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.
