BOOK REVIEW: ‘A Pleasure and a Calling’

OPINION:

A PLEASURE AND A CALLING

By Phil Hogan

Picador, $25, 288 pages

 

This is murder most droll. For the benefit of a reader planning to buy or sell his home, it offers invaluable advice about how much information a real estate agent not only can gather, but use for his own purposes.

Phil Hogan has written a wickedly funny book in which he describes in polite language the life and times of a young man whose homicidal proclivities surface in childhood and bloom as a successful real estate agent. Solemnly he recalls being a 6-year-old who hides, steals, eavesdrops, always walks softly, and on occasion puts a very large cat too close to a very small baby. As he recalls it, Riley the cat “mothered” the baby and “all hell broke loose.” By that time, the boy was somewhere else, looking innocent. He found a hiding place in a velvet ottoman at the foot of his parents’ bed and stayed there while the police were called. Asked where he had been, he said “Nowhere.”

His name is William but he likes to be known as Mr. Heming because he was a formal young man as he had been a quiet and courteous child. When his temper was roused, however, as when a dog owner insulted him as a “bourgeois knob” when he asked that he clean up the animal’s leavings, Mr. Heming could be lethal. He saw nothing else to do but kill the dog and bury its owner in a backyard.

But what he loved most was collecting keys. He was a very good realtor and took the advice of his first mentor Mr. Mower, that making himself useful to buyers and sellers was crucial. It was especially important because it meant he learned everything about his clients and their possessions, some of which he tucked away for future research. But keys were his true love. Keys decorated the walls of his apartment.

He was a quiet terror as a teenager at his boarding school from which he was eventually expelled for his extracurricular activities of gaining access to the rooms and desks and property of his schoolmates, who think he is rather dull. He “winkled out” the secrets of them all “the bullies, the dolts, the weaklings, the young Mozarts, the young Einsteins.” And when he goes to work at a real estate firm it is a job made in heaven. He disposes of a rival by food poisoning.

Mr. Heming recalls somewhat reproachfully that his Aunt Lillian and his cousin Isobel didn’t like him and mentions how he seemed to be blamed for an accident involving two small children, a box of colored matches and the sloshing of petrol in a red paint can. However, it seems that all good things may come to an end when a pair of police officers arrive on Mr. Heming’s doorstep investigating the corpse in the backyard right next door to the Cooksons, who were an especially exasperating couple because they couldn’t make their minds up about houses.

The police spend the first of many hours questioning Mr. Heming about his busy schedule and he is patient and polite even if he is also worried about a misplaced key in the home of a woman friend. Mr. Heming has women friends, but they are much less important to him than his work. When Zoe, a colleague at work, becomes too close and too curious, he resorts to an ancient disused boiler to her home that when properly treated, could “release enough carbon monoxide to down an elephant.”

He takes her out for an Indian takeaway and they have a quiet evening.

“I fully expected her to be dead by Monday,” he dryly notes.

Mr. Heming is not arrested because evidence is lacking. So he retreats to his “lair” in the pretty village where he has a key to every house he ever entered, and cherishes a “stupendous sticker chart — a great tapestry of wishes.” Cross-referencing it, he reflects happily, makes him feel like “a god at play.” Not your average murderer. Not your average real estate agent.

• Muriel Dobbin is a former White House and national political reporter for McClatchy newspapers and the Baltimore Sun.