The Magic Bottle
By (Author) Cyril Hare
Faber & Faber
Faber & Faber
11th December 2008
Main
United Kingdom
Children
Fiction
Paperback
158
Width 126mm, Height 198mm, Spine 11mm
170g
His style is easy and fluent, and his books are eminently readable A great novelist. Spectator The Magic Bottle originally published in 1946 is the only book for children by much-loved Golden Age crime writer Cyril Hare. When Philip and his sister Mary opened the oddly-shaped bottle and found that they had released a Djinn, Philip, who knew his Arabian Nights, feared the worst. But the Djinn was an unexpected kind of Djinn, and his release was the start of some very unexpected adventures
Cyril Hare was the pseudonym for the distinguished lawyer Alfred Alexander Gordon Clark. He was born in Surrey, in 1900, and was educated at Rugby and Oxford. A member of the Inner Temple, he was called to the Bar in 1924 and joined the chambers of Roland Oliver, who handled many of the great crime cases of the 1920s. He practised as a barrister until the Second World War, after which he served in various legal and judicial capacities including a time as a county court judge in Surrey. Hare's crime novels, many of which draw on his legal experience, have been praised by Elizabeth Bowen and P.D. James among others. He died in 1958 at the peak of his career as a judge, and at the height of his powers as a master of the whodunit.