grudges each employee seems to hold against the others.
PictureA nod to NeO-aD marketing: handmade art, copy, and lettering, circa mid-1950s.
For me, Murder Isn’t Easy carries an additional and especially attractive aspect by painting a simpler, satirical picture of the advertising business from an era long gone. The felicitously lettered NeO-aD agency is modernized well past the ink-stained bustle of Dickensian copy houses from decades prior, but it still traffics in text and art that is charmingly quaint by today’s standards. Print advertisements for blouses and beads and canned goods that display blocks of words and hand-drawn images bring to mind an earlier, more innocent time. Just as much of the fun of reading a Golden Age-era mystery story lies in its ability to transport one to a world where character types, social rules, and class interactions are intriguingly nostalgic and unreal, there’s a similar sense of a wistful past on display here. One easily imagines Barraclough working fussily at the ledgers while Thomas sketches the Platonic ideal of a tomato onto heavy draft paper and Latimer letters “And now, the new…” on a sheet of copy.

Murder might not be easy, but here Richard Hull successfully bundles the details of 1930s office life – both the creative advertising and the destructive scheming aspects – into one highly appealing package.  
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Book Review: A CONSTERNATION OF MONSTERS (2015) by Eric Fritzius

6/5/2016

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With each horror and dark fantasy short story collection I read, I am able to more clearly identify the qualities that make the experience memorable and engaging to me. For instance, I am a fan of variety: it helps if it doesn’t feel like the same story is told, with the same formula used, by an author multiple times. Changes in tone and tempo are also welcome; one tale could be a stinging trill just a few pages long, while the next might be a deliberate symphony, unfolding slowly and steadily, the menace building at an unyielding clip. In short, I hope to find that the author of a short story collection is interested in exploring many moods and topics, and that somehow the stories also tie together and speak to one another in interesting ways. Oh, and strong writing is also preferred. Not too tall of an order, is it?

With A Consternation of Monsters, West Virginia author Eric Fritzius manages to deliver on all of these (admittedly subjective) expectations. Earlier this year I had read horror story collections from Ramsey Campbell and Laird Barron, but it is the variety of Monsters that I return to. Fritzius makes smart use of the shadowy, mythical creatures that appear in so much regional and historical folklore, and he understands the key principle behind both horror and elegance: show just enough, but not too much. Nearly every one of the ten stories delivers its pace and atmosphere at just the right pitch and volume, from the narrative of a survivor from an eerie shipwreck telling his story for a final time to an ancient antique shop owner confronting a nemesis during an apocalyptic rainstorm. In each tale, plot, setting, and monster are balanced just right, creating admirable new additions to the genre of great campfire stories.

The collection’s first entry, “The Hocco Makes the Echo,” may be the best example of this. It is both deceptively simple – a father realizes too late what his son understands about the voice-mimicking creature in the Mississippi woods – and unnerving on a primal level. Interestingly, the author revisits the family in a later story, “Puppet Legacy,” this time with the son of the earlier tale now an adult. Aaron discovers an unsettling truth grounded in very human, rather than supernatural, acts.

Another pair of connected stories, “The Wise Ones” and “Limited Edition,” center around an old woman who knows more about the ancient objects in her shop, and later at an Antiques Roadshow appraisal site, than anyone else…except possibly for those who seek her out. Both stories are well-constructed and intriguing, but it is the curious item under consideration in the second story, and the narcissistic appraiser Hovelan, through whose perspective the story is told, that makes “Limited Edition” resonate long after the deal has been struck.

I want to single out two stories in particular, as both show Fritzius’ facility to craft eerie tales that use uncertainty as a powerful and surprising tool of resolution. “…to a Flame” is winningly comic for most of its length, a likeable yarn about an Appalachian man who needs his friend’s help when he accidentally shoots and kills a mythic Mothman. (No true spoilers here, as the victim’s identity is revealed early on.) It’s a great subversion of expectations: no other author would use the scenario for backwoods humor, yet Fritzius does, and the tone is perfect. But it is the ending, which masterfully returns to many threads smartly set up at the start – involving a rusted freezer, a battered arc-welder, a late-night radio show, and the menacing Men In Black – that provides an unsettling coda that won’t let the reader dismiss the comedy that has come before.

The other story that still resonates with me is “Wolves among Stones at Dusk.” Once more, the elegance of explaining enough but not too much makes this story special. It is told from the perspective of a desert wolf who watches a human drama unfold in the darkness below. The gambit, which involves the wolf interpreting actions and motives of men with the behavior that he knows of his own species, is successful and very compelling. And then there is a man in darkness, also at the edge of the cliff, watching and waiting, and this figure adds another uncanny dimension to the scene. As with many of these stories, by the end we have some of the facts but not all. Yet that which cannot be explained still feels real and right for the world that has been created.

Check out this smart collection, available in print or eBook through Amazon.com. You can also listen to podcast adaptations of several of the stories from A Consternation of Monsters by visiting this page.


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