Richard Hull

• Born: September 6, 1896
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: 1973
• Place of death: London, England

Type of Plot: Inverted

Contribution

Richard Hull’s mysteries have won acclaim for their “acid bite,” their originality, their brilliant viciousness, and their credible exposure of the human capacity for self-delusion. They are marked by resoundingly unpleasant characters who are totally self-convinced, egotistical, and amoral, yet fascinating. They bring a sense of fun and amusement to the mystery story, mingling the comic and satiric with the gruesome, thereby adding an extra dimension to the traditions of the genre. Hull enjoys breaking formulas and reversing expectations time and again within a single work, and his clever and effective use of the inverted pattern with a final narrative twist assures that anyone who has read only the first half of one of his novels will seldom be able to predict the second half. In fact, the pattern Hull developed provides a highly successful model for imitators. Isaac Anderson of The New York Times calls Hull’s books “subtle, skillful and unusual,” while Will Cuppy calls for more mysteries by authors such as Hull, who writes with “the same kind of brains needed in other books—murderous fun of a high order.”

Biography

Born Richard Henry Sampson in London in 1896, Richard Hull was the son of Nina Hull and S. A. Sampson. He attended Rugby College; though awarded a scholarship in mathematics on completing his studies there, he failed to enter Trinity College at Cambridge University because of the outbreak of World War I. He entered the army on his eighteenth birthday and received a commission. He served with an infantry battalion and the machine gun corps and spent three years in France. After the war, he remained on the active list of his original army battalion until 1929, when he formally retired. During that time, however, he joined a firm of chartered accountants, with whom he worked for several years. Although he passed his qualifying examinations in accounting, he was unsuccessful in establishing a private practice and turned to writing instead. He wrote his first and most famous novel, The Murder of My Aunt, in 1934, and thereafter published a book a year until 1941, when he began to release his work at a slower pace. He published fifteen novels in all, with the last appearing in 1953. When Hull wrote of himself, he relied on the third person, as in his letters to mystery critic and historian Howard Haycraft.

On September 1, 1939, Hull was recalled to service but was released as a major in July, 1940, because of his age. He next worked in the Admiralty as a chartered accountant, investigating costs of government contracts, until the mid-1950’s. A lifelong bachelor, he lived in his London club until his death in 1973.

Analysis

Richard Hull claims that his mysteries are imitative of the crime novels of Anthony Berkeley, particularly of Malice Aforethought: The Story of a Commonplace Crime (1931). They are indeed so in their reliance on a first-person narrator, their focus on the motives and mind of the murderer (the most villainous of whom shares the author’s name), and their deadly wit. In many ways, however, his work has much more in common with the novels of Jim Thompson or Patricia Highsmith, though his is a British version of these writers’ special brand of nastiness. At their best, Hull’s works are unique. They draw the reader into their own amoral world of plots and counterplots, utilizing an intimate diary-confessional form whereby the villain talks directly and intimately to the reader, making the unreasonable sound reasonable and the murderous seem necessary.

The variation of point of view within the novels is skillfully handled. Hull excels at having his narrator report one person’s story or reactions and then present the totally opposite position of another, giving the reader a strong sense of the self-delusions by which humans exist and of the difficulty of determining truth as events are filtered through a number of complex, conniving minds. The Murder of My Aunt is a tour de force at reversing perspectives, with the bulk of the novel from the point of view of the murderous nephew and the final chapter from the point of view of the aunt, the intended victim. My Own Murderer (1940) repeatedly provides multiple interpretations of the same action, interpretations that reveal the prejudices, obsessions, and values or lack of values of the various characters involved. Hull continually plays with the reader’s perceptions, a fact that is evident from his titles. Several of the titles seem clear in their intent as one begins the work but take on a different meaning and texture as one concludes the book and realizes that the pronoun or the possessive has a second sense that fits the situation far more aptly than the more common meaning. Only in The Ghost It Was (1936) does Hull vary his narrative form, relying uncharacteristically and not so successfully on a third-person narrative.

In Hull’s novels, there is no focus on clues, suspicions, or police procedures. When a police inspector or an amateur detective does appear, he is a peripheral figure, described in greatest detail only in the final chapter or chapters. He guesses about character and motive; although the narrator thinks that he understands far more fully than the detective possibly could, the irony of the ending is that the narrator (and the reader, who has shared his perceptions), is shown to have been partially, if not totally, wrong all along. Typical of Hull’s distinctive manner is The Ghost It Was, wherein the detective enters the case solely to clear a ghost of a murder charge, and in an unexpected switch, the butler is a legitimate suspect. In most Hull mysteries there are no interviews of witnesses, and often there is no traditional suspense, in that the reader knows from the beginning who committed the first murder or who is attempting murder and why. There are often multiple murders, but each one is committed by a different murderer, with the motives for the second or third murder growing out of and interlocked with the first. The pleasure comes from the mental vagaries of the narrator, from his rational irrationality, from his self-revelations and prejudices, and ultimately from a final twist in which perspectives are reversed and the best-laid plans go awry.

