Nothing Wasted, Not Even Murder
Introduction
Cyril Hare is an easy name to pass over. His list of novels is not long, his name rarely stands beside the great stars of the Golden Age, and at first glance there is something almost deceptively conventional about his place in detective fiction.
Yet a closer look reveals a writer whose interests and experiences gave his mysteries a character all their own. The deeper one looks, the more the apparently tidy figure begins to acquire unexpected edges.
He left behind no vast shelf of mysteries, but what he did leave behind was rarely wasted.
The Author Behind the Mysteries
Cyril Hare was the pen name of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, born in 1900 and raised in rural Surrey. The countryside remained important to him throughout his life, encouraging a love of country pursuits, while his enthusiasm for history eventually took him to Oxford to study the subject.
Called to the Bar in 1924, Clark built a career in both civil and criminal law. He acted for the prosecution as well as the defence, gaining experience on both sides of the courtroom. Writing developed alongside his legal career, with contributions to magazines such as Punch, but success came slowly.
His breakthrough arrived with Tenant for Death. In The Golden Age of Murder, Martin Edwards recounts a memory attributed to Michael Gilbert: Clark was defending a man accused of larceny at Maidstone Assizes when news arrived that the novel had been accepted. The name on the book was Cyril Hare, drawn from Cyril Mansions in Battersea, where he lived, and Hare Court in the Temple, where he practised.
Edwards also records Hare’s distinctly economical writing habits. Legal pleadings and correspondence could find a second use as writing paper, with stories drafted on their reverse sides. It is a small detail, but one that fits neatly with Hare’s practical nature.
The Second World War brought another change in his professional life. He worked for a time at the Ministry of Economic Warfare, a position he disliked, before becoming a legal assistant to the Director of Public Prosecutions. He later served as a deputy county court judge in Berkshire, adding judicial experience to an already varied legal career.
Edwards’s account also preserves Michael Gilbert’s striking first impression of Hare. Gilbert thought he resembled Sherlock Holmes as drawn by Sidney Paget: the narrow, inquisitive nose, high intellectual forehead and penetrating eyes were accompanied by what Gilbert called an “Oxford common room voice.” The resemblance must have seemed almost too appropriate for a writer of detective fiction.
Behind the pen name stood a man whose professional life had placed him among lawyers, defendants, judges and the machinery of justice long before those worlds became familiar territory in his mysteries.
Inside the Detection Club
Cyril Hare was elected to the Detection Club in 1948, entering a circle whose personalities could sometimes prove as complicated as the mysteries its members devised. That same period saw him join five other authors in writing half-hour radio plays broadcast to raise money for the Club. Hare’s contribution, The Murder at Warbeck Hall, would not be forgotten once the broadcast was over.
The Club also brought him into closer contact with fellow crime writers. Michael Gilbert’s first meeting with Hare, as recounted by Martin Edwards in The Golden Age of Murder, took place in the Club’s rooms in Kingly Street. Gilbert arrived to find a discussion under way about a gas stove that had stopped working and the apparent lack of a shilling to deal with the problem. The newest member fortunately had one. It was a wonderfully unglamorous introduction to a group now surrounded by Golden Age legend.
Hare himself discovered that the Club’s members did not always share the same sense of humour. In 1950 he invited fellow barrister Sir James Cassells, KC, to speak at a Club dinner. Cassells had apparently asked whether his audience could tolerate a little teasing. Hare thought they could. It soon became clear that, at least in the case of some members, they could not. According to Edwards, Milward Kennedy and Edmund Crispin may have been among those offended. Opinions differed even within the Club over whether the speech had been malicious or merely an elaborate piece of clowning.
A closer friendship developed with Christianna Brand. Edwards records that the two shared a low opinion of the behaviour of Lord Gorell, a founding member of the Detection Club and later one of its presidents. After Dorothy L. Sayers’s death, Hare and Brand were unimpressed by Gorell’s manner and privately nicknamed him “Lord Sheep.”
These anecdotes reveal a Detection Club rather different from the solemn institution its famous rituals might suggest. Hare was part of its friendships, irritations and occasional storms in teacups. For a man with a keen eye for human frailty, it must have provided excellent company.
Meet the Detectives
Cyril Hare’s detective fiction is not dominated by a single commanding sleuth. Instead, two very different figures move through his mysteries: a reluctant amateur shaped by the law and a Scotland Yard inspector with the experience and appetite of a professional.
An Archive Note
Francis Pettigrew is central to Hare’s detective fiction, but no clear physical description of him has been found in the sources consulted for this article. Rather than invent a face for the sake of a portrait, the Archive has chosen to let Pettigrew remain as he does on the page: defined by his character, his profession and his reluctant involvement in detection.
