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Rupert Holmes's current clever first entry in a promised series of handbooks from the McMasters Conservatory of the Applied Arts is an unintentional lesson in the difficulties of producing a genuinely witty book in which murder is the joke. A great deal of effort went into this project - the cover itself is an elegant work of art, subtly different fonts are used for different narrators, and certainly what is being taught at McMasters is painstakingly described if, happily, largely unlikely to be of much use to an actual prospective murderer.
The book is set in the 1950s, a decade sufficiently recent as to be fully electrified but early enough to lack our century's ubiquitous surveillance and twenty-four hour availability. McMasters Conservatory rejoices in a leafy campus somewhere unspecified. It could be in the United States or Britain or perhaps New Zealand though that's unlikely given the time frame. Wherever it is, it's close to Hogwarts, though its specialty is murder not magic.
And that is where the problems begin. McMasters is founded on the principle that some people do not deserve to live and those that take it upon themselves to make sure they don't deserve no punishment. The three students at the centre of the narrative have all been oppressed in one or another way by their employers. The most fully developed, Cliff Iverson, is at the Conservatory on a scholarship, courtesy of an anonymous patron. Cliff had never heard of McMasters until he awakes there one morning after being swept up by two fake cops following his attempt to shove his boss in front of a train. The boss is certainly vile, but it does not appear that Cliff ever tried to expose him before deciding, as he says it, to let the train kill him. Nonetheless, someone unknown approves and foots the bill for the extremely expensive training school for murderers.
The other two students are women - one, Gemma, who is being blackmailed by her supervisor who knows that Gemma helped her terminally ill father escape his suffering by speeding his inevitable death. Unlike Cliff, Gemma is already a murderer, if a loving one. Finally there is a movie star whose career is at standstill because she would not play along with a lecherous producer. Of the three she is the only one who can afford McMasters, which, like most private boarding schools, is eye-wateringly expensive. The food, however, is quite good.
From all this, we can gather that Holmes does not intend his comic defence of homicide to apply to most of the population. But surely, anyone with the wherewithal to spend a year or more learning to get away with murdering their employer could find another job instead. Yes, that would leave the boss in place, but if he is killed someone as bad or worse might replace him. In the case of Cliff's target, a revelation would seem to be more effective and even more satisfying than murder.
The problem that Holmes has not quite solved is that his premise is fundamentally unacceptable and no amount of word play and clever elaboration of Golden Age mystery tropes can fully obscure this fact. Holmes (a pen name, incidentally, with an evident source) does his best to distract the reader from contemplating the implications of guilt-free murder with the result that the book is far too long.
Moreover, when we finally reach the conclusion in which our prospective murderers do what they have been spending a fair amount of time preparing for, the whole book comes tumbling down in ways that would involve too many spoilers to describe. It is an inevitable collapse, however, that I don't think the author could have avoided.
The 1950s was a decade that followed one that in a mere five years produced a record of mass slaughter that is still remembered with horror now. Even so, those murders were state-sanctioned and directed, which certainly does not excuse them, but which gave the killers an excuse. Sadly, today rarely a day goes by without a mass murder in the US. Countries like mine in which random murder was very rare now experience it with a depressing regularity. It is very difficult to find the humour in murder under the circumstances. In short, I cannot say I await the arrival of Vol. 2 in this series with any enthusiasm.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal. She's been editing RTE since 2008.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, April 2024
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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