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Book Review: LAST FIRST (1947) by Richard Hull

7/26/2020

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Dedicated to those who habitually read the last chapter first.

So states the dedication of 1947's Last First, perhaps the author's boldest experiment in narrative order, where one reads the last chapter first and then spends the rest of the book watching the story build to that moment. It is a gimmick, all right, especially as the mystery genre is often all about the final chapter, with its revelations of who, how, and why crimes have been committed. To provide this information at the very top is innovative, to say the least, with many traps attendant.

But that's not what Richard Hull has actually attempted here.


Let me start at the beginning rather than jump in at the critical climax. Last First follows a small group of visitors at the Portray Hotel, a fishing and hiking retreat in the hills of Scotland. A gruff businessman named Appleyard arrives with his young secretary in tow, a flirty woman named Rosemary Mordaunt. The sole feminine presence within this masculine bastion soon stirs up conflict, and the disagreeable Communist Weston, poetry-spouting Romantic Bourn, and athletic and quiet Fielden are soon all very aware of the pigeon among the cats (or vice versa). The long-time resident and unofficial hotel mascot known as The Admiral also notes the tension and wonders whether the strain will spoil the week's planned fly-fishing excursions. It is The Admiral who will become a (rather slight) amateur detective when Appleyard's body is found on a rock with his head in the waters of the river Deren.

One of accountant-turned-writer Richard Hull's genre strengths is his continued interest in trying new storytelling approaches and set-ups: his celebrated debut novel, 1934's The Murder of My Aunt, is an inverted tale where the hopeful murderer documents his attempts in diary form (which we are reading); the flawed but amusing The Murderers of Monty (1937) hinges on violence drafted and agreed to by a limited partnership committee; and the highly enjoyable My Own Murderer (1940) has us rooting for an amoral lawyer who tries to frame his criminal client. Hull's output is inconsistent, but nearly all his stories show some curiosity about how expectations of the detective fiction format can be subverted and challenged.

So it is with Last First, a book that I found not wholly successful but intriguing in parts. How does the author manage that tricky "last chapter first" gimmick? If all is truly revealed from the beginning, i.e., if the identity of the murderer, the explanation of the crime, and the fate of the guilty party are all announced before the story even starts, then there is no suspense and little reason to read the detective story, as the reader can no longer play the game. To avoid this, Hull paints a climax where the characters are not positively identified. A man is atop a bluff, holding a gun, while three figures below walk across the rocks and grasses that trace the winding waters of Ben Deren. Rosemary Mordaunt, the only person not referred to by a nickname – everyone else is "Bongo" or "Greggy" or "Hoots", a childish naming habit of the flirtatious secretary – joins the man with a gun. Soon, the gun is fired, but is it to "warn off" a man below from stepping away from the path and into a dangerous bog or for a more sinister reason?

So we have a rather disorienting final scene first, followed by the story told chronologically to get the characters to this moment. The striking Scottish setting is agreeable and I was willing to let the story unwind – or more precisely meander – in order to complete the circle. The drama that unfolds at Portray Hotel and environs, however, is not especially believable or engaging, unfortunately. As I have felt with some other Hull novels, such as A Matter of Nerves and Invitation to an Inquest (both 1950), some of the scenes in Last First have a sort of page-filling, time-marking quality, and they are scenes that prove mostly unnecessary to the greater plot and are built upon chattery dialogue that doesn’t offer much in the way of clues or even characterization. I notice that Hull's last six books, including this one, have a tendency to wrap up at exactly 192 pages; it makes me wonder if he was writing to a strict word count, which in turn makes me suspect that those desultory conversations that pad the middle of these stories help to serve that purpose.

