Читать книгу Bodies from the Library 3 - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Best known to readers of detective fiction under the pseudonym ‘Cyril Hare’, Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark was born in 1900 in southern England. For around thirty years he led what might be described as a double life: as a highly respected lawyer; and as the author of nine superb novel-length detective mysteries as well as many criminous short stories.

Gordon Clark’s legal career followed broadly conventional lines. He became a barrister in 1924 and practised on civil and criminal cases. During the Second World War he joined the Public Prosecutions Department and in later years served as a County Court Judge in Surrey, the county of his birth. Gordon Clark’s first novel, Tenant for Death (1937), featured the Scotland Yard detective Inspector Mallett, while his fourth, Tragedy at Law (1942), introduced Francis Pettigrew, an ageing barrister who is based at least in part on Clark himself. Mallett and Pettigrew appear in several novels together but also tackle mysteries independently. While it features neither Mallett nor Pettigrew, one of Gordon Clark’s best books is the elegiac An English Murder (1951), which was derived from the radio play, ‘The Murder at Warbeck Hall’. Gordon Clark died in 1957.

The Murder at Warbeck Hall was first broadcast on the BBC Light Programme on 27 January 1948 as the second in a series of plays specially written for the BBC by Agatha Christie, Anthony Gilbert and other members of the Detection Club, which ‘Cyril Hare’ had joined in 1946. This is its first publication.