Hull explores the total absence of guilt in his characters, who are highly individualistic and with pretensions to education, artistic sensibilities, or wisdom above their fellows, but who have all failed in the real world in some way: financially, socially, or morally. For them, others are but insects to be crushed, and those who would disapprove are maudlin sentimentalists. Hull’s narrator, however, nevertheless appeals to the reader’s sympathies, explaining the reasons for his unrest, distrust, or distress to show himself in the best light: as a person put on, taken advantage of, or abused in some way by others, who, as a result, seem from his jaundiced perspective to deserve death. Typical is the narrator of My Own Murderer: When a friend in need, though uninvited, thanks him for an egg, he informs the reader, “It was preposterous. I hadn’t let him have it. He’d taken it as if it was Czecho-Slovakia, and nothing short of violence, which anyhow was impracticable, could have saved it.” Later he confides,

When Mrs. Kilner had been explaining, apparently extremely inaccurately, her desire to humiliate Alan Renwick, to have him in her power and then make him feel it, to make him crawl to her and eat humble pie, I had understood exactly what she meant. I had never had the chance to do that to any human being and I should particularly enjoy doing it to Alan, although from many angles I quite liked him.

Still later, he admits that he would have dearly liked to have been Alan’s dentist, “only that dentists in the end relieve pain.”

Such characters tamper with car brakes, start fires, experiment with garden poisons, put morphine in drinks, and send friends or relatives to painful deaths without a second thought, indeed with resentment at the trouble the person is causing them, and with regret that they cannot be disposed of more simply. Almost always their goal is financial gain. Moreover, they gloat over their own cleverness in checking out and planning the details of their atrocities, and ignore the possibility of injury to innocent bystanders. Hull’s characters are locked together in a strange mixture of like and dislike; at their most kindly they may be most dangerous, and at their most peevish they may be most charming. Ironically, however, convinced of their inherent superiority, his narrators are blind to their own limitations and weaknesses and cannot see major errors of judgment and action that damn them. In fact, when the view is reversed, the reader finds that others see through these narrators most easily, readily predict their future acts or unravel their past deeds, and know them for the scoundrels they are. Because part of the reader’s pleasure comes from sharing the speaker’s prejudices and plans (the reader is addressed so intimately), ultimately one must also share his guilt and both bemoan and enjoy his comeuppance, if there is one.

The Murder of My Aunt

The Murder of My Aunt sets the pattern for Hull’s later works. His main narrator, a worthless layabout nephew who is sponging off the rich old aunt who has reared him, is fat, blond, homosexual, and spoiled, as are most of Hull’s villains. He reads pornographic French novels, consumes sweets, is excessively precise about grammatical constructions, and dismisses most of what his aunt and her friends enjoy as rather crude and uncivilized, particularly if it involves physical labor or dirt. His lifetime has clearly been spent avoiding the lessons of British integrity, industry, and responsibility that his concerned aunt has endeavored to instill in him. When she, in their game of attack and avoid, pushes him a little too far (he must walk to town for his mail), he decides on deliberate and coldblooded murder to free himself from her judgments and control and to gain for himself the money and estate on which he depends. He acts alone, except for his beloved Pekingese dog, which he calls the only friend he has in the world, but which he would cheerfully sacrifice to further his own interests. His diary reports step-by-step his leisurely plans, their execution and results, and the thousand fears and anxieties to which they make him prey, until the final twist at the end when both the narrator and the perspective shift, revealing the importance of point of view in interpreting reports.

My Own Murderer

The works that followed The Murder of My Aunt explore the possibilities inherent in the inverted form. In My Own Murderer, an unscrupulous lawyer describes an elaborate conspiracy whereby he hopes to rewrite the will of and then murder a confessed murderer, making it first look like a contrived suicide to mislead the police and then like a genuine accident. When pawns in his game of death react unexpectedly, he is quite willing for an unwitting substitute to take his place and bear his death penalty. At the close of the work, he addresses the reader as the author of his own published confession. The confessor’s name? Richard Henry Sampson.

