I'm continuing to work my way through the detective novels of Cyril Hare (previously reviewed here in July and August 2026). I've now read: 'Death is No Sportsman' (published 1938) - an Inspector Mallet novel centred on a fishing syndicate on the River Didder; 'With a Bare Bodkin' (published 1946) - a wartime, office-based mystery, featuring the lawyer Francis Pettigrew, which has an amusing meta-textual element as one of the characters is himself an author of murder mysteries; and 'Death Walks the Woods' (published 1954) - another Francis Pettigrew novel which nicely links together some of the characters and geography of the other books, including 'When the Wind Blows'. All Cyril Hare's novels give a fascinating glimpse into the social history of the period and have a genteel, polite, English approach to brutal crime, but always with an unexpected, clever, plausible denouement.
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