The Murder of My Aunt by Richard Hull
Review by Matt B. (BuffaloSavage)
Set in Wales, this 1934 mystery takes place in the country town of Llwll. Our comically obnoxious and self-absorbed narrator Edward Powell cluelessly lets his anti-Welsh stereotypes show. He takes pains to point out how unspeakable Llwll seems, in terms of both its pronunciation and its dullness. The maritime weather is cloudy, windy, and as wet as the bottom of the ocean. The men are all built like rugby-players and their speech has an “ugly Welsh lilt.” Worse, they are browbeaten by Welsh women who tend to be small but make up for it by always taking charge. Edward’s Aunt Mildred recruits the local farmers and merchants in efforts to man Edward up into a real Welshman.
Indeed, Edward has serious need of manning up. Like many narrow-minded idlers, he is a selfish narcissist. As lazy as a toad, he only grudgingly helps in the garden. He’s happily jobless, content to live on an allowance doled out from his dead parents’ fortune. He nags his aunt to improve the stodgy interior decoration of the house. He keeps a Peke named So-So, spoils it rotten, and lets it kill his aunt’s pigeons. With no girlfriend in sight, he reads French smut. Even more alarming than his admiration for British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley is his fancy for wearing sweaters the color of crushed strawberries.
Aunt Mildred continually harangues him for his acne, foppishness and incompetence at bridge. With so much bad blood between them, their sick sad relationship, we feel, can only get worse. Edward is caught out by his aunt in a series of pointless lies, vandalism, and farm animal endangerment. Aunt makes him pay, literally, and so he decides to murder her and inherit his parents’ fortune. His attempt to kill her fails. And fails. And fails again. The plot twists are funny in a mordant, ironic way. Edward’s sulky egotistical explanations for his repeated failures are a hoot.
Judging by the fact that Hull’s first novel has been released in more editions than his fourteen other novels, The Murder of My Aunt remains his best-known and best-regarded work. Hull worked as a full-time accountant. Writing was in his moonlighting job, so his hyper-articulate prose is a wee bit stiff and feels labored by the end. This is balanced by his ingenious plotting and black sense of humor. The first-person narrative is amusingly unreliable.
Knowledgeable fans and critics regard The Murder of My Aunt as a classic of the inverted mystery. It appears on “The Reader’s List of Detective Story Cornerstones.” Critic-historian Howard Haycraft called this mystery “a classic of its kind; an intellectual shocker par excellence.”
