This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Few judges are known for their literary distinction, but the old County Court bench, the traditional home of might-have-beens, did produce a fair crop of novelists.

Whatever his legal achievements might have been, Thomas Hughes QC (Circuit No. 9, Chester) will always be remembered as the author of Tom Brown’s School Days first and last.

H. C. Leon MC (Circuit No. 46, Willesden) only admitted to being the novelist Henry Cecil upon his retirement in 1967, but given that his nom de plume consisted of his Christian names it is difficult to believe he ever fooled anyone.

And whilst John Drabble QC (Circuit No. 1, Northumberland) never achieved popularity with his two gritty, surprisingly modern crime novels, he did leave his name in the records of literature by being the father of A. S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble.

But special pleading is the prerogative of the columnist; and instead of a dissertation on literature and the law I want to recommend the novels of Cyril Hare, known to the law lists as His Honour Judge Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark (Circuit No. 48, then No. 60). Hare is not exactly forgotten — Faber & Faber has just about kept his books in print — but in the time-honoured cliché his novels and short stories deserve a wider audience.

Gordon Clark’s career had been conventional. Born in 1900, he had gone to Rugby and New College, Oxford, where he took a First. Then he went to the bar, had a mixed practice, was neither very successful nor unsuccessful, occasionally appearing in the law report, but not often enough to take silk.

Like his most famous creation, he knew something of “eking out his practice by the drudgery of legal authorship”, having indexed some volumes of Halsbury’s at the bar.

A Conservative and a conservative, he chaired the local branch of the Junior Imperial League and caused a sensation there when he married his vice-chairman.

During the Second World War, he briefly worked in the legal department of MI5 and for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, though the actual work was humdrum enough (he would later use his experience as a temporary civil servant in With a Bare Bodkin, published in 1946). In 1950, he went on the bench and remained there until he died in 1958.

His finest book is without doubt Tragedy at Law (1942), which introduced Francis Pettigrew, a former prize fellow of All Souls with a too-sharp wit whose career at the bar never quite took off. He found himself on circuit during the war, reflecting on his life’s unfulfilled promise (Pettigrew is obviously a less successful version of its creator, who did make it to the bench and start a family in good time), with a judge to whom increasingly alarming things happened.

Tragedy at Law became infamous for one of the most delayed murders in crime fiction, on page 221 out of 252. Its solution, which like that of his other novels turned on a straightforward point of law — in this case, almost unbelievably, the Law Reforms (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1934 — will annoy some readers.

The pleasure lies in his exquisite psychological portraits

But the pleasure of Hare’s oeuvre lies primarily in his exquisite psychological portraits of his characters as well as his descriptions of provincial English life of a sort now almost extinct. Tragedy at Law contains what may be the finest account of assizes in the 20th century, with its badly-built courthouses, mediocre hotels, faded messes, provincial pettifoggery and diverse headwear, its cast of red judges, sheriffs, lawyers, clerks, welcomed at market towns by trumpeters and javelin-men (or rather the lack thereof, for it was wartime, after all).

Whatever the merits of holding criminal trials only four times a year (which compares favourably to what the HM Courts & Tribunals Service offers these days), it is impossible to deny that they held far greater literary interest than the modern crown courts, and it is a shame that so much of its literature should consist in compilations of half-intelligible anecdotes. In Hare they found their most sensitive chronicler.

Hare’s later novels largely follow the same pattern, with Pettigrew as a reluctant detective who mellows with age in various provincial settings — the philharmonic society (When the Wind Blows), the wartime boarding-house (With a Bare Bodkin), the village cottage (That Yew Tree’s Shade).

In most of them, he is joined by Inspector Mallett, the sole hero of Hare’s first three books and a constant presence in later ones, a large man whose immense appetite for food belies his great intelligence.

Hare’s short stories, usefully collected in Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare and edited by fellow lawyer-cum-crime novelist Michael Gilbert, are on the darker side, but each and every one is written with immense skill. And since it is Christmas, I would be remiss to not recommend An English Murder, Hare’s only crime novel not to feature either Mallett or Pettigrew, set in a country house Christmas during the politically febrile Attlee years.

Had Hare not died at the height of his powers, he might well have achieved greater fame; but what he has managed to leave us is enough to propel him to the very first rank of legal novelists.