Search Results for 'Nicholas Blake'


FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins

   

   It began, I suppose, with Lord Peter Wimsey. Early in the Golden Age of English detective fiction between the World Wars, Dorothy L. Sayers’ first Wimsey novels created the sub-branch of the genre whose hallmarks were donnish wit, literary allusions and a contemporary sensibility. Near the end of the period in which this type of whodunit flourished, the mantle passed from women authors like Sayers to men, notably Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes and, a few years later, in the middle of World War II, Edmund Crispin.

   All three names were pseudonyms, the mystery-writing bylines of gentlemen with other careers. Blake, the one we are following today, was equally well known as C. (for Cecil) Day-Lewis (1904-1972), who along with his friends W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender was ranked among the foremost young poets of the post-WWI generation. Lovers of that form of literature remember him as England’s Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death, and for movie buffs he’s perhaps best known as the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis.

   I can’t remember when I began reading Nicholas Blake novels or even whether it was before or after we read the Day-Lewis translation of the Aeneid in high school. In any event it was generations ago. Recently I decided to revisit Blake and see how his work stands up today.

***

   His debut novel, A QUESTION OF PROOF (1935), opens at Sudeley Hall, a preparatory school of the sort in which Day-Lewis spent several years as an instructor. Of the eighty-odd boys that it houses, the richest and most despised is Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss. His classmates refer to him as a squit and a worm, and if THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS hadn’t taught Brits to love the sweetly singing little amphibian known to biologists as Bufo bufo, no doubt they would have called him a toad.

   On the end-of-term day when the inmates’ parents are invited to the school for fun and games, this young fiend is found strangled to death inside a hollow haystack which a few hours earlier had been the scene of a passionate rendezvous between one of the school’s instructors and the lovely young wife of its pedantic and tyrannical headmaster, who is also the dead boy’s uncle and only living relative.

   Could the lovers have been caught in the act by the kid, and could one or both of them have strangled him to keep his mouth shut? There are of course more than two suspects, including some other instructors and the headmaster, who inherits most of his swinish nephew’s money. (With his complete lack of interest in law, Blake does nothing to explain how this came about.)

   But the young man who visited the haystack is so deeply under suspicion that he sends to London for his old Oxford friend Nigel Strangeways, a Holmes-like consulting detective.

   At first Nigel comes across as something of a silly-ass character, demanding endless cups of tea, singing an aria from Handel’s ISRAEL IN EGYPT during a wild auto chase (the first of many physical action scenes in Blake novels), submitting to a schoolboy secret society’s initiation rite that involves, among other things, putting a chalk mustache on the statue of a “nimph” in the village square.

   But most of the time he plays his detective role well, preferring psychological to physical clues (of which there are none), recognizing that one unanswered question—why was the dead boy not seen by anyone in the hour or so before his death?—is the key to his murder.

   When a second murder takes place, a stabbing with an improvised stiletto during a cricket game between the students and their fathers, he concludes that the answer to another question—how was the stiletto made to disappear?—will solve both this crime and the earlier one. For Yanks there may be a bit too much schoolboy and cricket jargon but on the whole this is an excellent debut novel, deserving all the accolades it has garnered since its first publication.

***

   The title of the second Strangeways exploit and much of its plot are taken from an obscure (except to specialists) Jacobean melodrama. THOU SHELL OF DEATH (1936) is a quotation from Cyril Tourneur’s THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY (1607), a play which becomes increasingly relevant as we progress through the book.

   On a recommendation from his uncle, an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, Nigel travels to rural Somerset a few days before Christmas to investigate three threatening letters that have been sent at the rate of one a month to Fergus O’Brien, a World War I air ace who, somewhat like Lawrence of Arabia, has retired to the countryside.

   The most recent letter prophesies that O’Brien will die on the day after Christmas, also known as Boxing Day and the Feast of Stephen, the day on which good king Wenceslas in the carol went out. The reclusive war hero is uncharacteristically hosting a house party over the holidays, a party consisting of a woman explorer whose life he had saved in Africa, her financially desperate brother, a shady roadhouse proprietor, O’Brien’s discarded mistress, and an old Oxford don who had been one of Nigel’s professors.

