Murder in Mount Holly by Paul Theroux

First published in the UK in 1969; published by Mysterious Press on December 6, 2011

Originally published in Great Britain in 1969, Murder in Mount Holly is one of Paul Theroux’s early novels.  A prologue introduces its three main characters:  Herbie Gneiss, having unwillingly dropped out of college, must even less willingly find a job so he can support his gluttonous mother after his father’s death.  Mr. Gibbon is an aging veteran who walks around town carrying wrinkled paper bags when he’s not working in a war toy factory.  Miss Ball, a kindergarten teacher who collects products with catchy names, rents rooms in her house to Herbie and Gibbon so she’ll have extra money for the school janitor, with whom she’s having an affair.

“If you don’t laugh, you’ll go crazy,” says Herbie.  Murder in Mount Holly offers ample opportunity to increase your daily laughter quotient.  Theroux’s characters have ridiculous conversations, filled with non sequiturs and nonsense, and yet they all seem real, like recordings of conversations your near-deaf and slightly dotty grandparents might have with each other.  The older characters -- Gibbon, Ball, and Herbie’s mother -- are barely in touch with reality, living their lives in a past that never existed.  They are racially and religiously intolerant, wedded to political views that make Barry Goldwater seem like a pacifist.  To prove that they “still have a lot of spunk left,” they turn to crime, somehow justifying their scheme as a blow against communism.  It’s no surprise that things go wrong from the very start.  Meanwhile, Herbie gets his draft notice.  The old folks are delighted; whether he comes home is less important than their familiarity with someone who has been called to battle the communist menace.

If the story seems a bit dated, if Theroux’s targets seem too obvious, if the novel is less substantial than Theroux’s later work, the humor that inheres in his eccentric characters and absurd dialog endures, in the way that old Woody Allen comedies will always be funny.  I recommend Murder in Mount Holly to fans of offbeat comedy for that reason.

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