Customer Reviews

An Absolute Gentleman: A Novel (Counterpoint)

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R. M. Kinder explains in her afterword why she wrote "An Absolute Gentleman," a novel about a serial killer who is "well read, with old-world charm, intelligence, a good education, and nice outward form." It seems that an acquaintance of hers named Robert Weeks was just such an individual. She wanted to tell the story of an ordinary person who is actually a monster "to help explain the human condition, the paradox between the good neighbor and his evil acts."

"I was just an aging, bald man, willing to get along with everyone," says the narrator, Arthur J. Blume. Paradoxically, he "can care about someone and then kill them." In a series of flashbacks, Kinder fills in the back story that describes how the banal and courtly Blume became so twisted. His psychotic single mother, Mary, brought him up in a Georgia farmhouse during the 1940s. Mary's occasional moments of lucidity were offset by her frequent delusions. Fortunately, she had enough money from an inheritance to support herself and her son, although she relied on her good-hearted neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Sutton, to frequently step in and lend a hand. Mary had been abused as a child and she continues the pattern with Arthur. Although she does not strike him, she shuts him up in a closet (with a supply of food) for days on end and "touches" him inappropriately. By the age of ten, the neglected boy has been forced to become self-sufficient, having learned to cook, clean, and sew out of necessity. Arthur realizes early on that he cannot rely on his erratic mother for sustenance and support.

The chapters about the protagonist's early life alternate with those that take place in Missouri in the 1990s. At the age of fifty, Arthur moves to Mason, where he has been offered a job teaching creative writing to college students. He has published one novel, but so far, there are no takers for his second book, "Ghosts." As he settles into his position, he makes some new acquaintances, including the eccentric Nada, a seventy-three year old perpetual student and aspiring writer, Grace, an attractive professor who appears to have designs on him, and Margaret, the formidable and nasty English department secretary.

This is one of the most chilling books of the year, mostly because Arthur takes great pains to hide his underlying nature. He is polite and solicitous and gives no indication that he is capable of sudden and inexplicable acts of violence. The reader gets little hints along the way that Arthur wears a mask behind which he cleverly conceals the ugliness and rot festering in his psyche. For example, he loves to cite examples from nature documentaries about animals that do monstrous things to their young. He concludes one of these passages by saying, "The natural world is no place for any creature but there's no place else to go." Kinder also clues us in to Arthur's mental illness by describing the ways in which, as a child, he tortured and killed small animals.

The author's understated and vivid writing style is pitch-perfect. Her words are all the more terrifying because so many of the terrible incidents in the book are alluded to obliquely rather than spelled out in grotesque detail. Imagined terrors are generally more frightening than explicit ones. Kinder heightens our discomfort by making us sympathize with this fiend in the guise of a man. There but for grace of decent parenting and good genes goes any one of us, she implies. Arthur J. Blume doesn't consider himself an aberration, just a victim of circumstances. He poignantly states, "I like people. We're all caught in the same maelstrom of patterns and it's better to sympathize with one another than to compete." Indeed, he goes out of his way to champion the underdog, Nada, by protesting that his departmental colleagues consistently take advantage of this vulnerable old woman. In addition, Arthur establishes an intimate relationship with Grace; although she senses that her lover is a bit off, she nevertheless continues to see him socially.

Arthur is a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde who cannot feel normal emotions. However, he is an accomplished actor who is able to fool most of the people whom he meets. Underneath his benign façade, Arthur is deeply despondent, admitting at one point, "I was agitated. Miserable. Forever no good." He takes out his self-loathing on innocents who, for the most part, have done him no harm. Sadly for Arthur and his unfortunate victims, he can never exorcise the demons that eat away at his dark and empty soul. "An Absolute Gentleman" is a tightly constructed and unnerving novel of psychological suspense that may impel some readers to start looking at their kindly neighbors with a jaundiced and suspicious eye.

