An English Murder (1951) by Cyril Hare

An English Murder (1951) by "Cyril Hare," penname of Alfred A.G. Clark, was adapted from a radio-play, "Murder at Warbeck Hall," broadcast by the BBC on January 27, 1948 and a digest paperback was published in the US several years later – reprinted under the title The Christmas Murder. Hare's An English Murder is one of the better known, widely read holiday mysteries even before the reprint renaissance incidentally revived the Christmas detective novel.

I read Hare's An English Murder pre-blog and most of the details had faded from my memory, which is why it only got an honorable mention on "The Naughty List: Top 12 Favorite Christmas Mystery Novels & Short Stories." Kate, of Cross Examining Crime, on the other hand gave An English Murder the second place in her "Epic Ranking of Christmas Mysteries" listing 40 titles in total. I figured a revisit was in order.

Warbeck Hall, "oldest inhabited house in Markshire," is the backdrop where the feeble, dying Lord Warbeck is preparing to celebrate, what's going to be, his last Christmas. So he has invited his last two living relatives, some acquaintances and still has a house guest, the Hungarian-born historian Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink, who's going through historical documents in the muniment room – studying developments of the English constitution during the 1700s. However, the problem is not a lingering house guest, but Lord Warbeck's relatives and trying to maintain the golden rule of no politics at Christmas. Richard Warbeck, Lord Warbeck's son, had "the misfortune to be born into the first generation of the dispossessed," because he was destined to be a lord without money or a manor. The post-WWII upheavals and austerity both cleaned out the estate and makes untenable to hold on to the manor house when Lord Warbeck passes away. So now Richard heads a Fascist organization, the League of Liberty and Justice, not unlike Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists. Richard sees his father's cousin, Sir Julius Warbeck, as the enemy within and the driving force behind all these changes. Sir Julius, "Chancellor of the Exchequer in the most advanced socialist government of," is an avowed democratic socialist who hates Richard and looks forward to the moment when there are "no more Warbecks of Warbeck Hall" ("the next Budget would see to that"). Even joking at breakfast he's going to put another sixpence on the income-tax.

So that all ensures a gloomy, somewhat tense and potentially hostile Christmas, but it's also a Christmas celebrated under post-war austerity. There no tree nor decorations and not a single mention of presents or Santa Claus. A dying Lord Warbeck gets to observe how the snow temporarily covered the traces of "neglect and disrepair or recent time," which were left neglected and broken due to a lack of funds. The celebration itself, a simple dinner, is not the event it once was when Briggs, loyal butler, had a kitchen staff of four and two footmen under him. An English Murder breaths atmosphere of the post-war malaise in Britain with its ongoing rationing, food shortages, housing crisis and the feeling that the fabric of British society was being unraveled. That marked a lot of the post-WWII British mysteries, especially the works of Christopher Bush and E.C.R. Lorac, but also novels like E.R. Punshon's Music Tells All (1948) and Leo Bruce's Cold Blood (1952). I don't think it has ever been as pivotal to a detective story or used as effectively than here.

Hare is confident in taking the time in this already shortish novel to introduce the characters, outline their backstories and setting up all the pieces, before getting to the murder – a dozen, or so, pages short of the halfway mark. To ring in Christmas Day, they pop a bottle of champagne at the stroke of twelve "to drink in the festive season, according to custom," but one of the glass contains a deadly dose of cyanide. And, to give it an old-fashioned touch, a snowstorm cuts them off from the outside world. So the official investigation, for the time being, falls into the hands of Sergeant Rogers, Special Branch of Scotland Yard, who had been assigned as Sir Julius' bodyguard. Dr. Bottwink is the one who, of course, pieces together the correct solution.

I think Dr. Bottwink is the best and most interesting character from An English Murder. A serious treatment of the Hercule Poirot-type detective character: an outsider to British society, a Hungarian-born Jew, whom everyone assumes is out of depth when it comes to the intricacies of English customs ("...funny little foreigner"). It's noteworthy that Dr. Bottwink is the only character who's not being skewered and satirized. He's not taken very seriously, most of the time, but comes through in the end when he gets to explain the murder is not only "an essentially English crime," it's a murder that "could only have happened in England." That brings us to the best part of the book and possibly it's sole smudge.

An English Murder has all the trappings of a country house whodunit, albeit one under austerity measures, but the question here is not one of who or how. The question here is one of motive. Dr. Bottwink explains "a motive that is valid for one form of society may be totally non-existent in another" and "the social and political framework in which it occurs" must be considered – after which finding the killer "becomes a mere matter of simple deduction." This is usually applied to the regional/topographical detective novel taking place in foreign climes. Think of writers like S.H. Courtier, Todd Downing, Elspeth Huxley and Arthur W. Upfield, but Hare applied it perfectly to the quintessential English country house mystery. The motive earned An English Murder its status as a minor classic. A motive as unique as it's cleverly-hidden and maybe too well-hidden for its own good. Not that Hare went out of his way to unfairly hide it and Dr. Bottwink even tells the reader, through Rogers, where to find the solution, but you have to break off the story to do some homework. That's easier done today, as you only have take out your phone to at least get a summary, but not something you should expect a reader to do. So the integral part of the solution hinges on a piece of specialized knowledge. Even that shortcoming, somehow, fits the story perfectly.

So not your typical Christmas country house mystery, like those from the vastly fading 1930s, but the ingeniously plot and original motive proving the Golden Age detective story still had a few tricks to play going into its twilight decade.

Notes for the curious: Hare died in 1958 and left behind an unfinished, untitled manuscript of a second Dr. Wenceslaus Bottwink mystery novel. Martin Edwards "has read the fragment but though he praised the characteristically careful, yet easy, style, comments that it offers no hint as the direction in which the story was heading." That's another title for the list of lost detective fiction. I don't remember if I got the idea to name my blog archive "The Muniment Room" from An English Murder, but, considering the role it played in the story, the idea probably appealed to me. I probably also thought it funny the book opened with an angry, bewildered Dr. Bottwink pouring over the illegible scribbles and hieroglyphics in the muniment room and "muttered maledictions on Lord Warbeck and his ill-mended quill pen" across two centuries. You can draw your own comparisons between the writings of the historical Lord Warbeck and my reviews. 😃