   Sure enough, O’Brien is found shot to death on Boxing Day morning, and over the next few days there’s another death, this one by poison inserted in a peanut, and a near-fatal bludgeoning. Many chapters are filled with complex alternative theories of the crimes, propounded by Nigel and a Somerset officer and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard, but the reasoning remains on a speculative level until Nigel travels to rural Ireland in search of O’Brien’s mysterious pre-war past.

   SHELL is more of a full-blooded detective novel than A QUESTION OF PROOF, with a particularly brilliant “player on the other side” (although how this adversary came to know so much about the works of Cyril Tourneur remains unexplained) and abundant quotations and allusions ranging from the tale of Hercules and Cacus and the epistles of St. Paul through Shakespeare (and of course Tourneur) and finally a few of Day-Lewis’s contemporaries.

   Nigel no longer guzzles tea by the potful as he did in his first outing but at one point, having missed his dinner, he snarfs a gargantuan impromptu meal—a pound or so of cold beef, ten potatoes, half a loaf of bread and most of an apple pie—-and later, just as in A QUESTION OF PROOF, he breaks into song during a wild auto chase.

   American readers might be put off by the number of minor characters who speak in regional or ethnic dialects as if they were in a Harry Stephen Keeler novel, but at least the accents are more authentic than the ones HSK dreamed up. (*)

***

   The poisoned peanut in the second Blake novel is (dare I say it?) a mere bag of shells compared with the murder method in the third. There were signs in that second book that Nigel was beginning to fall in love with Georgia the daredevil explorer. At the start of THERE’S TROUBLE BREWING (1937) they’re married. Nigel is still a consulting detective but has developed a sideline as an authority on poetry, and on the basis of his book on the subject he’s invited to deliver a lecture before the Literary Society in the Dorsetshire town of Maiden Astbury.

   The Big Daddy of the place is the owner of the local brewery, whom, if I weren’t so fond of Bufo bufo, I’d describe as a toad of the first water. He bullies his wife and all but cuts her out of his will (which I don’t think possible under either English or American law, but we’ve seen before that Blake has zero interest in legal issues).

   He also sexually harasses young women, requires his laborers to work inhuman schedules, makes life hell for his socially conscious younger brother, blackmails into silence the local doctor who has documented the brewery’s unsafe working conditions. He even beats his fox terrier! It’s because of this dog, who was found two weeks earlier in one of the brewery’s pressure vats, literally boiled to death, that the Big Daddy character prevails on Nigel to stay in Maiden Astbury for a while and investigate the animal’s murder.

   Nigel spends the next day touring the beer factory and interviewing its principals but his detection is interrupted by the discovery inside the same pressure vat of a human skeleton, apparently that of Big Daddy, although Nigel and the local police inspector seem to be familiar with Conan Doyle’s THE VALLEY OF FEAR and the early Ellery Queen novels since they seriously consider the possibility that the boiled corpse is someone else.

   Suspicion spreads among various characters and several highly speculative alternate theories of the crime are articulated. In due course come two more murders and a midnight climax in the eerie brewery that may remind some readers of a 1930s cliffhanger serial, although Blake is careful to keep Nigel from acting like a serial hero.

   With each chapter prefaced by a literary quotation—from Shakespeare and Bacon and Ben Jonson through 19th-century figures like Byron and Coleridge and Dickens to the poet A.E. Housman, who had died in 1936—this is a fine example of the kind of detective novel whose earliest protagonist was Lord Peter Wimsey.

***

   Blake’s fourth novel was the only book of his that became the basis of a feature-length film by a prestigious director. I’ll discuss both the book and the movie when I return to Blake later this year. His fifth novel was almost made into a movie by another prestigious director—or more precisely by a young man who quickly became one of the most prestigious directors of all time. When I take up Blake again I’ll tell that story too.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Marcia Muller


NICHOLAS BLAKE – End of Chapter. Harper & Brothers, 1957. Perennial Library, paperback, 1977, 1988. First published in the UK by Collins Crime Club, hardcover, 1957.

   The London publishing firm of Wenham & Geraldine has always been a conservative one, but now they are about to become embroiled in a scandal — a libel suit that could cost them both money and reputation. No one can prevent the suit from being filed, but something must be done to ensure that the unfortunate circumstances that prompted it will never happen again.