I cannot believe that this is a first novel! R. M. Kinder has crafted a unique serial killer in a psychological thriller that is just as good as the work of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell.

A college writing instructor, Arthur Blume is dedicated to his students, scrupulous about his work, elegant, well-spoken, intellectual, and often caring. A nice person, really, except for those pesky black holes in his character that lead to infrequent, random urges to murder. Raised by a mad, cruel mother, Arthur is a sad case, but his students, colleagues, and lovers don't catch on until a body is found in the snow.

Ms. Kinder has written this novel with artfulness and a light touch. By telling the story in the voice of the absolute gentleman, in the style of Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita, she spares the reader the grisly details. To create suspense without shock requires a deft touch indeed.

At the conclusion of the book, the author states that in writing An Absolute Gentleman, she drew from an experience she had with a real-life serial killer. I didn't realize this while I was reading it.

I loved this book. To me, it had no wrong notes. I found the story compelling and the characters intriguing, and I was sorry to finish it. I hope that the book gains a great following, and I hope that R. M. Kinder is inspired to try her hand at this genre again and again.

Last night I was up until 2:30am on a worknight reading this exceptional novel. It's one hell of a story, mega-creepy and the writing is exquisite and perfectly formed. A rare, startling book. You'll be recommending it to your friends if not pushing it into their hands.

It's a novel for book lovers in many ways: set on a mid-western campus; the protagonist is a creative-writing professor; the heroine is a literature professor. A novel for literature lovers; for those who appreciate an academic setting; for those who want to unravel a mystery; for all those who want to read a good book. Here you are!

There are so many quotable lines but this one, maybe, is my favorite: "The natural world is no place for any creature, but there's no place else to go."

Be good to your readerly heart -- read this novel just as soon as you can.

Arthur Blume, published author, teaches creative writing in Mason, Missouri. He's been convicted of murdering one of his students. The public has painted him and his mother monsters. In his memoir, he intends to rectify this misconception.

Arthur narrates his life, not in sequential order, but by alternating between his Missouri present and his Georgian past. As I read about his life, I found myself forgetting this was a work of fiction. It felt so unbelievably real.

R. M. Kinder, a masterful story weaver, gives readers penetrating insight into a serial killer's psyche. Throughout the book, I wondered if this is how neighbors and church members saw Dennis Rader, the BTK killer. From there, I wondered how well I know my own neighbors.

"An Absolute Gentleman" by R. M. Kinder is first novel that is loosely based on the author's real-life relationship with a convicted murderer. As I read the last few paragraphs of the book, goose bumps formed on my arms. What a chilling ending!

This book is without a doubt, one of the best thrillers I've read this year. It's Oh-My-God good!

This book was a complete surprise, a small town very likeble professor has a hidden past and also a hidden agenda. He once in a while is a murderer. He is a serial killer one who nobody around notices anything wrong.
What I think is most disturbing in this novel is the calmness with which everything happens. It has left me haunted thinking that anyone among us can be this man.
I wish I would find more books like this one.

Arthur Blume appears to be a gentleman. He also appears to be rather dull and set in his way. To the outside observer, Arthur is a rather boring person. He puts forth his best efforts at teaching but never seems to become successful as an outstanding teacher. Arthur had one book published early in his career but publishers have rejected his other writing. It seems the only thing Arthur has made a real success of is killing.

Arthur began his journey through life in a small town in Georgia. His mother, Mary Blume, suffered from episodes of madness. Today she might be diagnosed and be able to live a normal life with medication. In later years, Mary was able to control her actions and was much more aware of Arthur and his flaws than Arthur could have thought possible. Arthur never knew the identity of his father.

When Arthur takes up a teaching position at a small college in Mason, Missouri, he becomes involved with another teacher. Grace Burch begins a relationship with Arthur but she is careful to keep that relationship very private. As time goes on Grace begins to notice strange things about Arthur but fails to derive a conclusion until it is too late to save one of her friends.

