Literary Birthday – 4 September – Cyril Hare

Cyril Hare was born on 4 September 1900 and died on 25 August 1958.

Cyril Hare Quotes

1. It is seldom that any judge really gets to the bottom of a case. The well of truth is usually too deep for the merely judicial plumb-line. (Death Walks the Woods)
2. In a word (which he had coined specially for the occasion) he disliked his unsnubbability. (With a Bare Bodkin)
3. 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. (With a Bare Bodkin)
4. Daily he was called upon to solve the insoluble, to divine the truth between competing perjuries, to apportion derisory incomes among innumerable creditors. (Death Walks the Woods)
5. She dropped the stilted words into the court like pebbles into a calm pool, wrapping her strange dignity around her like a cloak. (Death Walks the Woods)

Cyril Hare was the pseudonym of Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, an English barrister, judge, and crime writer. Hare wrote nine detective novels, numerous short stories, a children’s book, and a play. He began writing at 36, contributing humorous sketches to Punch before publishing his first detective novel, Tenant for Death, in 1937. Hare drew heavily on his legal career and wartime experiences for novels such as Tragedy at Law and With a Bare Bodkin. He created two memorable detectives, Scotland Yard Inspector Mallett and amateur sleuth, Francis Pettigrew, who appeared in several novels, including Tragedy at Law and He Should Have Died Hereafter. He also wrote The Magic Bottle for children and the play, The House of Warbeck.

Source for photograph: United Agents

by Amanda Patterson
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