Forgotten Book - The Martineau Murders

The Martineau Murders is the last novel published by Richard Hull. An obscure and hard-to-find title, It appeared under the Collins Crime Club imprint in 1953, and it marked the end of an interesting literary career. I've mentioned my enthusiasm for Hull (real name Richard Henry Sampson) several times on this blog, and I've been trying to find out more about him for years..

In  his day, he was much admired, and he continued to play an active part in the Detection Club, of which he was Secretary, for a long time after he gave up writing. It seems to me that he lost enthusiasm for fiction, as there is a touch of weariness evident in some of his post-war books. None of them lived up to his famous debut, The Murder of My Aunt. But The Martineau Murders represents a return to that book. Not because there are any common characters or a shared setting, but certainly some story elements are to be found in both novels.

"My doctor has just left me" is the opening sentence. Alas, the medic has brought bad news to the narrator, the eponymous Martineau, or so it seems. But Martineau is a rather unreliable narrator, and much of the pleasure of the story comes from the reader's recognition of the gulf between Martineau's perceptions and reality. Some of this is, perhaps, rather laboured for modern tastes, and this is a book that (like one or two of Hull's other books) could have done with a meatier plot, but it is still quite entertaining.

By the time this book was written, more than a decade had passed since the appearance of the last book by Francis Iles, the author whose Malice Aforethought was a profound influence on Hull. The two men laced their work with a good deal of irony, and the law of unintended consequences plays a central part in their fiction. So it is with The Martineau Murders, a village mystery with a pleasing if foreseeable twist in the final chapter.

Forgotten Book - The Unfortunate Murderer

Richard Hull was the name under which R.H. Sampson, one of Britain's few crime-writing accountants, wrote rather unorthodox fiction for roughly twenty years. To some extent, he was influenced by Anthony Berkeley/Francis Iles, but his work was often rather original and unpredictable, and as I mention in The Golden Age of Murder, it even attracted the attention of Jorge Luis Borges.

My Forgotten Book for today is a Hull novel written and set during the Second World War. The Unfortunate Murderer (1941). It begins very well, with the scene set by a government auditor who has been sent to a munitions factory, only to stumble across a murder. Hull's wit, displayed as early as the Acknowledgements page at the start of the book, is in evidence at times, but he does not indulge his taste for irony as extensively as in some of his other novels.

The murder is quite cleverly contrived, but the story does, I regret to say, become rather bogged down, and a thin and frankly uninteresting espionage sub-plot doesn't help. On the whole, I was more taken with the portrayal of business life - something Hull knew rather more about than some of his fellow Golden Age writers - and the wartime background. The factory is based somewhere in north Wales, unspecified but possibly in the vicinity of Wrexham, which is definitely an under-used location in the genre. But the solution to the killing was,for me, a let-down.

This isn't a book that has ever been much discussed, but a contemporary review in The Spectator said it was "nearly very good"and praised the freshness of the writing. Despite my enthusiasm for Hull, I think this errs a little on the side of generosity, but even his minor and less successful mysteries usually offer something of interest, and I found it a quick and agreeable read. But the book he wrote just before this one, My Own Murderer, is definitely superior.

Forgotten Book - Keep It Quiet

Richard Hull, who has featured in my series of Forgotten Books a number of times already, is again the man responsible for today's choice. Keep It Quiet, published in 1935, was a prompt follow-up to his highly successful debut, The Murder of My Aunt. Again, the story-line is unusual, although it's fair to say that, as with so many writers who make a brilliant start, he did not find the second book as straightforward.

Keep It Quiet is set in a gentleman's club in London, and Hull was writing about what he knew, since apparently he was not only a member of such a club, but actually lived there at one time. Biographical details about Hull are fairly scant, mostly confined to bios on the back of a few Penguin editions of his work. I'd be interested to know more about him. He certainly had a sharp sense of humour. The setting gives him plenty of chances to amuse himself and his readers about clubland life. There's quite a funny joke about his own weight, smuggled in to chapter 29, which only makes sense if you know that Hull's real name was Richard Henry Sampson.

