With a Bare Bodkin [Mass Market Paperback]

Cyril Hare (Author)

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 220 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (1954)
• ASIN: B0014IUA5M
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A classic by neglected author, December 30, 2000

By 

N. Quast (Dulles, Virginia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: With a Bare Bodkin (Paperback)

U.K. lawyer Cyril Hare wrote some of the best golden age style British Mysteries going, most with attorney Pettigrew. Here Pettigrew is doing war duty at a huge special bureaucratic ministry which has commandeered a large remotish mansion. When murder occurs among the files, it's Pettigrew who must keep order and track down the cause. Great atmosphere, great characters and great fun.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Lesser Hare - And Yet, Offers A Clever Resolution, June 2, 2007

By 

Michael Wischmeyer (Houston, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: With a Bare Bodkin (Paperback)

With a Bare Bodkin (1946) hosts the second appearance of the civil lawyer, Francis Pettigrew. Working as legal counsel for the war time bureaucratic agency, Pin Control (Pin Restrictions Order, 1940), Pettigrew and his co-workers have been recently relocated to the remote Marsett Bay to escape the Blitz. The setting and the control agency are apparently fictional.

With a Bare Bodkin (1946) misses its mark. The pace is noticeably slow. The anticipated murder does not occur until about midway; the resulting investigation plods along from one interview to another. However, on the plus side, the resolution involves an ingenious twist that I had not previously encountered. For a reader new to Cyril Hare, I would recommend beginning with An English Murder, When the Wind Blows, Tragedy at Law, or He Should Have Died Hereafter.

At Marsett Bay conditions are crowded and activities are quite limited. Not unexpectedly, gossip abounds and factional differences develop. Fortuitously, one of the civil servants is discovered to be an author of minor mystery stories, and as a lark a joint effort begins to develop a murder plot centered about their current situation. This rather juvenile activity is ultimately terminated by an actual murder, one borrowing heavily from the fictional plot. Inspector Mallet of Scotland Yard - Cyril Hare's best known character - manages the investigation with his usual competency and determination.

With the exception of some minor references to watered-down beer and annoying travel restrictions, Hare largely ignores the ongoing war. Perhaps he simply assumed that his reader in 1946 needed no reminder of war time restrictions and suffering. Nevertheless, as Cyril Hare had held positions in the Director of Public Prosecutions Department and in the Ministry of Economic Warfare, his war time background could have been used to greater advantage.

(For comparison purposes I recommend another mystery from that period: Minute for Murder (1947) by Nicholas Blake has a similar war time setting. Nigel Strangeways, a writer and poet in peace time, is working at the Ministry of Morale, a bureaucratic wartime agency in London. When a colleague is poisoned, Strangeways is again paired with his good friend Superintendent Blount of Scotland Yard. I especially enjoyed the insight into daily life in war time London.)

Useful Trivia: A bodkin point is a type of arrowhead, a metal spike used extensively during the Middle Ages to penetrate mail armor. A bodkin also refers to a long, narrow metal skewer used by clerks to make holes in stacks of paper to tie files together.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Highly recommend, July 4, 2006

By 

Pentiumm (East Providence, RI United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: With a Bare Bodkin (Paperback)

For the duration of the war, the Ministry of Unnecessary Forms (my words), is housed in an aristocratic mansion of biblical proportions, repurposed for its governmental function without regard to grace or aesthetics. But the Ministry is confronted with murder. One of the typist/form runners is struck down while boiling the kettle, and there are suspects aplenty.

Enter civil servant Pettigrew, a placid, unflappable man who was in private practice before the war. Now the poor man is plodding through through the war, too old to be on the battlefield defending his country, but doing his bit, as they say, in keeping the government functioning as best he can. It is up to Pettigrew to figure out who had the opportunity (many), means (lots), and motive (abundant) to do the poor woman in.

This is a delightful mystery, lots of clues, very whodunnit, and extremely well written. Cyril Hare is an superbly skilled plottist, and he has the writing skill to keep you turning the pages.