The Ghost It Was (1936) by Richard Hull

Only a year or two ago, Richard Hull was dimly remembered as the author of an unconventional inverted detective story, The Murder of My Aunt (1934), but the rest of his work remained in the shadows of obscurity until the British Library and Agora Books began reprinting his lesser-known work – such as Keep It Quiet (1935), Murder Isn't Easy (1936) and Excellent Intentions (1938). After half-a-dozen reprints, Hull emerged as an innovator of the inverted detective story and arguably one of the most popular rediscoveries of the present renaissance of the Golden Age mystery. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be more popular today than during his own lifetime.

Hull has regained his reputation as an experimenter and innovator of the inverted mystery, but he has also tinkered with the conventions of the traditional detective story. And that book was reprinted last year by Agora Books.

The Ghost It Was (1936) has been described as an homage to John Dickson Carr and black comedy in the best English tradition, but, this time, there are quite a few contrarians and Steve, of In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, posted a less than exciting review in January – on which two people commented that they were unable to finish the book. So how good, or bad, is The Ghost It Was? Well, let's find out.

Gregory Spring-Benson is a man of "unlimited effrontery" with "exclusive and expensive tastes," but his bank balance was insufficient to meet the demand of the ever growing stack of unpaid bills and he has been unable to hold a job. As a previous employer remarked, "perfect idleness and sarcasm" are poor substitutes for more humdrum, but useful, qualifications. So he decided to up his "debonair frankness," combined with "a pose of specious honesty," to obtain an introduction to Linnell, deputy sub-assistant editor of The New Light, who sends the impertinent Gregory packing.

However, Linnell tells Gregory that, if he happens to have any ideas for a story, he can send it to him personally and an idea is presented when reading a poorly written column in The New Light.

The column reports that a well-known, international financier, Mr. James Warrenton, has returned to his ancestral village, Amberhurst, where he has purchased a mansion with "a private ghost" haunting the tower standing at the north-west corner of the house – who happens to be Uncle James to Gregory. Unfortunately, Uncle James has told his insufferable nephew to never darken his door again. So he has to find a way to worm his way back into his uncle's household and Warrenton, who's as impudent as his nephew, makes a sporting bet with Gregory. He gives Gregory six months to swindle him out of "an appreciable sum of money" using spiritualism.

I suppose this is where the story began to lose the previously mentioned commentators, on Steve's review, because the plot began to drag here. Don't get me wrong. This is a well-written, darkly comedic detective story, but the main plot was barely moving after this point and instead we got a closer look at the characters and some of their schemes, which eventually result in murder. But it takes a while to get there. I think it was a mistake to compare The Ghost It Was to Carr, because the similarities (impossible crimes, a haunted tower and ghost stories) are only superficial and not even Hull could match him in the plotting department. In my opinion, the book is much more black send-up of Edmund Crispin (c.f. Buried for Pleasure, 1948) with a hint of evil and full of wittily couched insults, verbal digs, unpleasant or downtrodden relatives and even a scheming parson. So, if you're going into this book expecting a Carrian pastiche, you'll end up disappointed or even giving up before reaching the final chapter. The reader has been warned!

Around the halfway mark, the plot begins to roll again and the people at the mansion witnessed a figure, who seemed "to emanate a radiance," on the tower "clad in a gown" and a short sword or dagger, which glowed, hung from "a ribbon that seemed to be attached to the waist." When this figure appears for a second time, Warrenton recognizes the ghost as one of his relatives and bursts out laughing, but suddenly, another figure came along the top of the turret with it's "right arm stretched out menacingly" and the other figure plunged to his death – a scene eerily reminiscent of the tragic ghost story from 1535. This is only quasi-impossible murder, but the second death on top of that haunted tower is indisputably a locked room mystery.

One of the household members, Emily, notices a strange gleam on the top of the tower from her bedroom window, moving backwards and forwards, before realizing it was either a dagger or a knife. A floating weapon that plunges itself in the only person who was standing on the tower, but here's the real kicker. Everyone was locked into their rooms to prevent them from playing the ghost. These two (impossible) murders were superbly handled, a nice spoof of the theatrically-staged murder mystery, which had a nice, uncomplicated solution with a beauty of a clue subtly foreshadowing the trick the murderer used on the tower. A clue actually worthy of Carr himself.

Regrettably, the way the final chapter was handled made the solution fall flat on its face and this was completely unnecessary.

Obviously, Hull was a writer who tried to be innovative and decided to do this, in this very conventionally structured detective novel, in the last chapter by not mentioning the murderer by name. Now this could have worked had the murderer not been so obvious and the reader had to pay close attention to find all the clues to piece together who they were talking about, which certainly was not the case here and this made Hull look like he was being difficult for the sake of being difficult – reflecting poorly on an otherwise pretty decent country house mystery.