   Nigel Strangeways is summoned by the firm’s partners, who explain the problem of the memoirs of General Richard Thoresby: When the general’s manuscript was received, it contained passages that libeled Thoresby’s rival, Major General Sir Charles Blair-Chatterley. After some argument, the author agreed to delete them, and did so. However, before the manuscript was delivered to the printer,someone reinstated the passages. The book has been withdrawn, but the damage has already been done. Strangeways agrees to investigate, under the guise that he has been hired by the firm to do some specialized reading.

   The cast of characters Strangeways encounters includes Stephen Protheroe, the author of one great poem, who has withdrawn into the obscurity of his editorial office for twenty-five years; Millicent Miles, writer of torrid romances, who is currently using the office next to Stephen’s to write her steamy memoirs; Herbert Bates, the production manager, who has been forced into early retirement after many years with the firm; General Thoresby himself, and Cyprian Gleed,the ne’er-do-well son of Miss Miles.

   Any of these people — plus a number of less important employees — had the opportunity and motive to alter the proofs. But by the time Strangeways has delved deeper into the situation, murder has been done, and the motive turns out to be more complex than any he has imagined.

   This is a well-plotted novel and a good depiction of the publishing world, but it moves very slowly, and Nigel Strangeways fails to come alive in contrast to the other characters — some of whom are extremely memorable. Blake has an irritating habit of making cryptic forecasts such as “He could not know that one of the questions he had asked this morning would lead directly to a murder.” Without these, perhaps the suspense would be greater; as it is, End of Chapter contains few surprises.

   Strangeways’s other investigations include The Smiler with the Knife (1939); The Corpse in the Snowman (1941); Minute for Murder (1947), which Barzun and Taylor term Blake’s “masterpiece”; and The Worm of Death (1961). The best of Blake’s non-series crime novels is probably A Penknife in My Heart (1959).

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Bill Pronzini


NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Beast Must Die. Harper, hardcover, 1938. US paperback editions include: Crestwood / Black Cat Detective Series #7, digest-sized, 1943; Dell D227, Great Mystery Library #15, 1958; Berkley F971, 1964; Perennial Library, 1978. First published in the UK by Collins, hardcover, 1938.

   British Poet Laureate (1968-72) and novelist Cecil Day Lewis, writing as Nicholas Blake, published a score of popular detective and suspense novels from 1935 to 1968, all but four of which feature an urbane amateur sleuth named Nigel Strangeways. For the most part, the Blake novels are fair-play deductive mysteries in the classic mold and are chock-full of literary references and involved digressions, which makes for rather slow pacing. But they are also full of well-drawn characters and unusual incidents, and offer a wide variety of settings and information on such diverse topics as sailing, academia, the British publishing industry, and the cold war.

   The Beast Must Die is considered by some to be Blake’s finest work and a crime-fiction classic. When the young son of mystery novelist Felix Cairnes (a.k.a. Felix Lane) is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Lane, who doted on the boy, vows to track down and kill the man responsible. A trail of clues leads him to a film star named Lena Lawson, who was a passenger in the death car, and finally to its driver, George Rafferty, the obnoxious part owner of a Gloucestershire garage.

   Lane insinuates himself into Rafferty’s household as Lena’s new lover, and makes preparations to exact his revenge via a sailing “accident.” But things don’t quite go as he (or the reader) anticipates. And when murder finally does strike, it does so in a wholly unexpected fashion.

   The plot is tricky and ingeniously constructed: the first third is told first-person in the form of Felix Lane’s diary; there is a brief middle section, called “Set Piece on a River,” which is done third-person from Lane’s point of view; and the last half is a straightforward, third-person narrative that introduces Nigel Strangeways (and his wife, Georgia, and Inspector Blount of Scotland Yard) and follows Strangeways as he unravels a tangled web of hatreds and unpleasantries. Blake builds the suspense nicely in the first half, makes good use of a subplot involving Lane’s affection for Rafferty’s own son, Phil, and even spices his narrative with a little sex — an unusual ingredient for mystery novels during the Golden Age.

   But The Beast Must Die also has its share of flaws. The manner in which Lane tracks down Rafferty — and the ease with which he is able to meet and seduce a popular actress seem both convenient and contrived; once Strangeways (who is something of a colorless and priggish sort, at least in this novel) arrives on the scene, the narrative becomes talky and slow, diluting suspense; a physical attack on Strangeways is poorly motivated; and the final revelations, intended as a stunning surprise, are neither stunning nor particularly surprising.