A club member appears to have been poisoned by the club cook, and the hapless club secretary decides to embark on a cover-up, with the assistance of a member who happens to be a doctor.This unwise course of action has far-reaching repercussions, and soon it seems that the lives of other members are under threat. The identity of the bad guy (there are no female characters of any significance) is clear from a relatively early stage, and the main question is how the situation will be sorted out, and whether anyone else will die before the end.

There's a neat variation on a familiar solution which introduces the laws of Latvia (of all things) and there's a general quirkiness about the book that works fairly well. The downside, as often with Hull, is that his amusing central idea needed to be stretched out somewhat to result in a full-length novel. Writers like Agatha Christie, who made sure there were plenty of suspects to be studied, structured their books better. But Hull was an engaging writer, and I suspect he was also an engaging companion in real life.

Forgotten Book - My Own Murderer

Richard Hull is a writer who has long fascinated me, and I've chosen another of his titles as today's Forgotten Book. This is My Own Murderer, published in 1940, but probably written just before the outbreak of war. I found a very battered old paperback edition in an Amsterdam bookshop many years ago, and I'm glad I did, as I've never seen a copy since. An obscure book, then, one that cries out for a new life as an ebook.

The story is narrated by a solicitor, but not one with whom I was quick to empathise. His name is Richard Henry Sampson, and it's worth noting that this was Richard Hull's real name. Yet we can be sure this wasn't any sort of wish fulfilment, as Sampson is not a heroic figure. Far from it. The choice of name springs from Hull's love of irony.

Sampson's affable but very dodgy client, Alan Renwick, calls on him one evening, and we know from the start that Renwick has killed someone - a valet called Baynes, who was blackmailing him. Yet Sampson's instinct is not to encourage Renwick to go to the police, but rather to help him in concealing his involvement in the crime. The plot thickens pleasingly from there.

This is one of Hull's best books. One of the things I like about it is the way he presents Sampson as a rascal, but very much a loser. He constantly persuades himself that he's ahead of the game, fooling the police and everyone else, when in reality he is getting deeper and deeper into trouble. This kind of self-deception is something that really interests me, as anyone who has read Dancing for the Hangman will understand. And Hull develops the story very nicely, all the way up to a rather chilling finale. I can recommend this novel highly to anyone lucky enough to find a copy.

Accountants and Crime

Why don’t accountants feature more often in crime fiction? For every accountant who turns up in a mystery, there must be a hundred lawyers, and yet you would think that accountants are very well placed to indulge in criminal activity. Perhaps they are just better at getting away with it?

My question was prompted by the fact that one of the two narrators in Barbara Vine’s The Birthday Present, which I reviewed the other day, is an accountant. It has to be said that Vine, aka Ruth Rendell showed no interest in her character’s work, and portrayed him as a pretty dull dog. But it doesn’t have to be so. Some of my very best friends are accountants, and in person they are as varied a bunch as any other group One of the accountants I used to work with played drums in band that later became The Beatles.

Emma Lathen (actually, the pen-name concealed the identities of two female writers) wrote about a banker-sleuth called Thatcher, and one of her novels (a pretty good one) was called Accounting for Murder, but accountant-authors who write crime have always been thin on the ground. Perhaps one of the reasons why lawyers crop up so much more often in the genre is that so many crime novels are written by people who are either lawyers or have had legal training (it’s a long list that even includes such luminaries of long ago as Wilkie Collins.)

Richard Henry Sampson, who wrote as Richard Hull, is probably my favourite accountant-author; he emerged during the Golden Age, but his books were by no means conventional puzzles. His ironic mysteries weren’t uniformly successful, but almost all contain an interesting idea or two, and they deserve to be better known.

The recent film Deception, which I talked about a few weeks ago, is a contemporary examination of the criminal potential of accountancy, and a pretty good one. But I’m sure there’s scope for plenty of other interesting accountancy-linked mystery fiction. In the meantime, are there any really enjoyable examples I’ve missed?