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On home ground

Neil Clark

Wednesday, 27th August 2008

Neil Clark on Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, first published in 1942.

‘The best detective story that has appeared for some time and at the end of the year will tundoubtedly stand as one of the class leaders in the English school’ was how The Spectator described Cyril Hare’s Tragedy at Law, when it first appeared in 1942. ‘A detective masterpiece’ was the New Statesman’s verdict. Others were even more generous in their praise: the crime writer and critic, Julian Symons, included the book in his survey of ‘best, anywhere, ever’.

Tragedy at Law is a detective story like no other. There can’t be any other murder mystery in which the killer strikes so late — on the 221st page out of 252. In fact, to label Tragedy at Law a ‘detective story’ does it an injustice. It’s a wonderfully well-crafted and brilliantly characterised novel which just happens to have a crime in it. Agatha Christie presents great puzzles, but if you don’t like puzzle-solving, her books have relatively little to offer. Hare’s work, by contrast, while featuring ingenious mysteries, can be read even by those who don’t particularly care for the genre: even if Judge Barber didn’t get stabbed to death outside the Old Bailey in chapter 21, Tragedy at Law would still be a cracking read.

The book is set in that strange, twilight world of the autumn of 1939 — a world of blackouts but no bombs — and portrays in great detail wartime life on the Southern Circuit, with its curtailed pomp and ceremony, but far from curtailed rivalries and jealousies.

It was a world that Hare — or rather Alfred Gordon Clark — knew well. Clark was born into a family with strong legal traditions and after schooldays at Rugby (where he said he was ‘starved of food and crammed with learning’) and three years at Oxford (where he obtained a first in History), he made a beeline for the Bar. He learned that his first novel, Tenant for Death had been accepted while on his feet defending a larcenist at Maidstone Assizes. Living in Cyril Mansions in Battersea, and working from Hare Court, Inner Temple, gave Clark the idea for his pseudonym.

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Nicholas H

August 28th, 2008 8:37pm

Spot on ! Tragedy at Law was my first Hare, bought in an Oxfam shop after skimming the first couple of pages of description of the arrival of an Assize judge in the early days of the war. I laughed out loud in the shop. The way the solution to the crime is communicated is ingenious. I've tracked down others of his books in second hand and charity shops but not yet the "complete works". Well due for a proper reprint. As you say, they would make first rate television adaptations because unlike Midsomer and Co (and even Christie who is better read than watched) there is substance to the stories and proper characterisation.

Alan Hill

August 30th, 2008 3:44pm

Gosh, What a Spectator review will do.

I looked this book up on Amazon, nearly £43 for a paperback. Cyril Hare's other books seem to go from 50p to £5-00.

Anyway I've ordered it from my excellent local library service for 85p.

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