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.
Themes
The Dangers of Vanity and Ego
Content Warning: This text deals with dark themes including suicide and features scenes of murder and sexual behavior. The source text also contains anti-LGBTQ+ bias, including anti-transgender bias.
The Dangers of Vanity and Ego is a major theme in Murder Your Employer, as everyone who fails in this novel does so because of this particular vice. Throughout the novel, the theme is reinforced by opposing examples being held in juxtaposition. The vain and egotistical villain is contrasted with the compassionate, altruistic murderer, making the villain’s deletion feel necessary while glorifying the concept of justice.
Fiedler, Helkampf, Kosta, and Underton are all deleted (though Underton is saved at the last minute) because their vanity draws them into a trap or into committing an act that is unwise. The predictability of this character trait allows others to manipulate their blind spots and trick them, like Fiedler putting the poison (actually the antidote) in Cliff’s cup or Helkampf walking himself down to the kilns where his body will disappear.
It isn’t only the villains who suffer from this character flaw, as Dean Harrow allows his vanity and ego to grow until he confidently breaks the rules in publishing Murder Your Employer and allows himself to be lured by his vanity into a similar fate as Helkampf. Cliff also begins the novel falsely confident in his perfect murder, his ego and vanity making him unaware how obvious and wrong his actions are according to McMasters. His fear in response to being caught and instant humility when confronted with McMasters demonstrates that Cliff’s ego is not as deeply rooted as his humility and altruism. Gemma and Jack Horvath are also examples of egoless characters, and they succeed on a higher level, with Gemma maintaining her goodness and being acknowledged for her morality and Jack deleting himself while getting his wife the resources she needs to survive his absence.
A final example of The Dangers of Vanity and Ego is Dulcie/Doria. Her ego and vanity rival the worst villain of the novel, and when she answers the Fourth Enquiry about whose life will be improved, her hasty inclusion of starlets who suffer from Kosta’s sexual predation is too flippantly added to hide the fact that she is unconcerned. Her deletion is successful but also could be the failed example Dean Harrow speaks of in the Forward, as her narrow and selfish point-of-view keeps her from noticing Kosta is dying and her deletion is unnecessary. The novel ends with her contemplating another murder and McMasters noting they will need to keep an eye on her to see if her vanity and ego spiral out of control. Including Dulcie’s example in the novel indicates that the success or failure of the characters can be measured by their levels of vanity and ego and reinforce the novel’s throughline of murderous altruism.
The Use of Humor to Explore Darkness
Humor is used in the opening lines of the novel and doesn’t stop until the final half-word. The despair and ugly situations necessary to drive one human to kill another are not shied away from in Murder Your Employer, but the way they are depicted with the promise of justice and humorous puns and witty aphorisms, as well as with the absurdity of the situation, make them manageable and even enjoyable for the reader. In this novel, humor is the major tool that makes reading about the darker side of human behavior pleasant and palatable.
The witty characters of both Cliff Iverson and Dean Harbinger Harrow, the first-person narrators, are key to making this happen. The Dean’s opening lines imitate a well-used trope of the self-help genre but with an absurd twist that instantly conveys the light-hearted tone of the book. He continues to use witty aphorisms throughout that are both memorable and silly when used in the context of killing someone, such as his comment to Gemma about “Old habits die hard” (344). Cliff is a master of puns and aphorisms himself and uses witty and often silly descriptions to add both humor and vividness to the prose. His description of Helkampf as a “demented” clown and McMasters as Toad Hall instantly add life and humor to the narrative while not shying away from the danger or absurdity of the situation. The humor of both of these narrators is essential to convincing the reader to root for them but also to overlook the darkness of the actions being plotted and the situations that brought the students to the school in the first place.
