Suicide Excepted

by Cyril Hare

Genres: Crime, Mystery
Pages: 220
Rating:

Synopsis:

Inspector Mallett's stay at the country house hotel of Pendlebury Old Hall has been a letdown, room, food and service, and he longs for it to end. His last trial is to listen when a boorish old man, whose family once owned the house, joins his table. The next day the man is dead and Mallett finds himself investigating the suspicious 'suicide'.

I can’t remember where exactly Cyril Hare’s Suicide Excepted popped up that led me to add it via Kobo Plus — maybe it was just recommended by Kobo! I hadn’t come across Hare before, at any rate, but he was writing during the Golden Age of Crime Fiction, and therefore falls into my interests pretty neatly, and picking up Suicide Excepted proved to be a good decision.

The story is a bit unusual in that it opens following a police detective who gets caught up in a mystery: someone speaks to him the night before they’re found dead in portentous tones that seem to render a verdict of suicide the most likely and sensible outcome. The book then switches to the perspective of Anne and Stephen, the man’s children, as they try to figure out a way to overturn that verdict in order to gain the man’s life insurance money.

I had two theories in mind throughout, and considered one more likely than the other just because of the structure of the book… but in the end it was my second theory which turned out to be correct, which was a nice surprise — I thought the mystery aspect was really well handled. I feel really sorry for Anne, given the way her brother and fiancé were behaving, and given how things turned out. I don’t quite understand exactly what she figured out, but she was pretty badly treated by both men all round, and I do wish we’d seen a glimpse of her moving on.

In any case, I enjoyed how it worked out and had a good time with this one; I’ll read more of Cyril Hare’s work in future.

Rating: 4/5 (“really like it”)