JASON HALF : writer
  • Home
  • Full-length Plays
    • The Community Play
    • Kate and Comet
    • Sundial
    • Tulip Brothers
  • Short Plays
    • Among the Oats
    • Holly and Mr. Ivy
    • Locked Room Misery
  • Screenplays
    • The Ballad of Faith Divine
    • My Advice
    • Finders
  • Fiction
  • Blog

Book Review: THE MURDERERS OF MONTY (1937) by Richard Hull

10/1/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Excerpted dialogue from The Murderers of Monty:
“How, in the name of all the gods at once, do you imagine that you are going to avoid detection? When Monty – or if you insist, if Monty – is found full of nicotine, it must be you, and there’s enough written evidence in your own handwriting to hang you for a certainty. The trial will be a pure formality. Similarly, if Monty is found with his beastly sword-stick stuck into him, the intelligent sleuth collects me – or Prunes, if it turns out to be a revolver with which the trick has been done.”

“Does he? You know, I think that you underrate the intelligence of the average sleuth. The first thing that he will say to himself is that if I was really going to do it, the last thing that I should actually use would be nicotine. Therefore, he will say to himself: ‘it can’t be that charming fellow Bethel, whom anyhow I should very much dislike to cause to be hanged.’ Similarly, if the sword has been used, he will say: ‘it can’t be that red-headed, bad-tempered blundering ass, Wrangham, richly though he deserves a hanging.’ That’s how he will argue.”

“But that implies that each of us might do it in such a way as to throw suspicion on one of the others.”

“Precisely. Three people, three ways. That gives Monty nine deaths in all, like a cat.”

Synopsis: Born out of mutual antipathy, four bankers decide to create a company dedicated to the demise of an irritating auditing accountant. The board members of The Murderers of Monty, Limited proceed – with their victim’s goodhearted but confused cooperation – to plan an evening where each member will steal 'round to the flat at a designated time and mock-dispense of Monty by means of poisoning, stabbing, shooting, or (in the case of J. Kernside, the member who remains uncommitted) a method yet to be determined.

Arthur Bethel takes great pleasure in extracting nicotine from a pack of cigarettes to be offered in capsule form. Norman Wrangham prepares a sword-stick and P.R. Unwin-Shackleton – or “Prunes” to Delia Martindale, his presumed beloved – acquires blank cartridges to use in Monty’s desk-drawer revolver. The evening of mock-execution does not go entirely as planned, however. Kernside summons the police, explaining that he arrived eight minutes late to find that one or more people decided to make the company a success. Detective-Inspector Fenby investigates to find a strange scene: Monty has a sword-stick through his heart, a bullet in his head, and (as medical consultant Doctor Lovell reports) three undigested capsules in his stom
ach.

The three previous visitors all claim to have left their victim in good health after their encounter, but doubts begin to creep in. Bethel admits to planting a false moustache around the hilt of the sword-stick – which might have contributed to an accident – while Wrangham can’t remember whether the sword was sheathed when he stabbed out in a bit of play-acting. Prunes, meanwhile, is not certain whether he unloaded the cylinder in the correct rotation when substituting the two blanks before firing. Clues to motive (beyond the shared dislike of a boring individual) are scarce, but Fenby pursues two: did Monty’s interest in Delia spur the phlegmatic Prunes into a jealous rage? And to whom or to what does the scrap of hurried handwriting with either “ABetc” or “ABitl” refer? Was the literal overkill the doings of one man or the work of a cabal? Fenby finds the answer and acts, thus concluding the business of The Murderers of Monty, Limited.

Review: It is clear that Richard Hull was attracted to the Mystery Story with the Enticing Premise, a plot element – a cynic might say a “gimmick” – that immediately generates interest. And that is all to the good, since it attracts Golden Age Detection readers like me to choose such stories with a unique approach, such as offering the last chapter first (in Last First, naturally) or providing diary-entry narration of a hopeful heir plotting murder (in The Murder of My Aunt). But the Enticing Premise also comes with a Potential Pitfall: the story needs to sustain itself and satisfy the reader beyond its clever setup. And this is where 1937’s The Murderers of Monty and some of Hull’s other mysteries get mired.

Monty is still an enjoyable read, and the light tone and comic perspective remain intact; Hull’s prose and dialogue remind me agreeably of Anthony Berkeley’s books or the earliest Nigel Strangeways stories from Nicholas Blake. Here, the lopsided courtship between the strong-minded Delia Martindale and the vacillating P.R. Unwin-Shackleton provides moments of dry social humor, while the friendly sparring between Detective-Inspector Fenby and his contrarian colleague Doctor Lovell seems right when discussing a crime with too many variables. In part, though, it’s the author’s admirable adherence to fair-play plotting that allows the reader to identify the killer 40 pages before Fenby does.