Sexual manipulation, racism, extortion, disregard for human life, and misuse of power do indeed throw many characters into despair deep enough to make someone feel death by suicide is their best option, as with Cliff’s colleague, Cora Deakins. Centuries of serious literary works have been created around achieving justice for similar crimes, often with dark consequences for the protagonist. What makes Murder Your Employer different is the humor that makes the acts of justice cathartic and lead to an unexpectedly happy end. The murder of the perpetrator becomes ironically life-affirming as it restores joy and order.
Further enforcing this is the fact that the targets in this novel show little humor at all. Even though they rob others of joy, they themselves are devoid of positive emotion. This makes them less relatable and perceivably less human when compared to the funny and likable Cliff Iverson, helping the reader overlook the fact that he’s a murderer. Humor and how one can use it to get through the darkness becomes measure of one’s humanity in Murder Your Employer.
The one exception to this is Gemma, who does indeed have a sense of humor but maintains a level of gravitas. For her, murder is no laughing matter, and her inability to twist her deep sense of morality to justify what she is trying to do is the same determination that doesn’t allow her to smile when the rest of the students do. Cliff notes he will forever remember her as the woman who didn’t laugh at him when others did. As with the other big ideas of the novel, Gemma is the antithesis example of this theme, showing what the opposite side of the spectrum of protagonists looks like so the reader can feel comfortable with a point of view that may be more like their own when it comes to contemplating murder.
The Moral Complexities of Justice
The characters of Murder Your Employer are firmly coached by McMasters faculty in the Four Enquires. This encourages the students to feel as though murder is the only possible choice as well as one that becomes infused with the sense of justice and a higher morality in the characters and in the minds of the readers. All students are required to start their education with these questions:
- Is this murder necessary?
- Have you given your target every last chance to redeem themselves?
- What innocent person might suffer by your actions?
- Will this deletion improve the life of others? (2, 3).
By contemplating these questions before they decide to proceed, McMasters students feel firmly on moral ground before they proceed with their deletions. The theme of The Moral Complexities of Justice speaks directly to the reader, as the novel shuffles traditional ranking of evils in society’s moral code. While murder is usually considered the worst of the sins against humanity, Murder Your Employer works to convince the reader that there are worse crimes, such as allowing dastardly humans go unchecked and unpunished. For McMasters students, murder becomes less terrible when justice feels necessary. Readers feel this shifted moral high ground through first-person narration and may find themselves agreeing and empathizing with students’ situations.
The Four Enquires direct the students toward compassion for one’s fellow man, and this moral displaces the value of human life to become the pinnacle against which to measure all others. All the villains of the book lack this trait. Jud Helkampf and Merrill Fiedler don’t care about the innocent people affected and use others’ suffering to further their agenda. Adele Underton and Leonid Kosta similarly have no compassion. According to McMasters, this self-centered behavior is worse than murder, as it destroys the living life of others. As Cliff points out, “Who are you to pour your poisonous self into the only life we have?” (337). This phrase sums up the unique and complex morality the novel presents, suggesting compassion for the innocent justifies the evils of murder, and one should value human life only if that human isn’t an extraordinarily bad one.
Part of the author’s trick is to put the reader in a position of agreeing with the school that morally complex actions should be allowed in the execution of compassionate, well-thought-out justice. The reader is forced onto the same ethical ground as the murderous students by Dean Harrow’s declaration in the novel’s opening sentences “So you’ve decided to commit a murder. Congratulations” (1). By accepting the reader’s morality (or lack of it) at the beginning, Dean Harrow encourages the reader to adopt a new code of ethics and accept the realities of the world of the novel.
Just when the novel seems to have solidified its stance on the morality of murder, it acknowledges toward the end that things may still be complicated. When the students attempt their deletions, with the exception of Dulcie, the process is less direct. Gemma fails at her deletion entirely, and Cliff tricks his target into poisoning himself, thus avoiding having to physically do the deed. As the students return to the real world outside of the school in the second half of the novel, a reality similar to the reader’s world creeps into the forefront. Thus, the reader isn’t expected to heartlessly encourage a brutal murder, but rather to meet the characters halfway between the morality of McMasters and the reader’s real world.
