Fun cozy crime at it's best from a forgotten master. A crime caper that would be at home with the best of the black humour Ealing comedies of the silver screen.

It was Benson, the chef of the Whitehall Club, who put events in motion. He accidentally brought a bottle of poison to work in a bottle labelled “Vanilla” (for a perfectly innocent reason, apparently). It was he who carelessly left it lying around despite knowing one particularly objectionable member of the club always wanted vanilla added to his food. And when that club member is found dead, it would appear that Benson had accidentally poisoned him.

But the Whitehall Club cannot possibly have such a scandal – after all, Benson is an excellent chef. When Ford, the club secretary, and Dr Anstruther, the member who helped him cover up the potential manslaughter (or murder) start receiving blackmail letters suggesting ways to improve the club (such as buying more billiard balls), at first they decide to ignore them. But the blackmailer is persistent and soon things turn deadly…


Keep It Quiet was the second novel from Richard Hull, following the success of The Murder Of My Aunt – for those keeping score, Murder Isn’t Easy was the third, the upcoming The Ghost It Was was fourth and the British Library title Excellent Intentions was sixth. If you recall, my current high point for Hull is Murder Isn’t Easy. Does this reach those height? No, but it doesn’t miss by much.

Hull basically works with three central points of view for most of the book, Ford, Anstruther and Cardonnel, a club member who is presented as the sleuth, although given Hull’s trickery, I found myself doubting how talented he was in that direction.

“Cardonnel was the kind of man who knows his own size in gloves and is amazed to find that others are not equally well informed.”

The trials and tribulations of keeping the initial secret (and inevitably others) are rather fun to follow, especially as Ford is presented as being awfully slow, never quite behaving as the blackmailer intends. The first half is beautifully paced and just as I’d guessed who the blackmailer was – Hull reveals it anyway! We then get to see that character’s insights as well, especially when their plans don’t play out as expected. There’s also a nice growing realisation as to just how mad the villain is.

So a fun read, although like The Murder Of My Aunt, there’s a sense that Hull dreamed up the final chapter and then wrote the rest of the book to get to that point. Still, this is top notch fun and Highly Recommended.

Keep It Quiet is being reissued by Ipso books on June 28th. Many thanks for the review copy.

Published in 1935, this is a quintessential British cozy taking place among the Gentlemen's Clubs of the time. The writing was exquisite and the mystery was entertaining. i received a copy from NetGalley and the publisher and this is my honest opinion.

Finding a member (and an annoying one at that) dead in the Whitehall gentlemen's club is bound to attract the wrong sort of attention, especially when there's the possibility he could have been poisoned. So of course the natural thing to do is keep it quiet, until blackmailing notes start arriving.....

A pleasant enough old-fashioned mystery

This is a very entertaining twist on the classic Golden Age mystery set in a London club in the 1930s. Full of black humor, the book sets out some very amusing characters, particularly Ford, the club's hapless secretary, whose efforts to cover up what he thinks is a murder of one of the club's more objectionable members leads him into more and more trouble.
Although this is not a conventional murder mystery, there are mysteries to solve, as well as a satisfying denouement brought about by some unlikely detection.

Keep It Quiet is a witty British golden age mystery chock full of curmudgeons complaining about minor issues while members are being killed in their club’s easy chairs.

The chef at a London’s men’s club may have accidentally poisoned a member to death. The club’s secretary, Ford, wants to Keep It Quiet to avoid bad publicity. He enlists the help of a member, Dr. Anstruther, to put the cause of death as heart failure. Thus begins a comic farce of blackmail, threats and other crimes.

This book is hilarious! I enjoyed the hunt for the blackmailer. Despite guessing basically everyone in the book at various times, I still failed to guess correctly by the end.

Overall, highly recommended to armchair detectives and anyone looking for a droll golden age mystery. 4 stars!

Thanks to the publisher, Ipso now Agora Books, and NetGalley for an advanced copy.

Keep It Quiet is a reissued 1935 Comedy of Manners set in a middling Gentlemen's Club in London. It nicely satirises the minutiae of club life and the fussy habits of its members and has a wry, world-weary, almost meandering style, which I quite liked for a change from, say, a dark, modern psychological thriller.

Although it is not a traditional whodunit, there is a villain to unmask and there are a few red herrings thrown in for who this might be. It is cleverly plotted but perhaps for me a little unevenly paced: it was a bit slow in the middle, some of the minutiae got a little too tedious or some of the meandering a little too long.

That said it develops well; there is a mid-book twist and a surprising ending as well as a couple of subplots that are tied up nicely by the end. It features a great cast of characters, my particular favourite being the indefatigable Cardonnel.

I would recommend this to anyone looking for a gentle, light-hearted period piece that is a little different. Thank you to NetGalley and Agora Books for the ARC of Keep It Quiet.

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.

This mystery takes you on a very dizzy ride, one that keeps you guessing till the end. Starts off a little slow but certainly builds up as it moves along. The twist at the end was very clever, an older style book, and a good one.

Entertaining, clever and witty, this is the Hull I have most enjoyed. It takes pot shots at the world of men’s clubs, Holmesian deduction and the detective genre itself. The humour is light-handed and the writing is skilful, incorporating letters neatly into the plot.

There are deaths, intended and unintended, poisonings, blackmail and book thefts to delight the reader. The tone is just right, humorous but not overly jokey.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ipso Books for the digital ARC.