The Murder of My Aunt

by Richard Hull, Martin Edwards (Introduction)

Overview

Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder

"The book fairly races along to its surprising resolution. Fans of vintage crime fiction will hope for more reissues of Hull's work." —Publishers Weekly

Edward Powell lives with his Aunt Mildred in the Welsh town of Llwll. His aunt thinks Llwll an idyllic place to live, but Edward loathes the countryside—and thinks the company even worse. In fact, Edward has decided to murder his aunt.

A darkly humorous depiction of fraught family ties, The Murder of My Aunt was first published in 1934.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464209734
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	09/04/2018
Series:	British Library Crime Classics
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	5.25(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

RICHARD HULL (1896–1973) was a chartered accountant who later became a notable writer of detective novels. This is the first of Hull's titles to be published in the British Library Crime Classics series.

Editorial Reviews

"That popular reviewer phrase 'fiendishly clever' could have been coined to describe this 1934 mystery, reissued by the British Library as part of its Crime Classics series...Powell's movement toward the dark side will remind readers of Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train (and the Hitchcock film based on it). Fine psychological acuity, humor, and plotting throughout."

Booklist - Connie Fletcher

2018-05-29
The latest exhumation from the British Library of Crime Classics is the 1934 debut of the pseudonymous Richard Henry Sampson (1896-1973), a deliciously black comedy of murder most botched.Anticipating by more than 20 years the classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers, Hull presents the salt-and-cyanide duo of Edward Powell, a smugly unemployed dilettante of refined literary tastes, supercilious dialogue, and overweening vanity, and Mildred Powell, his maiden aunt, guardian under his grandmother's will, and housemate in Brynmawr, outside the Welsh village of Llwll, a spot that's either perfectly lovely or suffocatingly parochial, depending whom you ask. Even the most routine conversations between the two as they discuss, for example, whether Edward will be obliged to walk all the way to the village to pick up the latest parcel of French novels he's ordered, are rife with such provocation on both sides as they scheme to secure the most minute psychic advantages over each other that even without the title, you'd know it would be only a matter of time before Edward decided that his life would be much richer, freer, and more untroubled without Aunt Mildred. Unfortunately, his initial attempt on her life, cleverly conceived as it is, doesn't quite go according to plan. Now Edward must deal not only with the suspicion that will naturally fall on him if he's successful and the fact that every soul in Llwll seems fully apprised of everyone else's business and obsessed with the possibility of learning even more, but with the likelihood that Aunt Mildred has the wind up and that, as she repeatedly warns him, any future such activities on his part will force her to "take action." A child could see where this is all heading.Even so, fans of acid domestic intrigue as only the British can serve it up will rejoice in the republication of this minor classic despite an overlong last chapter that reveals the murderous narrator as even more witless, and his target as even more resourceful, than readers already knew.

Kirkus Reviews