Richard Hull

Who was Richard Hull?

Richard Hull was the pseudonym of Richard Henry Sampson, who became successful as a crime novelist with his first book in 1934. The son of Nina Hull and S.A. Sampson, he was born in London on 6 September 1896, and attended Rugby School, Warwickshire. He entered the British army at eighteen with the outbreak of the First World War and served as an officer in an infantry battalion and in the Machine Gun Corps. At the end of the war after three years in France he worked for a firm of chartered accountants in the early 1920s and then later set up his own practice. He moved into full-time writing in 1934 after the success of The Murder of My Aunt. In the Second World War, he was recalled to the army and became an auditor with the Admiralty in London, a position he retained until his retirement in the 1950s. While he ceased to write detective fiction after 1953, he did continue to take a close interest in the affairs of the Detection Club, assisting Agatha Christie with her duties as President. He was a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.