The true nature of an absolute gentleman

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	• An Absolute Gentleman: A Novel (Counterpoint) R. M. Kinder Counterpoint, 2007 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 15 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

surprisingly unexpected

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.

WOW

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.

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A Fantastic Read

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.

The true nature of an absolute gentleman

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 regards 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.

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?

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

A gripping first novel, based on the author's real-life relationship with a convicted murderer, that delves with subtlety and nuance rather than violence and sensationalism into the mind of a serial killer.

Meet Arthur Blume: charming guy, small-town college English professor, struggling writer, and occasional murderer. In this chilling debut novel, acclaimed author R.M. Kinder draws on her firsthand experience of dating a convicted murderer to brilliantly channel the voice of a polite, even sympathetic man who just happens to be a serial killer.

An Absolute Gentleman opens in a prison cell, where Arthur Blume is hard at work writing an account of his life--one stained in places with abuse and cruelty, but also characterized by everyday banality. Only as the plot unravels do the chinks in Arthur's armor of normality begin to surface, and the monster beneath the pleasant façade appears as Arthur closes in on his next victim.

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