Boucher picks the best mysteries of 1951.

In the 2 Dec 1951 New York Times, author-critic Anthony Boucher (aka William Anthony Parker White) listed "Boucher's Choices"—his selections for the best mysteries of 1951. They were:

• John Dickson Carr, The Devil in Velvet. "swashbuckling romance . . . strict detection." 
• Agatha Christie, They Came to Baghdad, . "adept . . . spy thriller."
• Dorothy Salisbury Davis, A Gentle Murderer. "distinguished."
• Cyril Hare [Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark], An English Murder . "adroit . . . social satire."
• Geoffrey Household, A Rough Shoot and A Time to Kill. "realistic political melodrama."
• Michael Innes, The Paper Thunderbolt. "funny and chilling."
• Eric Linklater, Mr. Byculla. "Deft."
• John Ross Macdonald [Ross Macdonald, Kenneth Millar], The Way Some People Die. "a worthy successor to Dashiell Hammett."
• William McGivern, Shield for Murder. "Complex and memorable study of a rogue cop."
• Ngaio Marsh, Night at the Vulcan. "Marsh's best to date."
• Elliott Paul, Murder on the Left Bank. "Fun."
• Ellery Queen, The Origin of Evil.  "intricate ingenuity."
• John Sherwood, Mr. Blessington's Imperialist Plot. "Ruritanian spy-melodrama."
• Bart Spicer, Black Sheep, Run and The Golden Door.  "appealing variants on the hardboiled story."
• Julian Symons, The 31st of February. "Striking satire."
• Lawrence Treat, Big Shot. "A notable novel about detectives."

A selection of Faber's mystery cover art.

Some historical samples of Faber's online archive of cover art include the following mystery works:

• The Black Tower by P. D. James (1975)

• Death at Crane's Court by Eilis Dillon (1953; new ed. from Rue Morgue P)

• Death by Request by Romilly John and K[atherine]. John (1933). Romilly was the son of painter Augustus John and the half-brother of cellist Amaryllis Fleming, half-sister of Ian Fleming.

George Antheil, NYPL

• Death in the Dark by Stacey Bishop (aka composer George Antheil, 1930)

• An English Murder by Cyril Hare (aka Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, 1951)

• Famous Crimes, retold by "The Prince of Criminologists," William Roughead (1935)


• The Mummy Case by Dermot Morrah (1933; review here)

• The Ticker-Tape Murder by Milton Propper (1930; review here; partially serialized in the Border City Star, parts 1, 2, 3)

• A Tomb with a View by BBC producer Lance Sieveking (1950)

And of interest to Rex Stout fans:
• Forest Fire by Stout (1934; review here)
• Mr. Cinderella by Stout (1939; better cover of U.S. ed. here; review here)

Happy birthday, Cyril Hare.

Barrister and judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, aka mystery author and Detection Club member Cyril Hare, was born today in Surrey in 1900. His best-known sleuth is offbeat lawyer Francis Pettigrew; FaberFinds has reissued many of the Pettigrew novels, including Tragedy at Law, Untimely Death, and When the Wind Blows. His other detective is Inspector Mallett (Tenant for Death, Death Is No Sportsman, Suicide Excepted). Clark died in 1958. His colleague Michael Gilbert edited Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare in 1961.

Law professor: Law students can learn from detective stories.

When lawyers are not being villainized in popular culture, they are often portrayed as having many of the same admirable traits as a shrewd detective.
— Simon Stern, "Detecting Doctrines" 101

In "Detecting Doctrines: The Case Method and the Detective Story" (Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 23.2 [2011], 101–48), U-Toronto law professor Simon Stern suggests that the detective story

Illustration of Randolph
Mason by Dan Sayre
Groesheck, from Melville
Davisson Post's "The
Corrector of Destinies"
Pearson's Magazine
Feb 1907

can help teach legal reasoning and provides some examples of how courts have applied the detective story in constructing doctrines. He quotes from R. Austin Freeman's "Art of the Detective Story" (1924) and also deals with lawyers as detectives, including Anna Katharine Green's The Leavenworth Case (1878); Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886); Arthur Morrison's Martin Hewitt, Investigator (1894); the inevitable Randolph Mason (of Melville Davisson Post) and Perry Mason (of Erle Stanley Gardner); the Francis Pettigrew novels of Cyril Hare; and Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent (1987). Who knew that the legal magazine Green Bag criticized Sherlock Holmes's reasoning in 1902?  (Hat tips to the Legal Theory and Law & Humanities blogs)

Faber and Faber's Flickr collection.

The Faber & Faber collection on Flickr includes the following

• Early photo of P. D. James in the Tube

• Cover of P. D. James's Cover Her Face (2009 ed.)

• Cover of Cyril Hare's Untimely Death (2008 ed.)

• Cover of Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino (1994 ed.)

• Cover of Death in the Dark (1930) by Stacey Bishop (aka New Jersey-born composer George Antheil)

About the photo: George Antheil, NYPL

Faber turns 80—and Cyril Hare reprints at Faber Finds.

Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog discusses the 80th birthday of Faber, which includes reissuing P. D. James's Cover Her Face. Over at Faber Finds, the back-in-print program, works that have been reissued include a number by judge and Golden Age mystery author Cyril Hare (1900–58): Death Is No Sportsman, An English Murder, Suicide Excepted, Tenant for Death, That Yew Tree's Shade (aka Death Walks the Woods), and With a Bare Bodkin. Also reprinted: Hare's The Magic Bottle (a children's book) and The Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare (introd. Michael Gilbert).

Happy birthday, Cyril Hare.

Cyril Hare, the creator of lawyer sleuth Francis Pettigrew, was born today in Mickleham, UK, in 1900. Hare, the pseudonym for judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark, wrote nine mystery novels and was a talented short story writer; his favorite of his work is said to be Tragedy at Law (1942). He has an interesting piece in Michael Gilbert's Crime in Good Company (1959) on the classic mystery and served as an inspiration to Gilbert to pursue a mystery writing career. See Martin Edwards's essay on "The Reluctant Detective: Francis Pettigrew and Cyril Hare" here.