Francis Pettigrew
Francis Pettigrew is hardly a man searching for mysteries to solve. As Martin Edwards notes in The Golden Age of Murder, Pettigrew is an unsuccessful barrister reduced to the drudgery of legal writing when readers first encounter him in Tragedy at Law. He is also one of the most reluctant amateur detectives of the period.
Edwards draws particular attention to Pettigrew’s passionate opposition to capital punishment, an uncommon position for a detective character of his time. His legal background gives him an understanding of the machinery of justice, but his attitude towards the death penalty also places the human consequences of that machinery firmly in view.
Pettigrew does not remain fixed in place as the books continue. His circumstances improve, and in With a Bare Bodkin he meets the woman who will become his wife. Hare allows his personal life to move forward rather than simply returning him to the same starting point after each mystery.
That reluctance remains part of his appeal. Pettigrew is not a brilliant amateur eagerly waiting for the next corpse. He would often prefer murder to remain someone else’s problem, but his knowledge of the law and his own conscience have an unfortunate habit of pulling him back in.
Inspector Mallett
If Francis Pettigrew approaches detection reluctantly, Inspector Mallett comes to it as a professional. A Scotland Yard man whose first name remains elusive, he brings police experience and a thorough knowledge of London to Hare’s mysteries.
Norbert Spehner, in Le Détectionnaire, describes Mallett as tall, vigorous and powerfully built, with a ruddy face, shrewd green eyes and a formidable moustache. His pronounced Scottish accent adds another distinctive feature to a detective who is physically difficult to overlook.
Mallett is also a man who appreciates a good meal. Spehner notes that the inspector functions best when properly fed, making his interest in food something more than a passing character detail. His knowledge of London is equally impressive: he is said to know forty-two different ways of travelling between the Old Bailey and Scotland Yard.
His partnership with Pettigrew brings together two different relationships with the law. Mallett works within the official machinery of investigation; Pettigrew knows the legal world from the barrister’s side and would often rather not investigate at all. Hare uses the contrast without turning either man into the other’s comic opposite.
Mallett may be the professional detective of the pair, but he does not overwhelm Pettigrew. Instead, the two occupy different parts of Hare’s world of law and crime, meeting where a police investigation and a lawyer’s understanding of human weakness begin to overlap.
The Cases
The title Nothing Wasted, Not Even Murder finds its clearest meaning in Cyril Hare’s fiction. Ideas that failed in one form could return in another, while professional frustrations, legal questions and private interests repeatedly found their way into his mysteries.
Tenant for Death offers the earliest example. Martin Edwards explains in The Golden Age of Murder that Hare had first developed the story for the stage. The original play, Murder in Dale’s Ford Gardens, was written in 1929 and later revised as The Noose Is Cut, but neither version appears to have been performed. Hare did not abandon the material. He reshaped it into his first novel, published in 1937.
His own interests could provide equally useful material. The pleasure Hare took in angling informed Death Is No Sportsman, whose setting drew upon the River Test. Suicide Excepted followed, an ingenious mystery whose publication arrived at an unfortunate moment. Edwards recounts Hare’s complaint, remembered by his son Charles, that the book appeared just as the Second World War began, when readers were too unsettled to buy books and the long hours of air-raid shelters and fire-watching had not yet created a captive reading public.
Law provided even richer ground. An obscure legal point gave Hare the seed of a crime story, while his wartime experience as a judge’s marshal supplied the background for Tragedy at Law. The result brought Francis Pettigrew and Inspector Mallett into a world Hare knew intimately, allowing legal procedure and professional tensions to become part of the mystery rather than mere decoration.
His disliked posting at the Ministry of Economic Warfare was put to equally productive use. In With a Bare Bodkin, Hare transformed wartime bureaucracy into the fictional Ministry of Pin Control. The novel proved a considerable success: Edwards records that it earned Hare about £900 within a few months, more than his previous publications had made altogether.
The Detection Club also supplied material. Hare’s radio play The Murder at Warbeck Hall, written for the Club’s fundraising broadcasts, later became An English Murder. The novel moved the story to a Christmas country-house gathering and introduced the Hungarian historian Dr. Bottwink. Hare then returned the idea to the stage as The House of Warbeck. Its theatrical life was brief—it ran for only a week in Margate—but the same central story had now survived in three different forms.
