Death Is No Sportsman by Cyril Hare

A fishing story with no red herrings to confuse the trail

Death Is No Sportsman was
first published in 1938

The sport of fly fishing is at the centre of the mystery in Death Is No Sportsman, Cyril Hare’s second detective novel.

A group of men, who are all devoted to the pastime, gather at a small hotel, looking forward to spending a pleasant weekend on the river bank. Although the men are not friends, they try to get on amicably so they can continue to share the fishing rights they hold jointly to a small, but desirable stretch of the river Didder.

Behind their superficial courtesy towards each other, there are clearly tensions. Also, as regular guests at the hotel, they know the local people and are aware of the passions and rivalries going on below the surface in the small community.

All this is beautifully set up by Cyril Hare in the first few pages and it will come as no surprise to the reader when a body is discovered at the side of the river the following day.

The victim is the local squire, a man who was unpopular with both the fishermen and the villagers. It is quickly established that he has been shot in the head.

The corpse is discovered by a young man connected with the fishing syndicate, soon after his arrival at the inn. He is subsequently revealed to have deep feelings for the wife of the dead man, so the stage is expertly set by the author for a mystery involving interesting characters in an evocative setting.

Cyril Hare was, in fact, the pen name for Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, who was born in 1900 in Mickleham in Surrey and went on to become a barrister and a judge.

The writer’s pseudonym was derived from a mixture of Hare Court, where he was in Chambers as a barrister in London, and Cyril Mansions, where he lived.

Hare was a practising barrister and
judge as well as a writer

Hare wrote many short stories for the London Evening Standard and some radio and stage plays and he was a keen member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and other famous crime writers.

After the war, Hare, as Clark, was appointed a county court judge in Surrey. He died in 1958, when he was at the peak of his career as a judge and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.

In 1990, when the British Crime Writers’ Association published their list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, they awarded the 85th place to Hare’s 1942 novel, Tragedy at Law, which is considered by many to be his best work.

In Death Is No Sportsman, the police quickly find the murder of the local squire too complex for them to solve and call in Scotland Yard. In the following chapter, we see Inspector Mallet, ‘a very tall, very broad man, with a mild red face set off with an unexpectedly ferocious-looking waxed moustache,’ descending from the train ready to take over. He investigates with the thoroughness the reader expects of him, but the local police find his attention to detail mildly irritating.

I found Death Is No Sportsman to be an intriguing mystery that always plays fair with the reader. It was so well written that I enjoyed being guided along by Hare in the direction of the inevitable and satisfying scene at the end. The suspects have all gathered in a room at the inn next to the river where Mallet explains everything and the identity of the murderer is revealed.

Death Is No Sportsman was first published in 1938. 

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Tenant for Death by Cyril Hare

Inspector Mallett joins the ranks of fictional detectives who like a good lunch

Tenant for Death is published
by Faber and Faber

When two young estate agent’s clerks are sent to check an inventory on a house in South Kensington they find the dead body of a man on the premises, an item that was definitely not on their list.

Tenant for Death, published in 1937, is the first crime novel written by the detective novelist Cyril Hare, and it introduces his series sleuth, the formidable Inspector Mallett of Scotland Yard.

Set in the world of high finance as it was in the 1930s, Tenant for Death is ‘an ingenious story’ to use the words of the Times Literary Supplement review. It provides Mallett with a difficult and puzzling mystery to solve and establishes the Inspector as a thinking detective with a love of good food.

The murder victim turns out to be a businessman who had a lot of enemies. The police spend a great deal of time trying to establish the identity of the mysterious man who has rented the house where the body has been found and we do not find out who he really was and what has become of him until the last pages of the book.

Some of the suspects are extremely plausible characters in their own right and the reader can feel varying degrees of sympathy for them.

The author shows his detailed knowledge of the legal district of London as we follow Mallett along its streets and through its alleyways. I thought Tenant for Death was very well written and an interesting story, considering it was Hare’s first published detective novel.

Cyril Hare was, in fact, the pen name for Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, who was born in 1900 in Mickleham in Surrey and became a barrister and a judge.

Cyril Hare was a psuedonym for the
barrister Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark

The writer’s pseudonym was derived from a mixture of Hare Court, where he was in chambers as a barrister in London, and Cyril Mansions, where he lived.

Hare also wrote many short stories for the London Evening Standard and some radio and stage plays and he was a keen member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and many other famous crime writers.

After the war, Hare - as Clark - was appointed a county court judge in Surrey. He died in 1958, when he was at the peak of his career as a judge and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunnit.

In 1990, when the British Crime Writers’ Association published their list of The Top 100 Crime Novels of All Time, they awarded the 85th place to Hare’s 1942 novel, Tragedy at Law, which is considered by many to be his best work.

Although I enjoyed Tragedy at Law when I reviewed it for this website, I actually preferred Tenant for Death, finding it a more compelling story with well-drawn characters and a very clever ending.

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