Hare, Cyril - An English Murder / The Christmas Murder (1951)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

The English murder of the classic variety is the murder of an elderly aristocrat in a snow-bound country house. But for the murder to be even more English, the detective must be a foreigner: here, the Hungarian Jew historian, Dr. Bottwink — who knows more of England than the English do themselves.

The murder — and the reasons behind it — are particularly English, relying on an ingenious use of income tax, politics, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and an obscure piece of British history.

The process of criminal justice falls neatly into two sections; apprehension, which is the province of the police, and sentencing, which takes place in the courts. Detective writers have always had an interest in legal processes, and some excellent writers have been concerned with the legal profession in one capacity or another.

Cyril Hare was the pseudonym of Alfred Gordon Clark, a barrister who rose to be a circuit judge. Though his courts presided over civil, not criminal, cases, in his earlier career and during his war service he must have been in contact with plenty of real criminals and their activities. Despite this, when he sat down to write he was able to distance himself from the real and sordid and produce some masterpieces of classic detective fiction. He had a particular interest in concealing motives; and An English Murder features a motive that could have occurred nowhere else in the world. Not surprisingly, many of his books and stories concentrate on knotty legal points and unexpected discoveries, sometimes reminiscent of those exploited by another lawyer, Erle Stanley Gardner, in the long series of Perry Mason books. But Hare’s most common detective, Frank Pettigrew, is an elderly and rather diffident man, more in the tradition of Berkeley’s Mr. Chitterwick and Agatha Christie’s Mr. Satterthwaite.

There is a strong tendency among British crime writers to give their characters evocative names. This is partly a class thing – prosaic names like ‘Bucket’ and ‘Japp’ are associated with the working class, while more mellifluous names like ‘Campion’ and ‘Wimsey’ usually indicate an upper - class background. (In the 1930s a real Scotland Yard detective rejoiced in the name ‘Inspector Shape’.) In this book ‘Warbeck’ evokes memories of the medieval Pretender’s claims to royal ancestry: the plebeian ‘Briggs’ and ‘Rogers’ are badges of the working class; and ‘Dr. Bottwink’ is clearly an outsider – and therefore to be pitied, smiled at and condescended to.

The Story

An English Murder begins in December (1949?), in the muniments room at Warbeck Hall in Markshire, one of the many mythical counties created by English writers of detection. (One day an enterprising researcher will publish a Gazetteer of these.) Dr. Bottwink is researching the history of the Warbecks, a distinguished family – we are squarely in upper - class territory here. The butler, Briggs, a fellow antiquarian, brings him tea. They discuss the invalid owner of the house and head of his family, Lord Warbeck, and the guests who will be visiting over Christmas. Dr. Bottwink’s uncertain social position provides him with an outside perspective on the aristocratic milieu. Briggs is, of course, aware of all the nuances: “Not Lady Prendergast, sir - Lady Camilla Prendergast. A courtesy title. She is addressed as Lady Camilla, being an earl’s daughter.” Among the male guests are Sir Julius Warbeck, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Robert Warbeck, Lord Warbeck’s son, the head of a fascist political organisation, whose arrival Dr. Bottwink, a Czech refugee from the Nazis, views with trepidation.

A series of vignettes introduces the other characters to us:

Sir Julius Warbeck, Lord Warbeck’s cousin, is driving down from London with his driver Holly and his Special Branch minder Rogers. He reflects on his protégé Alan Carstairs, whose wife will be at the Christmas gathering, and on his dying cousin Lord Warbeck. As Chancellor in a socialist government, he knows the next Budget will see the end of the Warbecks at the Hall. Better to end with Thomas, Lord Warbeck than with his extremist son Robert!

Lady Camilla is packing for her trip down with Mrs. Carstairs. She is in love with Robert and means to press him for a commitment.

Mrs Carstairs is downstairs on the telephone to her absent husband, now visiting the USA.

Robert Warbeck is presiding over a meeting of his League of Liberty and Justice before setting off to the Hall.

At the Hall it is Christmas Eve. Lord Warbeck is contemplating the family’s fading fortunes. The war, death duties and the rise of socialism have not been kind to the old regime. Sir Julius arrives, and Rogers with him. Robert turns up at four o’clock and has an interview with his father, His hostility to Sir Julius and Mrs Carstairs is manifest, but Lord Warbeck urges him to respect family traditions. The women arrive and the guests all gather for tea.

