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Tenant for Death

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 10 months ago

Hare, Cyril - Tenant for Death (1937)

 

Cyril Hare's first mystery novel, Tenant for Death (1937), is squarely in the Crofts tradition. Its sleuth, Scotland Yard Inspector Mallett, is a plodding, methodical policeman, in the tradition of Crofts' Inspector French. Like the "Soapy" French, Mallett has a lot of techniques for charming information out of the witnesses he interviews, often pushed to comic extremes here by Hare. The characters in the books are involved in a series of businesses, and Hare provides inside looks at how these run, in the Crofts tradition of Backgrounds on the world of work. Instead of one business forming the entire Background of the novel, however, as in most of the Crofts school, Hare offers of series of mini-portraits of several different enterprises, at several different class levels of British society. We see the big time financier running an elaborate scam in the City, London's financial district; middle class workers at a housing agency; and a working class newspaper seller. This series of mini-backgrounds is somewhat unusual in the Crofts school. So are the humor and social satire with which Hare conducts his narrative. The financier, and the massive scandal his frauds invoke, recall the victim in E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case (1913), another pioneering book in the Realist School tradition. The mystery technique of the novel's puzzle plot also recalls Realist School traditions, with a standard approach of the School used in the book's ingenious finale (not named here to avoid spoilers). The book involves an alibi, of a sort, but one of a different kind than usually seen in mystery novels. On the down side, the book has too many coincidental relations between the characters, that turn out to be just that - coincidences - rather than being logically explained as part of the mystery plot.

 

There are also R. Austin Freeman-like aspects of the book. The plot centers around a mysterious personage, about whose life other people only get fragmentary glimpses. Such dimly observed events at the center of a mystery occur in many late Freeman novels. As in Freeman, the person comes out of nowhere, and even the details of him renting his house or opening a bank account are only glimpsed partially.

 

Hare's largely conservative political ideas are full of contradictions. Although this is poor logic, it also makes some interesting reading. Hare shows colonialism and Empire building as admirable, and seems to have no realization that the British Empire was less than ten years from disintegration, at the time of his writing. Hare treats the financial setbacks of upper class characters as tragic, but snobbishly views the hard working efforts of working class characters to better themselves as mere uppittiness (the book's least pleasant aspect). Conversely, there are a lot of signs that British society is full of dissatisfaction at all levels, from upper-middle class people who want to emigrate, to lower class radicals. The "good breeding" of the upper classes is always being compared favorably to the ill breeding of the lower here. Apparently, any sort of style or gracefulness was a monopoly of the rich in 1937 Britain. No wonder the British people later so enthusiastically embraced the Mods, the Rockers, the Teddy Boys and the Swinging Sixties, all movements that allowed working class Brits to show some style and flair.

 

Mike Grost

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