Book Review: “Murder Your Employer” by Rupert Holmes

Murder Your Employer by Rupert Holmes

Murder Your Employer by Dean Harbinger Harrow is a textbook for, well, how to “delete” your boss.  Holmes’ volume of the same name is a collection biographical stories of three of Harrow’s students in the 1950s.

Each student at McMasters Conservatory gains the deep and broad foundation in the art of murder (which they prefer to call “deletion”).  Their studies are capped with a practical project, dealing with someone that truly deserves to be dealt with.

This is a horrible idea—don’t try this at home!

But Holmes is going for humor, so McMasters is jokes and puns all the way down, as everyone has a jolly old time learning how to kill and get away with it. 

The story is set in the 1950s which throws in some Noir banter and cosplay.  But setting in this time is important because the main conceit is that McMasters is completely secret.  Students don’t know each other off campus, or even where campus is.  This notion requires a suspension of disbelief for 1950, and is just plain impossible to imagine today.

For that matter, the curriculum and “practical” projects are absurd Rube Goldberg nonsense.  Elaborate ruses, exotic poisons, crazy schemes—that’s the McMaster way.  Just bashing the SOB over the head in the alley is crude, and just not OK.

A college campus is always a useful setting for storytelling, giving us a mixture of colorful people.  In this case, we come to like the protagonists, to sympathies with their murderous intent, and in the end, we are rooting for them to succeed.

It should be noted that McMasters is a very, very moral place.  They have rules (a lot of them), and the main one is that killing (“deletion”) must be justified or it should not be done.  And, by the way, if you break the rules or flunk out, you will be deleted.  This certainly adds some tension to the old academic grind!

(And, should you successfully graduate, don’t even think about stiffing the McMasters alumni appeal!)

It all makes no sense at all.  But it’s just a bit of fun, and all we can do laugh and go along for the ride.  Who will survive the term?  How will the student theses work out in the real world? What will happen to these plucky kids?

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1. Rupert Holmes, Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide, New York, Simon & Schuster, 2023.

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