Crime at Christmas: A Seasonal Box of Murderous Delights by Jack Adrian

Author:Jack Adrian [Adrian, Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1853360317
Publisher: Equation
Published: 1988-11-30T21:00:00+00:00

Sister Bessie

CYRIL HARE

CYRIL HARE (real name Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, 1900—58) only wrote nine detective novels. Double that would still have been too few. Out of those nine books, four—Tragedy At Law (1942), With A Bare Bodkin (1946), When The Wind Blows (1949), and An English Murder (1951)—constitute a quartet of peculiarly English masterpieces of the murder-writer’s art.

Not that the rest of his slim output is that far behind (one book not included is The Magic Bottle, a wholly delightful fantasy for children which begs to be reprinted). I have a particular fondness for Suicide Excepted (1939), a fine novel, much underrated, with a nicely contrived shock at the end. Cyril Hare was good at shocks. Even his last book, He Should Have Died Hereafter (1958), though plotline-slim, manages effortlessly to surprise the reader, even though there’s a strong nudge in the direction of the solution in its own title. But then he never seemed to mind taking risks. Tragedy At Law has 284 text pages; the only murder takes place on page 253. On the face of it that’s not just a risk, it’s an act of madness. Yet since it was first published half a century ago the book has achieved classic status. Judge Henry Leon (who, as Henry Ceceil, wrote quantities of legal farces as well as some entertaining and characterful near-mysteries) praised it immoderately; Julian Symons included it amongst his list of ‘best, anywhere, ever’.

For most of his working life—apart from a brief wartime stint at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, and a longer spell under the Director of Public Prosecutions—Cyril Hare was at the hard end of the law, a working barrister whose career reached its peak when he was appointed a County Court judge. By all accounts he was a congenial man, urbane, dryly amusing, a lawyer to his fingertips yet one who had a gratifyingly short way with life’s little problems. His friend Michael Gilbert recalls an occasion when the gasfire in the Detection Club died and no one had a shilling for the meter; it was Cyril Hare who gently pointed out that an Italian one-lira coin worked just as well. All things considered, if I’d been up before the beak on the Surrey circuit circa 1950-58, I rather think I wouldn’t have minded that beak being Judge Gordon Clark.

His short stories are little gems. I’ve yet to come across a real dud. Even his earliest efforts—those written in his twenties for the popular weeklies and glossy magazines of the day: the Novel Magazine, Pearson’s Weekly, Passing Show, the Bystander—exhibit an enviable deftness of touch, narrational and plotting skills well above average, and a natural bent towards jurisprudence, however oddball (‘The Devil and Mr Tosher’, a very early story and never reprinted, hinges on a slackly drawn-up infernal contract). He had a lively sense of irony which he never lost, and was one of those rare souls—Leslie Charteris was another—capable of keeping a joke going throughout a full-length novel (there’s a priceless

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