An English Murder

An English Murder is a crime novel by the English writer Cyril Hare, published in 1951. It takes the shape of a classic Golden Age mystery, a group of guests snowed in together in a country house, and sets it in a Britain that has just come through the war and is in the middle of changing.

The house belongs to Viscount Warbeck, an old and very ill peer, and the party includes his only son, a first cousin who is a socialist Member of Parliament and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Chancellor's colleague and likely successor, and a sergeant of the Metropolitan Police who has been assigned as his personal guard. There is also Briggs the butler and his daughter Susan, and a professor of history named Wenceslaus Bottwink, who was born in Hungary.

The telephone lines go down with the snow, so nobody can arrive or leave, and a killing takes place at midnight. The novel then works through the guests in turn, since each of them has some reason to be glad of the death and none of them can simply walk away. Hare became a county court judge as well as a crime writer, and the book is as interested in the politics of the household as in the puzzle.