Still, Last First has moments of interest, although I have to wonder what a truly brilliant mystery fiction plotter might have done with the challenge of telling a detective story with the last chapter presented as the start of the narrative. (Note that the challenge would lie in tackling a true fair-play whodunit this way; a thriller tale where climax is offered up first seems a lot easier to craft, and in fact that's partly what Hull leans on here.) One wonders what Agatha Christie or Nicholas Blake might have done with the conceit. As for Richard Hull, he makes an attractive fly-cast, but falls short of hooking a fish of any substance this time around.

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Book Review: A MATTER OF NERVES (1950) by Richard Hull

2/18/2019

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Let's start with the gimmick. In the books of accountant-turned-mystery writer Richard Hull, there's often some sort of engaging narrative gimmick at play, whether it's an inverted Howdunit format (as in his début novel, 1934's The Murder of My Aunt), a roundelay of character perspectives (1936's enjoyable Murder Isn't Easy), or opening with the final chapter first (1947's Last First, naturally). Hull was nearing the end of his literary run by 1950, when A Matter of Nerves was published by the Collins Crime Club, but he was still experimenting with the form and the game between mystery writer and reader. Here, the narrator is the murderer, and the story opens with our storyteller recalling the night he (or she) killed the village butcher with an axe. The crime, he or she confides, was one meant to look like an accident, but after an unfortunate attempt to remove a trying grin from the dead man's face with the edge of the axe blade, the murderer decides to forget the accident scenario and dismember the body, distributing the various parts throughout the village.

The gimmick, I should clarify, is not so much that we follow the murderer's first-person point of view throughout, but rather that Hull playfully does not reveal the person's identity until the final pages. Thus, we are reading the criminal's "diary," and the writer has chosen to relate the events that follow by including and referring to himself in the cast of suspects as a third-person participant. It's a gambit that never really convinces, and the benefits (aside from having your first-person cake while delivering the intrigue of a traditional Whodunit) are negligible. Still, A Matter of Nerves is darkly humorous and entertaining throughout, and it is an absolute winner compared with the other Hull book published that year, the interminable Invitation to an Inquest.

As Hull employs his gimmick for Nerves, one of the most intriguing aspects becomes looking for clues within the text where the unknown narrator may show favoritism when describing a particular villager. One would, after all, expect the killer to reference himself in a more flattering light than his peers, especially as we can tell through tone and worldview that we have yet another Richard Hull misanthrope at the center of the tale. Personally, I felt more could have been done with this idea, which would lend itself nicely to some misdirection that the author doesn't seem interested to explore. Similarly, while I would love to continue to say "he or she" in reference to the murderer's gender, the two women characters Hull offers up are each handled so dismissively by the narrator that it's hard to imagine either Delia Keyes (portrayed as a lustful, roaming housewife) or May Benson (drawn as a prudish, humorless spinster) writing about herself in the third person and painting such an unflattering picture, even in private or in jest.  

So that leaves the men of Losfield End. Timothy Venner is a nerve-ravaged ex-soldier now engaged in a personal war with the village's extremely loud clock tower; Reverend James Young is a long-winded but cheerful clergyman with a fondness for black-market handkerchiefs; Carlisle is a London broker with questionable prospects and a penchant for model trains; Smee, a farmer now set upon by inspectors from the Ministry of Food, kept losing his livestock until butcher John Hannon disappeared. Delia Keyes' cuckolded husband Norman, the blustering Colonel Waring, and May Benson's long-suffering brother Alec – who is not averse to slipping his sister a sedative in exchange for an occasional night of peace and quiet – also take pleasure discussing the ongoing village events down at The Green Man over a pint.  

A Matter of Nerves proves to be a very readable story, but not a great one. I am always a fan of self-contained English village mysteries, where the visitor gets to view the occupants and their running about as if they were a colony of ants under glass. The many British irritations and obsessions on display strike me as one of the book's most engaging elements: for example, the Reverend prides himself on the fact that the entire village turns out for his sermons, when in fact the unknown narrator (and, one suspects, many more in the congregation) uses the time in church to muse on personal and criminal matters. May Benson's insistence that everything should happen on a precise schedule, even sinning and time-wasting, is a humorous conceit, and the subplot of a one-man post-war black market that traffics in stolen sheep, Persian rugs, and silk handkerchiefs lends a lighter flavor to a story that starts, and ends, with death.

