A Most Mysterious Suicide-- Maybe...

Hello everybody and welcome to this brand-new, special edition of At the Scene of the Crime! Today, I’m very pleased to participate in the first cross-blog review of the one-year anniversary celebrations. And what better co-blogger than Les Blatt of the prolific Classic Mysteries podcast?

But what to review? Les usually tackles classic mysteries that are either in print or easily obtained, so that ruled out books like the ever-so-obscure (I wonder if that’s because it’s fictional) novel by George Van Hooligan, The Case of the Murderous Monk.

But wait! Thanks to Faber & Faber, several novels by Cyril Hare have been brought back into print! This seemed like a perfect choice. Cyril Hare is such a respected mystery author and was a member of the prestigious Detection Club— plus he had experience as a judge, which lends a touch of authenticity to his work. And after some thinking, we settled on Suicide Excepted as a good book to read together!

Thanks a lot for joining me today, Les!

…

Les?

Oh, that’s right. I nearly forgot. As I’ve said before, Les’ reviews are in podcast form. That means there’s only one way to do this review properly, and that’s to go invade the Classic Mysteries podcast!

You can listen to the podcast review here.

Les’ post on this review can be found here.

Come and be killed

I have never before read a novel by Cyril Hare, which was the pseudonym of one Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, an English judge who was also part of the esteemed Detection Club. He was admitted to the club in 1946, and the snippets we get of him in Curt Evans’ fabulous pamphlet Was Corrine’s Murder Clued? made me extremely interested in the author. Some basic research (how did we ever survive before Wikipedia?) reveals something interesting: he read History at New College, Oxford, where he once heard William Archibald Spooner say in one of his sermons “now we see through a dark glassly”. Granted, it’s no “we’ll have the hags flung out” (flags hung out), but it’s an amusing scene to picture nonetheless.

And so that leads us to He Should Have Died Hereafter, which has also been published under the title Untimely Death. In this book, the Pettigrew couple (Francis Pettigrew is apparently a recurring character) go on holiday to Exmoor. It’s a charming little place, which of course means that murder is just ‘round the corner. Francis recalls that when he was a child, he stumbled over a dead body on the moor. But now he’s a man, so he should be able to exorcise this demon—he decides to do so by walking over to the place where the incident occurred… only to stumble over another dead body.