Light-hearted crime mystery, poking fun at the bureaucracy of the English public service, but very well written and good use of the English language. Published in 1950. ( )

Maybe even 4.5*

I found Hare’s setting in this one very amusing (a satire of WW2 British bureaucracy, it’s set in the Bureau of Pin Control and has a subplot about black market trading in pins!) and the mystery was very good. I thought that I had figured it out but not so! ( )

Maybe even 4.5*

I found Hare’s setting in this one very amusing (a satire of WW2 British bureaucracy, it’s set in the Bureau of Pin Control and has a subplot about black market trading in pins!) and the mystery was very good. I thought that I had figured it out but not so! ( )

Bevat: De moord met het scheermes
De moord op het rijksbureau

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 ( )