In closing, The Ghost It Was is a good, but not great, detective story drenched in black humor, ghostly murders and an excellent portrayal of a dysfunctional family who dance to the purse-strings of the family patriarch. Only the unnecessary and irritating obfuscation about the murderer's name in the last chapter is a real blemish on the plot.

Murder Isn't Easy (1936) by Richard Hull

Richard Henry Sampson was a veteran of the First World War, serving in France for three years, before he began an inauspicious career as an accountant and this career was cut short when his first novel, published as "Richard Hull," became a success – a witty inverted detective novel titled The Murder of My Aunt (1934). A further fourteen comical, character-oriented crime novels appeared, published between 1935 and 1953, but they had been largely forgotten by mystery readers.

Hull was only remembered as the author of The Murder of My Aunt and readers usually confused even that one with C.H.B. Kitchin's similarly titled Death of My Aunt (1929). However, this has recently began to change as Hull's work is slowly being rediscovered.

The Poisoned Pen Press, under the banner of "British Library Crime Classics," reissued The Murder of My Aunt and Excellent Intentions (1938), while Ipso Books republished Murder Isn't Easy (1936). And they have announced on their website that more releases from Hull are coming soon! So we can say that Hull is beginning to enjoy the perks of the present Renaissance Era, but is Murder Isn't Easy worthy of all the praise heaped on it by my fellow reviewers (here, here and here)? Yes. It does.

However, I have to caveat the yes by mentioning that the book will probably fail to excite readers who prefer their murder, or murders, to occur early on in a story, because this is one of those mystery novels with a slow build towards the murder – hardly even resembling a detective story during its first half. The first half reads like a lighthearted, office comedy with a dark underbelly and with all the events taking place inside an advertising agency it almost feels like a British TV-series like Yes, Minister.

Murder Isn't Easy is largely narrated by the three principal players of the story, Nicholas Latimer, Paul Spencer and Sandy Barraclough, who made their biggest mistake of their life when they decided to go into business together.

The book has an unusual structure, consisting of four diary entries, which begins with the longest account written by the copy-writer of NeO-aD, Latimer, who presents himself to the reader as the unrecognized, downtrodden genius of their floundering agency. Latimer lays the blame of their failings at the feet of his partners, but has a particular grievance with Spencer and holds him responsible for losing the Flaik-Foam advertisements. And, as it becomes very clear, the personalities of the three partners are completely incompatible.

The tensions slowly begin to come to a head when Latimer has a chance encounter with a prospective client, M. Tonescu, who's a Romanian claiming to have discovered "a process by which glass would not become clouded by steam or heat" and water runs off it quickly – which he wanted to sell to the cleanly British to keep their bathroom mirrors unfogged. Latimer saw a more practical use, namely the windscreens of cars, but Spencer and Barraclough professed skepticism. Once again, Spencer is seen by Latimer as the main obstacle to his great plans.

So he begins an ill-fated series of attempts to get rid of Spencer by trying to vote him off the board and offered to buy his share in the agency, but "every legal method had been attempted" and all had failed. The situation demanded a drastic solution and murder, with all its complications, entered the picture.

After this point, it becomes hard to describe the plot without giving anything away, but how the story and chapters were structured were a pleasure to read. All of the subsequent accounts throw a different light on the previous narrative and reveal that the narrators were not exactly how they presented themselves. Or that their plans were not as water-proof as they envisioned, which kept the story one step ahead of the reader by twisting it around with each narration. You can gauge roughly what's really going on and what's going to happen, but not entirely and that made for a fun, engrossing and surprising detective story.

Interestingly, the way in which two of the partners were murdered, on the same evening, recalled the plotting-technique of a personal favorite, Christopher Bush, who (sort of) specialized in maze-like plots that linked a double murder, committed in close proximity in time and place, together – e.g. Dead Man Twice (1930), Dancing Death (1931) and The Case of the April Fools (1933). You can chalk that one down as a definite plus.

So this was a very short post, but there's not more that I can say without treading into spoiler territory, because every section of the story has developments and twists that you have to read and discover for yourself. It makes the book more fun.

Murder Isn't Easy is a character-driven, darkly comedic (semi) inverted detective story, but the plot is surprisingly satisfying as it twist and turns in lockstep with the narratives of its characters. Definitely recommended! I really hope British Library or Ipso reprints The Ghost It Was (1936) next. A detective novel that has been described as Hull's homage to John Dickson Carr.

Double Entendre

"You wouldn't think, would you, one small village could have so much trouble bubbling away under the surface."

- DCI Tom Barnaby (Midsomer Murders: The Killings at Badger's Drift, 1997)

Richard Henry Sampson was an author who enrolled into the British army at eighteen, serving on the French Front during World War I, after which he finally entered civilian life and began to pursue a career as an accountant, but was given an opportunity to write full-time when his first novel, The Murder of My Aunt (1934), became an unexpected success – which appeared under the penname of "Richard Hull." He would go on to write an additional fourteen crime-novels, but none of them left an impression on the genre quite like that first one.