Other Works

In a similar vein, A Matter of Nerves (1950) claims to be the diary of a murderer, reporting his method, his performance of the deed, and the aftermath, but keeping his identity a secret. Hull varies the point of view in Excellent Intentions (1938) by telling the story through a series of courtroom scenes and by inverting the psychology as well as the narration as the judge realizes the selfless motives of the murderer and the worthlessness of the victim. In Murder Isn’t Easy (1936), the variation is based on the story of the murder of a company director being told from the different viewpoints of those most closely involved. The Murderers of Monty (1937) begins with an elaborate practical joke, a company formed to “murder” Monty, but one that backfires when a real murder results. Keep It Quiet (1935) also involves a not-so-funny joke that gets out of hand (the wife of a club chef placing perchloride of mercury in a bottle labeled “vanilla”) and ends with blackmail as the club secretary tries to hide the disastrous results of her act: poison on the club’s dinner table and double death thereby. The other works in Hull’s canon are weaker in execution and lack the humor and originality of earlier works, though Last First (1947) attempts to surprise in the Hull tradition by placing its final chapter first.

Setting and Tone

Hull’s settings are highly detailed and concrete and often depend on ironic contrast: a peaceful rural scene that hides mayhem, a sinister setting in which plans go awry and tragicomic bumbling ensues. The interaction of English villagers, their peeves and pranks and gossipy good humor, details of gardening and mechanics, the daily activities of a small advertising agency, and the various methods for manipulating and changing legal documents are all presented with convincing verisimilitude. The description of the police interrogating witnesses in Invitation to an Inquest (1950) is particularly nasty.

There is a tragicomic tone to Hull’s stories, with the quips and pranks witty in a British tradition. Burke Hare, in his introduction to the 1979 edition of The Murder of My Aunt, calls Hull “a true comic novelist.” Indeed, the comic dominates: comic description, comic action, comic wordplay. The guide to Welsh pronunciation that opens The Murder of My Aunt is both learned and hilarious, and speeches like the following are typical:

I rather welcome seeing a little sentiment in you, Edward. In some ways you are a little hard; but you mustn’t make a fool of yourself about So-so. Now, don’t jump up like that and fly into a pet, just listen reasonably. No dog in this house ever has a tombstone. It was bad enough your making Evans dig up the garden for him; still worse when you made a sort of coffin and even conducted some kind of a burial service over him, from what I hear. That was bad enough, but I refuse absolutely to have a tombstone in the potatoes, and I absolutely and entirely refuse to have an epitaph beginning . . . “To darling So-so, his master’s only joy. A victim of speed.”

Usually the comedy results from witty repartee as characters with values alien to each other clash, from a character’s blindness to his own absurdity (one trying to burn up his aunt and her home secretly, but ostentatiously carrying away a carload of personal valuables, clothes, hats, and favorite books), from objects that reveal personality, from unexpectedly juxtaposed details, or from acts that are taken to the extreme (reading through all the poisons in the encyclopedia in an effort to select the best one; pulling up various garden plants, hoping for a poisonous one, then rerooting them haphazardly and expecting no one to notice). Sometimes it results from the narrator’s genuine distress at the behavior of friends or acquaintances, as when one irritatedly notes, “One does not expect one’s friends to drop in in the middle of the night and mention casually after an hour or two’s delay that they have committed murder that evening.” Often the humor results from contrasting versions of the same story, as each character tries to hide his own feelings and motives and to blame others or obscure relationships.

A good Hull mystery, then, depends on a charming but unscrupulous narrator who amuses and provokes and makes murder seem the most natural and inevitable of acts. These well-written stories blend humor and erudition with unpredictable and fascinating plots to make the most gruesome of deeds somehow a pleasure to be savored, like a fine wine.

Bibliography

Knight, Stephen Thomas. Crime Fiction, 1800-2000: Detection, Death, Diversity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Broad overview of the important trends and developments in two centuries of detective fiction. Argues that the genre becomes more diverse in tone and narrative technique in the twentieth century. Provides perspective on Hull’s works.

Morley, Christopher. Introduction to Murder with a Difference: Three Unusual Crime Novels. New York: Random House, 1946. Discusses Hull’s The Murder of My Aunt, which is reprinted here alongside novels by Gerald Heard and Patrick Hamilton.

Peach, Linden. Masquerade, Crime, and Fiction: Criminal Deceptions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Extended study of the theme and portrayal of disguise and deception in mystery and detective fiction. Sheds light on Hull’s novels.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of Last First in The Armchair Detective 8 (February, 1975): 140. Review looks at Hull’s novel and analyzes its ability to stand the test of time.

Shibuk, Charles. Review of The Murder of My Aunt in The Armchair Detective 8 (Summer, 1980): 250. Another retrospective review examines Hull’s reception and contrasts it with his present reputation.

Slide, Anthony. Lost Gay Novels: A Reference Guide to Fifty Works from the First Half of the Twentieth Century. New York: Harrington Park Press, 2003. Contains a chapter analyzing The Murder of My Aunt with reference to its inclusion of gay characters.