Customer Reviews

With a Bare Bodkin

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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.

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.

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.

I bought this book because I liked another of the author's books, Tragedy at Law, which also featured barrister Francis Pettigrew. I was sorely disappointed in this one. Pettigrew is not working on a court case, but is sent to advise the Department of Pin Control (don't ask me what this is). It is about as interesting for its time as investigating dyed diesel fuel excise tax violations during Hurricane Katrina. The book is dull and dated, written in 1946. This doesn't have to be. Lots of mysteries were written even earlier and are now classics (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey, Miss Marple). They even get shown on PBS.

Why doesn't this work as a period piece? First, up until almost page 90 (50% of the book) absolutely nothing happens. We are introduced to a lot of vaguely obnoxious characters who do nothing except play bridge, play parlor games and get drunk and embarrass each other. This is the Second World War, for heaven's sake! There was plenty of action going on all over the world. Couldn't we have had something, even in the background? Listening to the BBC news? An air raid? A friend or relative in the Armed Forces or trapped in Nazi-occupied Europe? Wasn't there rationing? Weren't there shortages? Weren't there wounded troops getting shipped back? This might as well be an Edwardian drawing room with everyone sipping tea. The lack of any action is inexcusable, and in mysteries written today, you might notice that something happens in the first chapter or even in flashback, to get the readers' attention. It's not enough that one person is a writer and the group plays a game setting up a perfect mystery. They really don't focus on it enough to make it interesting. Far too much time is spent on tea drinking and antiquated office procedures.

The attitudes of characters also make the book dated. One character appears to suffer from depression and is continually referred to as "mad" or "insane." Men are so used to being waited on hand and foot in the office that when Pettigrew's secretary is out of town he can't manage to shut off a screaming teakettle by himself, let alone make his own tea? He really, literally belongs to another century. Some remarks would be considered outright offensive today. Of course, one can argue, it was written 60 years ago. But doesn't that prove the point, that the book doesn't stand the test of time?

Even the weapon is probably something nobody ever heard of outside of Shakespeare. Fortunately the author gives an explanation. No one in an electronic office uses a sharp pointed instrument to poke holes in papers for filing. Even years ago, people used ACCO punches and fasteners. So the title, which might have seemed clever in 1946, just draws blank looks now.

If a reader is interested in the character of Pettigrew, this is definitely not the book to start with. The author assumes everything is known about him, and we learn very little. He "solves" the mystery, but doesn't have much to do until the end, and even when the action gets going, the pace is agonizingly slow. Not a recommend for 21st century readers.

This is a rather dull entry in Cyril Hare's usually excellent series of detective stories. Francis Pettigrew makes his second appearance, as Legal Advisor to the Pin Control, an obscure government department lodged in a former mansion belonging to the late Lord Eglwyswrw, who "chose this really lovely, but confoundedly breezy, site overlooking the sea, to plant this monstrous structure. How anybody can have seriously proposed to live in such bloated magnificence, I can't imagine. Perhaps nobody really could-at least, his lordship died within a couple of months of making the attempt, since when it stood empty until some genius realised that the marble halls were simply ideal for accommodating platoons of typists and that the endless marble corridors were just made for female messengers to run clattering down with files, or more often teapots, in their hands." It is teapots which are at the heart of the mystery, for the victim is a former lunatic, murdered while preparing tea. Ironically, the victim was the proposed murderess in a fictional murder plotted by the suspects-"now in some nightmare fashion the plot had come alive, the silly farce turned itself into grim tragedy." A similar plot exists in Ngaio Marsh's ARTISTS IN CRIME. Unfortunately, as in Ngaio Marsh's detective stories, the mystery is dull beyond belief, the detection consisting entirely of serial interviewing in the worst Ngaio Marsh style-even the policeman feels `that we're not going to make an arrest in this case by sitting here and talking about it!' The most probable suspect is the murderer, and there is no ingenuity.

The civil service aspect of the story is well-depicted, with several amusing caricatures, bearing out the Pin Controller's statement that `the temporary civil servant is the bane of government in war-time.' There is "a very pretty little Black Market affair which affects the Control", dealing in pins, and run by some of the suspects.

There is some good characterisation--Miss Brown who wishes to marry a surrogate father, and who ends up marrying Pettigrew, the unwilling detective, who feels of murder that "this was precisely the set of circumstances that he would instinctively seek to avoid, with which he felt utterly incompetent to deal. All his working life had been spent in resolving other people's problems, but they had been the problems of strangers, dealt with at arm's length through the medium of a solicitor, and considered in the quiet, dust-laden atmosphere of the Temple, where matters of life and death, fortune and bankruptcy resolved themselves into carefully phrased opinions and the comparison of reported cases. ... He felt deeply aggrieved that fate should have set such a burden on his shoulders, but he saw now that he could no longer simply pretend that the burden wasn't there.'

The burden in the book, however, is mainly on the reader's shoulders, for the book is so utterly dull that it is impossible to sustain any interest in the plot.