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Book Review: THE MARTINEAU MURDERS (1953) by Richard Hull

8/13/2021

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​In many ways, The Martineau Murders (1953) is a fitting final book to end accountant-turned-author Richard Hull’s output of crime stories. It features all of the author’s hallmarks: a misanthropic male antihero battling rustics in a village that gives him no end of grief; a darkly humorous tone bolstered by a plot with ironic turns and characters with sarcastic perspectives; and the prospect of murder undertaken without sufficient attention to the complications and the consequences of such actions. It also displays some of Hull’s less satisfying traits as a writer, including an ending that feels not quite worth the journey. (Martineau treads similar ground to the author’s first and most celebrated story, 1934’s The Murder of My Aunt, but comparisons unfortunately show the strength of the first to the detriment of the last.)
 
Convinced he is dying, Mr. Martineau decides to settle some imagined scores among the villagers of Underfield. Through diary entries, the reader learns that the once-prosperous squire has set his sights on Dwyer, a wealthy neighbor who has bought the family hall and property at a fair price, but with whom Martineau regularly argues about the upkeep of the water stream and the footbridge. There is also a gossipy man named Bowen whom Mr. M deems worthy of dispatch. As for the others in the village, they are irritants – from fluttery Miss Jefferson, who has a cough that especially displeases Martineau, to Mrs. Venner, who is particularly reluctant to sell the squire a custard tart – but for now escape a judgment of death.
 
But Martineau’s plans don’t go off as expected, largely because of the scattershot approach to setting his traps. Sabotaging the footbridge, tampering with automobile brakes, and growing a questionable batch of salmonella bacteria all yield results, but in each case either the intended victim escapes unscathed or an innocent party is injured or dies. Through these misfortunes, Martineau shows no remorse and great self-regard. By the time events and coincidence provide a strange sort of justice, Mr. Martineau may be past the point to appreciate the irony of it all.
 
I appreciated the simple cause-and-effect momentum of this book, especially since propulsive plotting is sometimes missing from Richard Hull’s stories. (Books like Last First [1947] and Invitation to an Inquest [1950] trap the reader in a languor that makes one yearn for a speedy conclusion.) Martineau’s narration and scheming move things along, and if the outcome is fairly obvious – the antihero is just too conceited and his execution too sloppy for his efforts to truly succeed – the journey is a darkly enjoyable one. It is also appealing that many of the characters we see through Martineau’s eyes are genuinely aggravating, whether it is the condescending and pompous Dr. Ritson or the selectively deaf groundsman Ashard, who has been secretly selling the squire’s surplus produce and eggs for a profit.
 
But the irritable, vain narrator at the story’s center is perhaps the most consistent element within the author’s oeuvre. Richard Hull seems to be fascinated by egotistical, petty males with an axe to grind, people who quickly find fault with others and are often driven to murderous distraction. Indeed, Hull’s best work seems to contain this archetype, from the dandy trying to kill his sainted Aunt to the dyspeptic copy writer in Murder Isn’t Easy (1936) to the curmudgeon-as-victim in Excellent Intentions (1938). Hull’s most meta-literary incarnation is Richard Sampson, the lawyer squirming under pressure in 1940’s wonderfully twisty My Own Murderer: here, the author mischievously gives the hopeful killer his own name.
 
Hull should also be celebrated for consistently experimenting with style and structure. He often employed an enticing gimmick with his stories: The Murderers of Monty (1937) tackles homicide by incorporated partnership; Last First delivers the last chapter first; A Matter of Nerves (1950) is a first-person narrative from the killer’s point of view where the culprit’s identity is only revealed at the end. With fourteen other books to consider and contrast against, The Martineau Murders is an enjoyable but slight story, one that was delivered more effectively by Richard Hull nearly two decades before.
 
Genre scholar and mystery writer Martin Edwards has frequently championed Richard Hull’s witty and playful stories. You can find Martin’s review of The Martineau Murders here.

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Book Review: LEFT-HANDED DEATH (1946) by Richard Hull

5/10/2021

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“Of one thing though I am most perfectly certain and that is that the case is more completely topsy-turvy than it ought to be. I like my murders to start at the beginning with the corpse and go on to the end with the conviction. But when you start in the middle with the confession – well, all I can say is, that it’s all wrong!”
– Inspector Hardwick, assessing the circumstances in Left-Handed Death


The war years saw a four-year hiatus between Richard Hull’s previous mystery, 1942’s underwhelming The Unfortunate Murderer, and his next tale of office-inspired mayhem, Left-Handed Death. While this book is more engaging than Hull’s prior effort, there are nevertheless some structure and pacing problems on display that will plague many of the author’s later stories. At the book’s start, we find Arthur Shergold and Guy Reeves, managers of an engineering company that manufactures goods ordered through Ministry contracts, deep in discussion. Soon thereafter, Reeves proudly visits Scotland Yard and confesses to strangling Barry Foster, an overweight Ministry accountant assigned to review the company’s finances.

Upon investigation, the police discover Foster dead in his flat, marks on his neck indicating that he was strangled with only a thumb and one finger, which are the digits remaining on Guy Reeves’ left hand after a combat accident in Tunis. But Inspector Hardwick finds the man’s unsolicited confession problematic, and his explanation that he killed Foster because he insulted co-worker and budding love interest Cynthia Trent does not convince. Hardwick tasks his colleagues, Sergeant Matthews and Constable Troughton, with some old-fashioned detective work, and soon alibis are checked, time tables are created, and waiters, bartenders, and bus conductors are shown photographs in hopes of identification.

Curiously, the final 30 pages of Left-Handed Death are to me fleet and satisfying; it is the trek to get there that proves a marathon. Richard Hull seems to embrace the misanthropes of the business world in his books, people who can charitably be considered antiheroes, as Guy Reeves is here. Reeves is vain and egotistical, and if anything, his managing partner Arthur Shergold is even worse. As a result, the reader doesn’t worry overmuch about his plight, even as one suspects he is confessing out of a misguided mix of pride and obtuseness.

Hull’s fascination with despicable characters can yield bracing, wonderful results: visit the egotistical narrator from his début novel, 1934’s The Murder of My Aunt, or the delightfully dyspeptic copy writer Nicholas Latimer in 1936’s Murder Isn’t Easy. But when unlikable characters get paired with poor plotting, as in the desultory Invitation to an Inquest (1950), it is an effort to slog forward. Left-Handed Death finds itself staking out a middle ground. While some dialogue runs and episodic moments are enjoyable – and the trio of nicely sketched police officers, with an assist from an amusing Ministry official named Pennington, steal the show, in my opinion – Guy Reeves remains a weak figure who acts irrationally.

Hull’s structuring of his tale may be the most quixotic aspect, especially as a narrative skeleton definitely exists on which to craft a highly successful story. But that meeting between Shergold and Reeves in the opening pages effectively gives the game away, resulting in an undercutting of mystery and a diminishing of suspense. For some reason I don’t understand, Hull also has Reeves send a letter to Cynthia Trent boasting of his impending cleverness before he goes along to Scotland Yard to confess. Why does he do it? What will that help? I’m not sure. Nor does Richard Hull do much with that message, beyond having Inspector Hardwick note the letter’s postmarked date and time. That, along with the strange circumstances and inner motives that inspire Reeves to confess, add to the list of elements that alienate more than intrigue.

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For those who wish to sample this interesting but uneven experiment in crime fiction, Agora Books has returned it to print in trade paperback and eBook editions. For a second opinion, you can find reviews at crossexaminingcrime, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, and Martin Edwards’ Crime Writing Blog.


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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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