Finally, I enjoyed the fact that the first-person storytelling allowed me to connect the narrator's guilt of his crime with the very troubled boarder trapped in Poe's famous story, "The Tell-Tale Heart." There's just enough evidence in the text to draw parallels, but not enough to glean anything significant from the comparison. That feeling of missed opportunity and potential present but untapped runs throughout A Matter of Nerves. It's enjoyable, but with a steadier hand and a little more literary ambition, it could have been a late-period classic of detection fiction.

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Book Review: THE MURDER OF MY AUNT (1934) by Richard Hull

9/7/2018

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I have been thinking a lot lately about the role that characterization plays in mystery fiction past and present. It's an intriguing exploration, because one could argue that mystery stories (or any literary genre defined by a particular structure) only need character types to work, and not necessarily characters with sincere or striking traits or personalities. To this end, one has a detective, a victim, assorted suspects, and perhaps a Watson to act as proxy for the reader. With people in place, the author can then manipulate the characters like chess pieces and effectively play out the game. And just as chess pieces are familiar in role but nondescript in detail – we don't know more about our bishops, knights, or rooks beyond their functional maneuverability – a mystery writer can present game after game using the same characters making the same familiar moves on the board.

Of course, any type of fiction is enhanced when a writer manages to deliver engaging characters caught up in a compelling plot, with an original tone supporting both story and theme. (Easier said than done.) This explains why I prefer imaginative writers who experiment and take risks – and occasionally fail – to those who work from a tried-and-tested template. Personally, I'm far less interested in the puzzle than in how the mystery format can be used to say something about the characters and, by extension, about humanity. It's why I'm lukewarm on clever puzzle constructors like Ellery Queen and John Dickson Carr, and why my favorite Agatha Christie books are not Poirot baffle-fests but instead And Then There Were None and The Mirror Crack'd, two titles where the psychology of the killer is both memorable and carries a note of human tragedy.

It is also why I read and reread the books of outside-yet-within-the-genre writers Gladys Mitchell and Richard Hull.

The Murder of My Aunt is Hull's first mystery novel, and the one he was compelled to write after working for years as a chartered accountant. It is one of those début books where the exuberance of the author alive to the possibilities of plot and prose and language is evident on every page. Hull chooses as his narrator a conceited, comically misanthropic young man named Edward Powell, who is unhappy with his stifled life in the small Welsh village of Llwll (pronounced, if Edward is to be believed, as "filth") in general and with his disapproving, domineering aunt in particular. As we learn of Edward's opinions and grievances through his confidences in detailed diary entries, we also learn much about his character. This is one of the book's most enjoyable gambits: Hull creates a narrator who is both sympathetic (perhaps pitiable is more accurate) and shallow. One can understand the circumstances of his frustration, but he's also greatly at fault due to his vanity and laziness, as he has no interest in pursuing an independent life and means of income. He is lazy, that is, until he decides that the murder of his aunt would provide freedom and a useful inheritance to boot.

Returning to those elements of strong fiction, Richard Hull incorporates all three with purpose, wit, and a great deal of ironic humor. The plot can hardly be bettered: one person wants to kill another, but the victim refuses to cooperate. In fact, as we only know what Edward reports, we get the feeling that Aunt Mildred might know more about the situation than our diarist thinks, and that creates an excellent mounting tension which connects directly to two age-old dramatic questions: What will happen next? and Who's going to win? Making both Edward Powell and his aunt well-delineated adversaries through personality and motivation, Hull offers up characterization that is as sharp and specific as anything he would later deliver. Further, the book's witty comic tone (for those who appreciate it; not all mystery readers do) is a terrific success. Edward's observations are amusing throughout, and the recounting of an incident where he tries to purchase oxalic acid and instead winds up buying a Christmas card in September is laugh-out-loud funny.

