It is not easy to keep things quiet. Not even when it's a matter of life or death. Perhaps especially when it's a matter of life or death. And particularly when the people trying to hush things up aren't particularly good at it (or at much else, come to think of it). Take the death of an unpleasant man, a member of one of those "gentlemen's clubs" found in a goodly number of Golden Age mysteries. His name was Morrison, and he died in a peculiar...accident, I suppose, or maybe it was murder? In any case, the death of a member in mysterious circumstances wasn't the kind of thing that would do the Whitehall Club much good. If only there was a way to keep it quiet... Well, you'll see where that can lead in Richard Hull's savagely funny Keep it Quiet, originally published in 1935. It's the subject of this week's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the complete review by clicking here. Keep in Quiet is being reissued later in June by Ipso Books, which provided me with an electronic copy via NetGalley for this review.
Herbert Benson, the chef at the Whitehall Club, had taken a small bottle of a poisonous ointment - trying to heal a carbuncle - to work with him one morning, along with another bottle of vanilla extract, which he plans to use in his preparation of a dessert for the club’s dining room that evening. Then, predictably, disaster happens: Morrison – a generally disliked member of the club, and the man for whom Benson had made that special, vanilla-flavored dessert, is found dead in one of the club rooms. And Benson tells Ford, the club secretary – the rather incompetent man who runs the club – that he may have mixed up the vanilla bottle with the poison bottle by accident.
Is Morrison’s death an accident? Or was he deliberately poisoned? The indecisive and ineffectual Ford would dearly love for it to be an accident. And he thinks he sees an opportunity to make that verdict a reality: another club member, Dr. Anstruther, is the doctor on hand when Morrison’s body is discovered. He tells Ford that even though the man’s death might be poisoning, he is prepared to sign a death certificate stating that Morrison died from a heart attack – even without a post-mortem, mind you. Wonderful, as far as Ford is concerned. He doesn’t really care if it was a heart attack or poison. All they have to do in order to protect the club and its reputation – and, for that matter, to protect each other - is keep the real story of Morrison’s death a secret. In other words, as the title says, keep it quiet.
And that is precisely what will prove virtually impossible to do – especially once the blackmail letters begin arriving...
Richard Hull takes these raw materials, creates a goodly group of potential suspects, and sets them at each other’s throat. Hull’s satire can be devastating, and some of his descriptions of the characters are simply marvelous. There’s a great deal of pointed satire in Keep it Secret. It reads as if the author had a great deal of pleasure in writing it – and I think today’s readers will appreciate Keep it Secret as well.
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