The Murder of My Aunt was selected as one of the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones, "A Reader's List of Detective Story Cornerstones," which labeled the book "a classic of its kind" and "a shocker par excellence." The book also secured a spot on a 2003 best-of list that was compiled by the members of the Yahoo GADetection Group, which at the time was a good sample group of Western mystery readers. So this is one of those books that have always stuck with readers of crime fiction and I can see why now.

The story is told from a first-person perspective by Edward Powell, a haughty, indolent and repugnant creature, who found himself bound by his grandmother's will to his meddlesome aunt, but he loathes her as much as the place where they live – a hill-top house situated just outside the small, Welsh town of Llwll. Edwards takes the first couple of pages to berate the town, "a place whose name no Christian person can pronounce," decries the "horrible, twisting little lanes," covered with "loose jagged flints," that pass themselves off as roads and looked down his nose at the people who populate the area.

Not exactly a portrayal of a warm, kind and loving person, but Edward, for all his flaws and shortcomings, is not entirely unjustified in his dislike for everyone and everything around him.

Aunt Mildred is an affront to Edward's refined sensibilities, "a dreadful sight in country clothes" with "florid, bourgeois apple cheeks," but being a loud, uncouth plebeian would have been a forgivable offense. Not as easy to ignore is her tight clutch on the purse-strings and stubborn refusal to provide him with an adequate allowance, which prevents him from living on one of the few civilized patches on the globe – such as Paris or Rome. But what prove to be completely unforgivable to Edward are her never-ending personal remarks and the nasty tricks she loves to play on him.

You can safely say that Edward and Aunt Mildred are in a permanent state of "cold war" with each other, but on a domestic level.

In the opening parts of the book, the reader is told about one of Aunt Mildred's schemes, which appears as a fairly innocent tease to get Edward out of the house, but there were several people from the village involved and they all had a good laugh at his expense. However, Edward knew he was being played and tried to spoil some of his aunt’s fun, but this eventually led to an embarrassing scene and she told him in no uncertain terms that when "I say you are going to walk into Llwll, you ARE going to walk into Llwll." She follows this up by pointing out some of the people who had been laughing at him behind his back. So this made one thing very clear to Edward: Aunt Mildred has got to go. But that proves to be easier said than done.

The portion of the book between the opening and closing chapters is filled with Edward's diary entrants, in which gives detailed accounts of his various, often overly ingenious plots and failed attempts on the life of his aunt – some of which could have come from Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. One of the attempts even involved a "horrible infernal machine," which could have been ordered from an ACME catalogue. As he plots and plans, Edward finds several nosey people on his path who ask pesky questions and this reminded me of Leo Bruce's Case for Sergeant Beef (1947). Bruce's book is also an inverted-mystery, consisting of diary entrants, in which the narrator attempts to plot and pull-off the perfect murder, but meets similar kind of people and was not the (super!) genius he imagined. You have to wonder if Hull inspired Bruce's take on the inverted detective story.

Anyway, Edward's murderous endeavors are constantly thwarted by Murphy's Law and this, perhaps, helped in making him a slightly more sympathetic character than an aspiring murderer deserves to be. He's basically a fat, lazy and ill-mannered cat who tried to mind his own business, but constantly got yanked from the windowsill by the tail and eventually tried to strike back – which makes his failures all the more adorable. Aunt Mildred is somewhat redeemed in the final chapter and there's an acknowledgment that she should not have publicly humiliated him, but that does not entirely absolved her from all her responsibilities. She knew of his potential mental trouble, probably inherited from his late father, as well as his need for petty revenge, but nonetheless choose to keep him close to her and verbally cudgel on a daily basis.

However, Edward is still an odious character and the nature of his personality, and that of his aunt, is what makes the surprise twist at the end so satisfying. A twist that would probably have received the nodding approval of the great Pat McGerr and gave the book its status as a classic crime novel. A status that's more than deserved. I also realized The Murder of My Aunt may have founded a new sub-genre, the Amateur Murderer, which has a ton of potential, but seems to have remained largely unexplored ever since. A shame!

On a final note, I have to return to my previous blog-post, which was a review of C.H.B. Kitchin's Death of My Aunt (1929), in which I mentioned Kitchin's and Hull's book were often confused with one another. Once I began to read this book, I found it hard to believe any one could ever confuse these them, because they were very different, but then I came to the third attempted murder – which gives a possible explanation for the confusion. For his third attempt, Edward researches a number of poisons and one of his options are oxalic acid crystals. It's not a poison that turns up very often in detective stories, but Death of My Aunt happened to be one of them and Edward remarks of the writer of the article on oxalic acid had an aunt. A discreet nod and a wink at Death of My Aunt? I'll take a gamble and say it was.

So, all in all, you can expect The Murder of My Aunt to make an appearance on my best-of list for this year, because I really liked it and can recommend it without hesitation.