One difficulty to surmount with this particular Enticing Premise is tied to the timetable: if the victim is killed by gun, sword, and poison, and if each participant visits in the arranged sequence, a single killer will by necessity have to administer the death blows after the others have come and gone. If not, the next person arriving will notice the unresponsive victim and, with no reason for an innocent man to lie, would explain his findings to the police. With the final visitor arriving late for his meeting – and why is Kernside allowed to not commit to a murder method? – the killer must have revisited within that window of time, unless he was the last person scheduled to arrive, i.e., Kernside. This between-the-penultimate-and-the-final window for the crime makes the confusion over witnesses’ statements unsatisfying: either the innocent person left Monty alive and breathing (and knew that he did so) or not. Uncertainty over shooting and stabbing, and its effects on the recipient, strains credulity, even in a work of light detective fiction.

Connected with this fair-play flaw is another: one piece of information that defines motive and identifies the murderer is easy to spot, despite Hull’s masking of the piece’s significance until the tale’s climax. This makes the book’s procedural middle chapters slow-going until Fenby catches up with the reader. (I should admit that, while I am an avid reader of mystery stories, I am not particularly adept at spotting who “done” it, and lazily wait for the detective to unmask the culprit. For this reason, when I am ahead of a fair-play mystery story, it is fair to assume that others will be as well.)  

One senses a missed opportunity too among the quartet of suspects, whose corporate attempt at gallows humor – principally the work of the over-imaginative Arthur Bethel – has now made them suspects in a murder investigation. It would be genuinely interesting to see these company members grow suspicious of one another, with subsequent collusions and betrayals bringing out the ugly side of human nature. This would invite the reader to doubt each suspect in turn, keeping Fenby engaged and the characters scheming to save their own skins. Instead, Hull has his men remain polite, slightly concerned, and curiously uninterested about which close colleague might be a murderer in their midst.

And speaking of unconvincing character traits, it is surprising that the victim, who, we are told, is insufferable and worthy of murder several times over, is quite benign and amiable. We learn that he has hair on his ears and that everyone, Delia included, finds him an incredible bore, yet the limited stage time Hull provides Monty doesn’t demonstrate that he is any more pedantic or irritating than the personalities of the founders of The Murderers of Monty, Limited. While I would be happy to consider this an intended irony on the author’s part – that the murderers are more deserving of elimination than the victim – such evidence is lacking to attach a larger social comment to the choice. For a book that is also benign and amiable, The Murderers of Monty is somewhat done in by an ambitious scheme that aims higher and falls shorter than its premise and its characters can deliver.

0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    BLOG

    Lots of book reviews and discussion of classic and contemporary mystery fiction. I welcome comments and continuing conversation.

    Subscribe below to receive updates!

    Subscribe

    Categories

    All
    19th Century Novels
    Andrew Garve
    Anne Morice
    Anthologies
    Anthony Boucher
    Appalachian Authors
    Bill James
    Book Review
    Catherine Dilts
    C. Daly King
    Craig Rice
    David Goodis
    E.C.R. Lorac / Carol Carnac
    Erle Stanley Gardner
    E.R. Punshon
    Freeman Wills Crofts
    French Authors
    George Bellairs
    George Milner
    Gladys Mitchell
    Golden Age Mystery
    Gregory McDonald
    Hardboiled Detectives
    Helen McCloy
    Helen Simpson
    Henry Wade
    Herbert Adams
    Hugh Austin
    James Corbett
    J. Jefferson Farjeon
    John Bude
    John Rhode/Miles Burton
    Leo Bruce
    Maj Sjowall / Per Wahloo
    Margery Allingham
    Martin Edwards
    Michael Gilbert
    Michael Innes
    Mignon G. Eberhart
    Milward Kennedy
    Mitchell Mystery Reading Group
    New Fiction
    New Mystery
    Nicholas Blake
    Nicolas Freeling
    Noir
    Philip MacDonald
    Play Review
    Q. Patrick / Patrick Quentin
    Rex Stout
    Richard Hull
    Ross MacDonald
    Russian Authors
    Science Fiction
    Vernon Loder
    Vladimir Nabokov
    William L. DeAndrea
    Winifred Blazey
    Writing

    Mystery Fiction Sites
    -- all recommended ! --
    Ahsweetmysteryblog
    The Art of Words
    Beneath the Stains of Time
    Bitter Tea and Mystery
    Catherine Dilts - author
    Countdown John's Christie Journal
    Classic Mysteries
    Clothes in Books
    ​A Crime is Afoot
    Crossexaminingcrime
    Gladys Mitchell Tribute
    Grandest Game in the World
    Happiness Is a Book
    In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel
    The Invisible Event
    Martin Edwards' Crime Writing Blog
    Murder at the Manse
    Mysteries Ahoy!
    Noirish
    The Passing Tramp
    Past Offences
    Pretty Sinister Books
    Tipping My Fedora
    To the Manor Born
    Witness to the Crime
    

    Archives

    December 2024
    November 2024
    September 2024
    May 2024
    April 2024
    January 2024
    August 2023
    June 2023
    May 2023
    April 2023
    March 2023
    February 2023
    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    November 2015
    October 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015

    RSS Feed

Unless otherwise stated, all text content on this site is
​copyright Jason Half, 2024.