With a Bare Bodkin (1946)

I think Cyril Hare's real talent was in the selection of intriguing and appealing titles for his books. This one has been taken from Hamlet; the ones I have still to read have titles like Death is no Sportsman, Suicide Excepted and He Should Have Died Hereafter. And so even though I reached the end of this one thinking it had been a little uninteresting and unusually lacking in suspense for a crime novel, and even though I sincerely wished it had ended two pages earlier than it did, so that I could have been spared the romantic subplot which made the book seem like a cheap throwaway romance, I already feel myself tempted by those other titles. But this one I found disappointing: it begins interestingly, ends dreadfully, and doesn't really take you anywhere you don't expect to go. Continued ( )

I found this novel hugely enjoyable. Written in 1946 it might now seem somewhat dated, even quaint, but I found the portrayal of office relationships within a Civil Service Department frighteningly plausible.
The barrister Francis Pettigrew is uprooted from normal chambers-based lifde in London to act as legal adviser to the government department regulating the manufacture, wholsesale and export of pins during war-torn Britain. This involves relocation to the remote Welsh coast where he ends up in a private residential hotel in which the majority of his fellow inmates are drawn from the same office as him. In the absence of any other cheap, accessible entertainment, and influenced by the discovery that one of their number had previously made a living as a writer of crime novels, the residents start planning an im,aginary murder and the subsequent investigation.
However, almost predictably, one of them is indeed murdered, in a manner frighteningly reminiscent of the method adopted for their imaginary plot. Meanwhile, Inspector mallett of the yard had already happened upon the scene, eager to investgiate a spat of recent breaches of security.
Investigations proceed apace, but it falls to Franci Pettigrew to resolve the interlaced strands of the story.
The characters ar perfectly drawn, the setting wholly credible, and the resolution gratifyingly weatertight. Definitely worth reading! ( )