Death Walks the Woods

THAT YEW TREE'S SHADE is known in the States as DEATH WALKS THE WOODS, but it seems it';s only available now under its original title, which might please the late Cyril Hare if he cared about such things. And since he used a pseudonym to mask his own real name, who knows how he would feel? Another novel featuring Francis (whom his wife Eleanor calls "Frank") Pettigrew, THAT YEW TREE'S SHADE is very much a Golden Age Detective special as it is so built on cracking the multiple alibis proffered by the chief suspects in a very English crime. And it's also about finding the occluded motive hidden by one of the others and, if you ask me, that's pretty much the only bit of detection Francis Pettigrew manages in this novel, which is delightful in other ways of course. The little village of Didford in mid-Markshire is arranged at the base of a steep yew covered hill, and Francis and Eleanor's new house has a grand view of the majestic scenery all the way up to the top. Hare's descriptions are a little confusing--when it comes to nature, he's no DH Lawrence and he's certainly not up to standards of John Cowper Powys--but apparently three paths lead to a central concavity halfway up the hill where the county constabulary is thinking of installing a trash barrel to put a spike in the increase in picnickers' trash strewn about. The villagers appear one by one--Mrs. Pink, the best woman in town and the church lady of the village--Mrs. Ransome, a divorcee who scandalizes the village with her wanton ways and her new houseguest, the notorious Humphrey Rose, newly released from a prison term give to him for his massive defalcation of the funds of hundreds of strangers--he's like the Ken Lay of England, but with a strange, mysterious charm Ken Lay never had. There's Godfrey Ransome, the 17 year old schoolboy in whom Frank takes first a fatherly, then a brotherly, then what seems like an amative interest. There's Todman and there's Wendon, who I don't have the time to tell you about. Hare is great at establishing character, and I love what he's done with these people. The story itself isn't wonderful, and Hare makes us think that he's going to make much more use of a Thomas Hardy slash George Meredith figure whose memory haunts the Didford hillside. There's a Henry Spicer Museum that has some of the gloomy gus's relics in it, but Hare missed the kind of chance Robert Barnard would not have, to satirize the Victorians, and the novel suffers from a kind of bifurcated split in what's supposed to be funny, and what's supposed to be horrid.