With a Bare Bodkin

Punctilious Civil Service procedures can be grim especially to those of us who remember similar bureaucratic regulations - even if they were from a later date. Hare has illustrated them here in an amusing satire where lawyer, Francis Pettigrew, is legal advisor for Pin Control at the beginning of WWII. It is hard to imagine a business more suited to the rule-bound bureaucracy than the control of pin manufacture, presumably a fictional department created by Hare.

What started as a game to create a murder plot using department staff as characters turned out to be alarmingly real. However, the discussion of the crime and suspects was endless and tedious, that I expect was meant to also illustrate the painstaking official red-tape show more investigative methods. As a war time publication, when loss of life was only too real, this is a lighter murder mystery written to entertain. The satisfying denouement had a nice legal twist.

The tea kettle on the cover plays a part. show less

I read this series all out of order, and wish now there were more, since for me this is the last book. (I skipped this book previously because my father wrote "dismal" on the flyleaf, but I don't agree with his assessment at all.) The mystery itself was not my favorite of the Pettigrew series, but I loved the romance between Pettigrew and Eleanor. It was sort of a reverse Jane Eyre story ("Do you think that because I am poor, plain, obscure and little I am soulless and heartless?") I also loved the setting of the Pin Control bureau and the funny descriptions of the pointless busywork that sprang up in wartime Britain.
Warning: contains the n-word. Could be edited out so easily if reprinted.

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 show more 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! show less

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!

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 show more really take you anywhere you don't expect to go. Continued show less

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!

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.