58 pages • 1 hour read
Rupert HolmesMurder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Disguise
Many of the characters in Murder Your Employer utilize a disguise, and it becomes not only a symbol but one of the larger motifs of the text. Cliff’s original disguise is absurdly over the top and symbolizes his ineptitude when it comes to murder. That he believes it’s good helps emphasize his incompetence and feeds into the theme The Dangers of Vanity and Ego.
By the end of the novel, he utilizes the same ridiculous form of disguise but is now able to manipulate it in an alternative way that distracts the people around him and makes him intentionally memorable, thus helping to create an alibi and frame his victim. The repurposing of the disguise symbolizes his transformation from inept bumbling killer to a savvy, fully educated McMasters graduate.
Dulcie Mown/Doria Maye also uses disguise to commit her deletion, though hers is the second natured, well-done disguises of a Hollywood star accustomed to changing characters. That Gemma is the solitary student who doesn’t use a disguise is symbolic of her genuine, honest nature which makes her deletion of her extortioner impossible.
Hidden Information
One of the motifs used by the writer Rupert Holmes not only in Murder Your Employer but in other areas of his work is an element of hidden information and surprise resulting from a first-person narrator that has limited knowledge about the world.
The most obvious examples of this are the physical disguises that the characters use to hide information from the victims, but the hidden nature of things goes much further than this. In Rupert Holmes’s world, one doesn’t know exactly the motivation or identity of the person one is speaking to, be it one’s wife unknowingly answering the relationship-wanted ad (such as in his hit song “Escape”) or the wife of one’s killed coworker actually being one’s sponsor to McMasters. The protagonists all have limited understanding about the world and so each gets a surprise of sorts by the end. Gemma finds her target is pregnant and so doesn’t kill her and also that her crush Cliff has not died. Cliff learns his sponsor is his friend’s widow, and Doria discovers her murder was unnecessary. Each of these revelations have been hinted at throughout the text, giving the reader and the character a simultaneous revelatory moment of putting together the pieces.
In contrast, the murder victims are remarkably transparent. While not necessarily one-dimensional, they all are upfront about their vanity, egos, and blatant disregard of others. They do nothing to hide these flaws from those around them and so make themselves easy for everyone including the reader to dislike.
The Witty Aphorism
The Use of Humor to Explore Darkness is a major theme of the novel and the main type of humor used enough by both narrators to become one of the book’s motifs is the witty aphorism. The familiar phrase or lesson used by Dean Harrow, the McMasters faculty, and Cliff Iverson often multiple times a chapter take on a second significance when applied to murder providing the reader with various funny meanings.
While Dean Harrow uses memorable phrases to help illustrate lessons and cement them in student’s heads, they are used differently than originally intended and so provide the reader with a moment of simultaneous recognition and difference. The juxtaposition results in humor, particularly when a faculty member or Cliff adds a follow-up phrase. Contributing a humorous commentary on an already humorous adage furthers jokes, such as when a faculty member tells Gemma that past failure isn’t a problem: “And as Demosthenes said, ‘He who fights and runs away may live to fight another day’ […] although Guy McMasters preferred the more succinct ‘I’ll get you next time!’” (151). Examples like this and the using of stock phrases with unexpected and absurd twists (such as the Dean’s welcoming lines that imitate a self-help book) is the type of humor that is used throughout the book so often that if becomes a motif.
