Don't take the title literally
I must confess I read this book for the title. There is a certain hilarious bluntness in the name Murder Your Employer that most books vaguely gesturing in that direction would pad over in the name of politeness. Not so here: this is a book about, among many other things, a character inflicting fatal violence against the man who employs him. I also have to say that the man who wrote this book (also the man who wrote the Pina Colada song) is named Rupert Holmes, which is the best name I have ever seen for a crime writer (‘Rupert’ sounds like a character in an Agatha Christie novel, and ‘Holmes’ from the eminent Sherlock). So long as you have ‘Holmes’ you’re set, and ‘Rupert’ is wonderfully Victorian-sounding.
But regarding the actual book: this one is set in the years after World War II. It feels to me as a sort of invocation of Chandler American Time, as TVTropes calls it, the golden age of the American crime story. Holmes takes a particular delight in subverting the perceived glamor of those years, where prosperity for one caste was held up by the suffering of all the others. The book begins with a man trying to murder his employer and failing; clearly, the years after the good war were not good for everyone. It is after that failure where the McMasters Conservatory enters the picture.
The McMasters Conservatory is the only institute of learning in the world where the prime course of study is that of how to commit murders and get away with them. There is a particularly funny bit at the beginning where the Conservatory boasts of its famous alumni, and this includes many luminaries of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (another good reason to set this book far enough in the past: Holmes can make that joke without being sued!). The book goes out of its way to prevent anyone from knowing where the Conservatory actually is physically located, and this can be very funny sometimes. What it reminded me of was the John Wick movies, where there is this truly massive amount of worldbuilding that does not involve a single actual supernatural element, so far as I can tell. The result of this is a story whose first half or so feels like a dark parody of a campus novel, but with more dead people. It’s a compelling, amusing juxtaposition, one with shades of the rite-of-passage plots many young adult stories do (but, again, with more dead people).
Holmes varies the format from standard crime stories of this sort; a good chunk of the book is composed of a publication from the press of the McMasters Conservatory (side note: I love how that word ‘conservatory’ is used, as if murder were another type of musical work—it’s an art, according to McMasters, without question) about its own history (all appropriately laudatory, all properly wry, as is best). These bits give you a much fuller sense of the subterranean world of homicide that this book depicts; this wouldn’t be as fun without knowing the aforementioned luminaries who had attended McMasters. It also allows amusement through its self-aware tone; imagine if you were reading the Lockheed Martin website where it obliquely and in a darkly humorous manner alluded to the dead Yemeni children that are the inevitable result of the company’s policies, and you’ll get the gist of it all. Furthermore, the entire book is a packet of sorts, composed of interviews with three graduates of the homicidal program that allow for a diversified look at the people that are produced by the institute.
There is a certain element of wish fulfillment here; all the prominent victims of McMasters graduates are terrible people. In the world of Murder Your Employer, the most fantastic element, the most spellbinding departure from the real world, is that these awful people get lethal consequences for their actions. Of course, it is not only death that comes for them, but several more inventive schemes that make the murder feel ever sweeter. Yes, there is schadenfreude, and yes, it is not the finest expression of human emotion, but there is a certain visceral pleasure in seeing the plots come together. They become labyrinthine, like the works of demons sent specifically to torture specific awful people, and you may end up agreeing with the people who run McMasters that murder is indeed a work of art. Holmes certainly puts his best foot forward here.
Aristotle described catharsis as the way that tragedies can relieve emotions in the viewer (he was discussing this in a theatrical context) via the depiction of action and particularly the conclusion of the action (the word ‘catharsis’ originally referred to ritual purification). Digging deeper into the book, and why it works, may bring up unpleasant aspects of the human psyche, namely why we like reading about murder to begin with. A lot of it is simple curiosity from people who fortunately do not need to be exposed to truly awful things day after day, and the exposure to these things sates inquisitiveness and relieves boredom. All the murders are intensely cathartic, showing Holmes’s skill, but it may occur to those of us familiar with the works of Bertolt Brecht and his ‘distancing effect’ that this may well be the only way the book could have seen print, or perhaps written at all. Even the title is unabashedly provocative, hilariously so, reminiscent of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, where he argues that the culture industry under late capitalism creates nominally anti-establishment works that serve to temper the rebellious instincts of the people. There’s a tension here that I’m not really sure Holmes actually intended between the provocativeness of the title and the resolution of the story.
Murder Your Employer is darkly funny, exquisitely plotted, and deeply atmospheric in the way the best crime stories are. All crime stories are heavily about setting, and this book practically drags you into this grotty world of professional homicide. The whole thing just works, in a way that is so twisty that to give too many more details would spoil it. But one thing to conclude this—don’t take the title literally.
Reference: Holmes, Rupert. Murder Your Employer [Avid Reader Press, 2023].
POSTED BY: Alex Wallace, alternate history buff who reads more than is healthy.
