TRAGEDIES AT LAW:
The Detective
Fiction of Cyril Hare
“That the red riband should go,
in a week which
gives us that too rare treat, a J.J. Connington, to a newcomer, to Mr.
Cyril Hare…shows
that there is excellent ‘new stuff coming along’… Mr.
Crofts must look to his alibis.”
–
Torquemada, Observer, 28th March 1937
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“The late Cyril Hare’s stories were always
remarkable for their dry humour, their legal mischievousness and their
sound
craftsmanship.”
– Times Literary Supplement, 18th December 1959
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Cyril Hare is rather like Edmund Crispin: both
wrote only a handful of detective stories towards the very end of the
“Golden
Age” and finishing in the early 1950s, but are widely recognised as
being of a
very high quality. In Hare’s case, his
reputation
rests on his ability to construct an interesting plot revolving around
an
obscure legal point (insurance in Suicide
Excepted, marriage laws in When the Wind
Blows and inheritance in An English
Murder) and to take the reader behind the scenes of an institution
or way
of life (the judges’ circuit in Tragedy at
Law, bureaucracy in With a Bare
Bodkin), but also in one of the more believable detectives of
fiction: the lawyer
Francis Pettigrew who has little liking for detection but finds himself
involved
with murder time and again.
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What's New:
These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 5th December 2004.