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There is a neat concluding twist that I will leave alone, but it is memorable enough for me to recall from my initial reading of Aunt some decades ago. It was also this book that made me vow to find and read each of the author's fourteen other crime stories, and slowly but surely I am doing just that.

You can check out Kate's great review of The Murder of My Aunt at her crossexaminingcrime site. The book is getting a welcome reprint release from the British Library Crime Classics series and Poisoned Pen Press, presented with a great introduction by scholar and author Martin Edwards. I received an advance eBook copy through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. 



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Book Review: INVITATION TO AN INQUEST (1950) by Richard Hull

4/15/2018

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It can be capably argued that mystery author Richard Hull had an affinity for creating disagreeable characters. His books are populated with egotists and misanthropes, and perhaps his most common narrative perspective – as is evidenced in enjoyable books such as The Murder of My Aunt (1934), Murder Isn't Easy (1936), and My Own Murderer (1941) – is that of the self-satisfied schemer who turns out to be too clever by half. In contrast, 1950's Invitation to an Inquest presents three central characters that are so unlikable and circumlocutory that they move swiftly from antihero into the realm of pedant and bore. It doesn't help that neither the mystery at this story's heart nor the motive for murder are of much interest to the reader.

At the book's beginning, Inspector Yarrow is patiently interviewing Charles Kerrison, who may have witnessed a removed cousin jump into the Thames from the Waterloo (or perhaps it was the Vauxhall) Bridge. William Bowman has been dragged from the river, and Yarrow investigates his fiery relationship to the Ayres family, the meaning of an heirloom locket that Bowman would never pawn despite his desperate need for money, and the theft of payroll cash where he worked.

Yarrow also interviews the combative Felicity O'Shea, housemaid to Meredith Ayres and, improbably, both common-law wife to Bowman (who was never divorced from his first wife) and an ex-worker at the same electroplating factory where the payroll theft occurred. The Inspector also visits the elderly, caustic patriarch Meredith Ayres, who has contempt for Charles, his nephew once removed, and enjoys watching Felicity upset his house staff. And his ailing niece Mary may or may not have died from a purposeful window draught while staying at his home.

The novel's most obvious flaw is the aforementioned lack of relatable, accessible characters. A story can succeed using unsympathetic antiheroes, but they need to generate some sort of reader interest, even if it's only to see whether they receive their comeuppance. With Invitation to an Inquest, my reaction was consistently "Just get on with it" every time Charles Kerrison provided rambling details of the Night in Question. (The story starts after the deaths of William Bowman and Mary Ayres and the factory theft have occurred, which means that most of the storytelling is passive instead of active, and listening to various versions of what might have happened from one unreliable and conceited witness feels like padding to reach a page count.)  

As for Inspector Yarrow of the Yard, he too is a prototype commonly found in Richard Hull's stories: the competent but nondescript police detective, whose job it is to ask questions and yield the spotlight to the more outspoken suspects and witnesses he encounters during the investigation. This tabula rasa approach can also work, but it means that if the detective figure isn't allowed to form a personality and hold his own as a figure of power, then the other characters will need to engage the reader's interest independently. Suffice it to say, that didn't happen for me here.

When one reaches the tepid conclusion and learns the rather silly grand scheme and the motives that the relatives might have had (barely a spoiler: they revolve around inheritance and the fine print in great-grandfather Samuel Ayres' last will and testament), it's difficult not to wish you had spent that time rereading one of Hull's better, earlier books instead. Ironically, Invitation to an Inquest is a fairly rare book to find – I needed to request a text photocopy from the National Library of Scotland after securing permission from the agents who represent the author's estate – but it is also one of the few Richard Hull mysteries (and perhaps the only one; I have four more Hull titles to read) that has almost nothing to recommend.

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