Scan barcode
thecommonswings's review
5.0
I consider Cyril Hare as one of my very select pantheon of perfect crime writers. He’s not got the biting wit of Berkeley or the playfulness of Crispin or Mitchell or the showiness of a Dickson Carr or the all round brilliance of an Allingham, but what he always does have is an unerring sense of elegance and simplicity. He’s a writer of small scenes and some can find him a bit dry, but Pettigrew and his wife and lovely little creations and Hare is a master of creating a vignette without forcing the elements into place.
Christie, for her many talents, often just created types for her novels who never remotely felt real. Hare seems to create his puzzle and then populate it with characters who are mostly vivid and interesting. The weak link in this is the angry landlord, Todman, but even then Hare really turns him into a festering ball of frustration and anger and bitterness so that the sense of cliche is minimised. Far more vivid is the still pretty relevant Humphrey Rose, a caddish financier and the slightly gauche and self important teenager, Godfrey, who actually feels like a slightly pretentious teenager with delusions of grandeur whilst also being deeply sympathetic (but while also believably annoying almost everyone in the book other than Pettigrew and a couple of others for his slight priggishness)
But Hare’s real genius is his solutions. Some people find them a bit of a cheat because they rely on some pretty arcane legal knowledge (although, to be fair, this is probably the most easy to grasp solution yet for someone with no experience with the law), but I find them really elegant little solutions. There’s no sense of a plot circling itself wildly or going through insane arcs of coincidence to make it work. For me, a Hare book is like a jigsaw puzzle whose solution is that last puzzle piece that finally makes the previously obtuse and difficult to fathom images around it make sense. He’s not failed me yet and he hasn’t failed me here. Wonderful
Christie, for her many talents, often just created types for her novels who never remotely felt real. Hare seems to create his puzzle and then populate it with characters who are mostly vivid and interesting. The weak link in this is the angry landlord, Todman, but even then Hare really turns him into a festering ball of frustration and anger and bitterness so that the sense of cliche is minimised. Far more vivid is the still pretty relevant Humphrey Rose, a caddish financier and the slightly gauche and self important teenager, Godfrey, who actually feels like a slightly pretentious teenager with delusions of grandeur whilst also being deeply sympathetic (but while also believably annoying almost everyone in the book other than Pettigrew and a couple of others for his slight priggishness)
But Hare’s real genius is his solutions. Some people find them a bit of a cheat because they rely on some pretty arcane legal knowledge (although, to be fair, this is probably the most easy to grasp solution yet for someone with no experience with the law), but I find them really elegant little solutions. There’s no sense of a plot circling itself wildly or going through insane arcs of coincidence to make it work. For me, a Hare book is like a jigsaw puzzle whose solution is that last puzzle piece that finally makes the previously obtuse and difficult to fathom images around it make sense. He’s not failed me yet and he hasn’t failed me here. Wonderful
More...