Murder in Mount Holly

October 3, 2011
First published in the U.K. in 1969, Theroux’s slight caper novel, set in the small American town of Mount Holly, uneasily mixes dark comedy and violence. Herbie Gneiss, who’s quit college at the urging of his hypochondriac, overweight widowed mother, is looking into work at Kant-Brake Toys, a local factory. After landing a job there, Herbie moves to a rooming house run by Nettie Ball, who has another Kant-Brake employee as a lodger, Charlie Gibbon, “a fuddy-duddy, not a geezer,” who later falls for Herbie’s mom. After Herbie is drafted, Nettie, Charlie, and Mrs. Gneiss decide to rob “a communist bank,” to “prove to the world that old folks still had a lot of spunk left.” Bodies soon start to drop. It’s a subpar effort for the prolific Theroux, best known for his travel books (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star).

July 1, 2011

Nope, no trains and no travel, though one can anticipate Theroux's amusingly acid prose. It's the Sixties, and Herbie Gneiss works at the Kant-Brake factory. When he's drafted, his mother and his colleague, Mr. Gibbon, fall in love and scheme with their landlady to strike a patriotic blow by robbing the Mount Holly Trust Company, whose manager is, they believe, a Communist. Clearly, there's more going on here than your average whodunit has to offer; for mystery fans who like a sophisticated or satiric bent to their work.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2011
Acclaimed for his travel writing and literary fiction, Theroux seems to have dusted off a quirky manuscript copyrighted in 1969 about three benighted Americans who decide to rob a bank because the country is at stake. Mr. Gibbon has been mustered out of the U.S. Army after 38 years, and his adjustment to civilian life isn't going well. He explains to Miss Ball, a ditzy kindergarten teacher, and Mrs. Gneiss, his lumpen, junk-food-obsessed lover, that the robbery will make the world safe for good government, small government. They commit the crime, murdering a few people along the way, but the bank job isn't the reason to read this very peculiar book. Rather, it's to marvel at Theroux's bizarre characters and his acerbic look at the Vietnam era and the Silent Majority that Richard Nixon identified as his constituency. It's impossible not to see the connection to today's Tea Partiers, who are similarly mad as hell and biblically certain of their own beliefs (though anything but silent). Murder in Mount Holly is a slim twig of a book, but it's howlingly funny and will stay with readers for a long time.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)