Even Hare’s judicial work left traces. That Yew Tree’s Shade turns on a question of inheritance law, but Edwards also draws attention to its portrait of post-war rural society in the Home Counties. Housing shortages and restrictions surrounding pork and eggs become part of the world of the mystery, grounding the legal puzzle in the pressures of everyday life.
Hare did not need to travel far in search of fictional material. A courtroom, a government office, a fishing river or an old script could all provide a starting point. What mattered was recognising that an idea still had possibilities.
In Cyril Hare’s hands, very little reached the wastepaper basket without a fight.
Later Years and Legacy
Cyril Hare’s writing career was never a long one. A severe bout of tuberculosis weakened his health, and he died in 1958 at the age of fifty-seven. The title of his final novel, He Should Have Died Hereafter, also published as Untimely Death, acquired an unintended melancholy in the circumstances.
Shortly before his death, Hare had begun another novel featuring Dr. Bottwink. Martin Edwards records that Hare’s son, Charles Gordon Clark, later allowed him to examine the surviving manuscript. Only a few pages had been written, and they offered no clear indication of where Hare intended to take the story. For a writer so skilled at giving ideas another life, this one remained permanently unfinished.
Hare’s contribution to detective fiction rests partly in the way he used the law. Legal points were not simply decorative displays of specialist knowledge; they could shape the structure of a mystery, influence the motives of his characters and expose the consequences of the justice system itself. Through Francis Pettigrew in particular, Hare could look at the law from the perspective of a man who understood its machinery but was not always comfortable with its conclusions.
His fiction also carried the marks of the England around him. Wartime bureaucracy, post-war shortages and professional frustrations entered his mysteries alongside the murders. The puzzle remained important, but Hare allowed ordinary pressures and human weaknesses to crowd around it.
Edwards characterises Hare as a writer distinguished by readable prose, unusual storylines and a shrewd understanding of human frailty. His output was small, yet those qualities helped his work retain an identity of its own within the crowded field of Golden Age detective fiction.
There is also a quiet literary bridge to a later generation. Hare’s place on Faber’s list as a writer of traditional detective fiction was eventually taken by P. D. James. Her final novel, A Private Patient, used—with acknowledgement—a plot ingredient from Hare’s last book.
Cyril Hare left relatively few novels, but his understanding of law, character and the world beyond the puzzle gave them lasting weight. The barrister and judge never disappeared behind the detective novelist; instead, each part of his life strengthened the others.
Nothing wasted, indeed.
From Radio to Screen — and Back into Print
Cyril Hare’s mysteries have not generated the long catalogue of screen adaptations attached to some of his Golden Age contemporaries, but they have travelled farther than might be expected.
The most unusual journey belongs to An English Murder. In 1974, Mosfilm adapted the novel as the Soviet television production A Very English Murder, directed by Samson Samsonov. The snowbound English country house, its Christmas gathering and Dr. Bottwink all found their way onto Soviet television—an unexpected destination for one of Hare’s most traditionally English settings.
Radio remained a natural home as well. Tragedy at Law was presented on BBC Radio 4’s Saturday Night Theatre in 1984.
For modern readers, Hare is also less difficult to find than his relatively quiet reputation might suggest. Several of his novels are available as ebooks through Kobo, while German-language audiobooks of his work can be found through Audible.
Canadian readers have another particularly useful option. Project Gutenberg Canada offers a selection of Hare’s work free of charge as Canadian public-domain ebooks, including Tenant for Death, Suicide Excepted, Tragedy at Law, With a Bare Bodkin, When the Wind Blows, That Yew Tree’s Shade and An English Murder.
For an author whose name can be easy to overlook, Cyril Hare has proved surprisingly persistent. His stories moved between forms during his lifetime, reached Soviet television, and remain within reach of readers today.
Case Closed?
Cyril Hare never needed a long list of novels to make his mark. What emerges from his work is a writer attentive to people, professions and the small pressures capable of pushing an ordinary life in an unexpected direction.
There is something fitting in the way his own career unfolded. The barrister, the judge and the novelist were never entirely separate figures; each informed the others, leaving their traces in the stories he chose to tell.
The Archive opened Hare’s file expecting a relatively quiet figure of the Golden Age.
It found considerably more.
Have you ever read a mystery where the author’s profession or working life became as important to the story as the crime itself?
References
- Edwards, Martin. The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story.
- Spehner, Norbert. Le Détectionnaire.
- Hare, Cyril. Selected novels consulted through Project Gutenberg Canada.
- BBC Radio listings for Saturday Night Theatre: Tragedy at Law (1984).
- Mosfilm production information for A Very English Murder (1974), adapted from An English Murder.
- Kobo and Audible catalogues, consulted for current digital and audiobook availability.
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