Arthur relates his life story in flashbacks. He is unsure of the number of people he has killed. His lack of guilt over these deaths is terrifying.

Author R.M. Kinder went through a personal relationship with a serial killer. She has used her personal experience to try to relate to the reader what goes on in the mind of a killer.

Absolute Gentleman will make you take a closer look at your friends and neighbors. Who knows what secrets they may be hiding?

Armchair Interviews says: Very suspense-filled read.

Once I began reading, I found this book hard to put down. It was very creepy, Arthur reminds me of Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho".

Arthur is softspoken and intelligent, but he is also terrifying. At first I didn't know what to expect from this book, because I didn't want to hear details from a killer, but he doesn't go into any gory details. He actually tells his story almost politely. And believe it or not, I kind of like Arthur, he's almost a nice guy, except for the murdering of course. I felt bad for how his mother treated him, she created a serial killer.

I enjoyed this book very much.

Arthur Blume, a well-read, mannered, and kindly man, joins the faculty of a small-town university in Mason, Missouri. Despite his nondescript career and lack of published work, Arthur is liked by both his peers and his students. His university life is rescued from banality by a colleague, the lovely and intelligent Grace Burch, with whom he has a love affair. At first, Grace is tender, but later becomes demanding, frustrated by Arthur's evasiveness to her queries of his history. Arthur is unsettled by Grace's probing, but remains polite; he is, after all, a gentleman. As further proof, he takes up the cause of the much-maligned and unappreciated Nada Petrovich, an elderly and inquisitive volunteer who's ignored by the faculty and maltreated by the dean's secretary. Their lack of regard for the hardworking Nada offends his sense of fairness and advocates on her behalf.

Women have figured prominently in Arthur's life. He says of them, "They were intelligent women, not always attractive, too effacing perhaps. Some small thing went awry and one of us moved on, usually me. They gave me no reason to expect to see them again." They couldn't have even if they wanted to for you see, Arthur had killed them all. (Btw, this is not a spoiler. This fact is all over the product page and the book's back cover.)

A penetrating psychological study of the mind of a murderer, the novel is framed as the writing of Arthur Blume, himself a published author though of little renown. Barely raised by a mother who was mentally ill, his view of women is skewed and misogynistic, and he exhibits an early propensity for cruelty. But no one could have guessed--the Arthur his limited world sees is refined, responsible, attentive though introverted. It's a chilling story inspired by Rose Marie Kinder's own experiences with a serial killer, Robert Weeks. Real life, as is often said, is stranger than fiction.

There is a marked absence of graphic violence in this novel, a fact that's refreshingly unique given its subject matter. Not for the gentlemanly Arthur to describe his life with vulgarity or sensationalism; instead he relates it mostly in the first person in a lulling ordinariness, but switches to the third person when he describes the murders--an attempt to distance himself from the monstrous acts. Blink and one might even miss them. It is only toward the end that the reader realizes Arthur's accounts have been filtered through the prism of a very disturbed mind.

A short read at less than 300 pages, "An Absolute Gentleman" stays in the mind long after it is put down. Absorbing as it is, it's uncomfortable to be reminded that one never really knows the true nature of even the most genteel amongst us. But that is precisely the point. We just never really know, do we?

Arthur Bloom is an English Professor and a author; he is a quiet sort of guy. Who would think he was a serial killer? This novel portrays, in part, the life of a serial killer and his relationships with the people around him. We learn about his attitude toward women, and his own psychological breakdown. This book does not go into much detail about the murders, and there is not a lot of violence in it either. Instead, the book focuses on the human interaction of a serial killer. EXCELLENT.

An absolutely engaging, creepy and satisfying read. Wonderfully crafted with complex and interesting characters, I couldn't put it down. A real treat and a surprise, Kinder has a deft hand and a subtlety that makes this a great book and not campy genre crap.