Mrs Carstairs dominates over the tea - table, and Robert makes a scene insulting Dr. Bottwink over his Jewish background. Later he has a run - in with Rogers. A meeting with Briggs reveals Robert’s weakness; he is involved with Briggs’s daughter Susan, and Briggs is pressing him to settle the matter. Later we learn that the two are married, and Robert is keeping it from his family. Irritated by Briggs’s insistence, Robert then quarrels with Camilla.

Briggs and Susan meet in the butler’s pantry and discuss her prospects. Susan leaves and Camilla arrives to borrow a shoe - horn. Later Mrs. Carstairs accosts Briggs on the stairs and has another run - in with Dr. Bottwink, whom Briggs rather admires: ‘He certainly has a craze for anything that’s really old and out of date. He told me that was why he was so interested in the British constitution.” And Briggs and Rogers discover a shared enthusiasm for old port.

Dinner is strained to begin with, but loosens up when Sir Julius is persuaded to talk about fly - fishing. The party moves to the drawing - room to play bridge, and Robert’s truculent mood returns. Briggs brings in champagne at midnight and Robert opens the window to hear the church bells chime. He drains his glass – and dies. Dr Bottwink identifies the cause as cyanide poisoning.

Rogers, Sir Julius’s Special Branch minder, is called in and – the local police being uncontactable – is given authority to investigate. He makes a preliminary search and locks up the room. A source for the cyanide is located – a bottle for killing wasps that was in Briggs’ pantry, which is now missing – but the container in which it must have been carried is nowhere to be found. Rogers searches the rooms, and belatedly the party go to bed.

At breakfast Dr. Bottwink raises the question of whether there will be more poisonings. He is resigned to the fact that – as an untitled foreigner – he will probably be made the scapegoat. Julius is comically anxious to assure Dr. Bottwink that murders at family gatherings are not a typically English event. Sir Julius and Mrs Carstairs want to collude in claiming that Robert poisoned himself; but Dr. Bottwink will not agree. Mrs Carstairs sets out to persuade Camilla, and Dr. Bottwink returns to the muniments room, where he is researching Warbeck involvement with John Wilkes and the Middlesex election of 1768. Later Rogers invites him to the library, where he explores the doctor’s politics and seeks his account of last night’s events. He tells the doctor that Lord Warbeck has been informed by an unknown visitor of his son’s death and is in a state of collapse; in return, Dr Bottwink, who is beginning to see the light, directs him to read the Life of William Pitt the Younger.

The state of listlessness which invariably follows a murder sets in. The snow is piled high; Camilla and Briggs attend to the comatose Lord Warbeck. Susan comes to help, and there is a class - conscious confrontation with Camilla in which the secret marriage comes out. Meanwhile Briggs confronts Julius with the inconsistencies in the suicide story.

At lunch they are still snowed in. Susan comes down with a message; Lord Warbeck has died, with a final word for his cousin: ‘Tell Julius I’m sorry’. Julius ascends to the room, where Susan tells him of the marriage and her own baby boy, who is the new Lord Warbeck. Julius faints. When he recovers he suggests that this fact would be of interest to Rogers too. As they descend to the drawing - room the thaw begins and it starts to rain.

The rain ceases, and Julius attempts to walk to the village. Fighting his way through a snowdrift, he is confronted with the swollen River Didder. He attempts to cross, falls in, and is rescued by Rogers. They return to the Hall in time for tea. Mrs Carstairs takes a tray up to Camilla. When she fails to return Dr Bottwink becomes worried and urges Rogers to check upstairs. They all go, and find Camilla sleeping; but Mrs Carstairs is seated in her own room, dead from cyanide poisoning. Susan is interrogated, and Julius finds a poison bottle in his own room.

Camilla comes downstairs to talk to Dr Bottwink in the muniments room. He informs her of Mrs. Carstairs’ death, and she helps him to clear up a point of philology. Now he is in a position to approach Susan about her last meeting with Mrs. Carstairs.

The telephone is fixed and the police ring up; they will be there by tomorrow at dawn. The remaining guests return to the library for drinks. Rogers is depressed and exhausted. But Dr, Bottwink bids him cheer up. He, Bottwink, has solved the murders: they hang on an ancient and obscure point of English political tradition. Camilla begs him to explain, and he relents, and does so. With the aid of William Pitt and the events of 1789 a motive is established: and with the motive, a murderer.

About the book

It is fitting that we should finish our discussion of the Golden Age with a marvellously typical example of the genre. Hare’s book dates from 1951 but it could have been written at any time in the preceding thirty years. A family party with all its tensions and loathings; the isolated manor house; the weather conspiring to seal the house against intrusion or escape; a faithful butler; class consciousness and inter - class shenanigans; the gradual elimination of characters; these are all so familiar as to have spawned a hundred parodies and pastiches. None of this matters, however, as long as the material is handled well; and Hare handles it superbly. His characters take on just enough flesh to believable; not enough to dominate the story. None are out - and - out villains; all have flaws of one kind or another. Socialists and aristocrats are handled sympathetically; even Sir Julius is presented as the agent of what Dr. Bottwink would call ‘the zeitgeist’. As a picture of a dying breed, it is admirable.

The historian Dr. Bottwink, in his one outing as a detective, performs in the great tradition. He is sympathetic but unswayed in his investigation. Challenged, he rises to the occasion; in victory, he is magnanimous. He even manages odd shafts of humour. Being a foreigner (a real foreigner, from a funny middle - European state, not a familiar foreigner like a Frenchman), he can see the class distinctions and linguistic subtleties that the locals, submerged in them, miss. He knows more about England’s history than one of its leading politicians, and more about fascism than one of its leading fascists.

Under the humour there are great themes in this book – the decay of an aristocracy and the rise of a new class: all summed up in the latest Lord Warbeck – the grandson of his grandfather’s butler. The awkward situation of the manor house – above the village, yet isolated from it – represents the awkward situation of the aristocracy in the twentieth century. If Hare regrets the passing of this carefully structured system he manages not to dwell upon it. The most class - conscious character in the book is, after all, not an aristocrat but the butler, Briggs.

Hare died in harness in 1959, still at work after distinguished careers in two professions. Many other British writers have combined two professions successfully – for instance, Michael Innes, Edmund Crispin and Nicholas Blake, who wrote detective fiction while serenading the Queen as Poet Laureate under his real name of Cecil Day - Lewis.

Jon Jermey

An English Murder (1951) is Hare's only novel without a series sleuth. In fact, it is not at all clear in its early sections who the victim will be, and who will eventually play the role of sleuth - Hare keeps up pleasantly guessing on both points. The puzzle plot is tiny, but the book shows outstanding storytelling. The carefully elaborated Background involves politics and the English class system. It is set forth with a wealth of absorbing detail, and is unusually trenchant for a mystery novel, which often deals with politics in vaguer and less forthright terms than Hare does here. Hare also, like his model Freeman Wills Crofts, and Ngaio Marsh, offers deep opposition to anti-Semitism. Hare has plainly progressed since his early works, and thought much more deeply about political issues. The story has the multiple-class perspective of Tenant for Death. The various portraits of the characters and their lives also have somewhat of the same "series of mini-portraits" structure of that earlier novel. As in Tenant for Death, movement of characters between classes is a focus; so is a portrait of Britain as full of political radicalism.

In the Internet discussion group GAdetection, Tony Medawar revealed that An English Murder was based on Murder at Warbeck Hall, a half hour radio play first broadcast by the BBC on 27 January 1948 as Play No. 2 in the series "Mystery Playhouse presents The Detection Club, a series of plays specially written by its members". The story's politics do seem somewhat more appropriate to the immediate post-war period in Britain.

Neither An English Murder nor Death Is No Sportsman are at all mainstream like. Their storytelling very purely follows the narrative conventions and structures of traditional Golden Age fiction. In An English Murder, we have all the suspects gathered into an isolated country house; in Death Is No Sportsman, we follow the characters around one of the beautifully executed, map-based country landscapes beloved by Golden Age writers. Yet both books offer so little in the way of puzzle plot that they seem on the margins of what I value so highly in traditional mystery fiction. They seem more like eccentric curiosities than true classics. Both could use some of the plotting ingenuity that marked Hare's first mystery, Tenant for Death.

Mike Grost