   This is a good novel, certainly, one worth reading — but it’s not a mystery classic.

   A film version of The Beast Must Die was produced in France in 1969 under the title This Man Must Die. Directed by Claude Chabrol, it is faithful to the novel except in one major (and curious) point: It excludes Nigel Strangeways completely and tells the tale as a straightforward thriller.

         ———
   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.

REVIEWED BY TINA KARELSON:         


NICHOLAS BLAKE There's Trouble Brewing

NICHOLAS BLAKE – There’s Trouble Brewing. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1937. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1937. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library #30, 1944; Perennial, 1982.

   This is the third of the 16 Nigel Strangeways mysteries and earliest of the four that have lurked unread upon my shelves for the last 20 years or more.

   Blake, of course, is a pseudonym for the poet Cecil Day Lewis. And the Strangeways novels are the product of a poet and scholar whose purpose in writing mysteries was to make some extra money to support his growing family. While he’s giving a bit of a tweak to the genre as it existed in Britain at the time, he stays within its boundaries.

NICHOLAS BLAKE There's Trouble Brewing

   In fact, the traditional elements are quite rigid. The story unfolds chronologically, each chapter designated with a number, date and time. For example, the eighth chapter is “VIII. July 19, 8.20–11.30 A.M.” Each chapter has an epigraph; these are drawn from a variety of sources, from Shakespeare to a 19th century temperance ballad.

   The sleuth, Nigel Strangeways, is a classic upper-class amateur. In this case, he is summoned to the village of Maiden Astbury by an Oxford classmate’s wife, ostensibly to address the local literary society on the topic of his “delightful little book on the Caroline poets.” He ends up investigating a gruesome murder in a brewery, foreshadowed by the similar disposal of the brewery owner’s dog, subject of the book’s opening:

NICHOLAS BLAKE There's Trouble Brewing

   Every dog, they say, has its day. Whether Truffles would have assented to this proposition during his lifetime is highly doubtful. Not for him the elusive rabbit, the ineffable dungheap, the hob-nobbing with loose companions at street corners that for upper-class dogs represent the illicit high-spots of cloistered lives. Truffles, like everything else that Eustace Bunnett had to do with, was kept very much at heel.

   The educated, slightly tongue-in-cheek tone is maintained throughout. While gently amusing, it distances the reader from the story and characters.

   Plot and structure are similarly flawed; more than one significant character is offstage for all or most of the book, existing only through other characters’ eyes and according to the physical traces left behind. The total effect is of a puzzle with missing pieces, viewed from afar.

      Previously reviewed on this blog:

Murder with Malice   [by Marv Lachman]
Thou Shell of Death   [by Steve Lewis]
The Private Wound   [by Steve Lewis]

IT’S ABOUT CRIME
by Marvin Lachman


NICHOLAS BLAKE – Malice in Wonderland.

NICHOLAS BLAKE Murder with Malice

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1940. Harper & Brothers, US, hc, 1940, as The Summer Camp Mystery. Paperback reprints include: Penguin #592, 1946; Pyramid R-1008, 1964 (later 1971, shown) as Malice with Murder; and Carroll & Graf, 1987, as Murder with Malice.

   Recently published by Carroll & Graf, a publisher which is doing some of the most interesting reprints lately, is Nicholas Blake’s Murder with Malice. This is yet another title for the book which began life in 1940 as Malice in Wonderland (easily its best title) and was reprinted in the United States the same year as The Summer Camp Mystery.

   Oh well, under any title, this is one of the best examples of the late Golden Age of classic puzzles that you’ll find in paperback. Nigel Strangeways is called to investigate strange doings at a holiday camp named Wonderland, where a series of practical jokes — e.g., tennis balls dipped in treacle — by someone who calls himself “The Mad Hatter” have culminated in murder.

   The humor Is sophisticated and the puzzle very difficult to solve. The setting is believable but far enough removed from our usual lives to make perfect escape reading.

— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 9, No. 3, May/June 1987
         (very slightly revised).


Editorial Comment: I wonder if this detective novel holds the record for being published under the most titles. It’s certainly in the running!

FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins


   A few weeks ago Turner Classic Movies presented yet another film of the Thirties which, had it been made in the Forties, would have been accepted by everyone as film noir.

   I refer to Crime and Punishment (Columbia, 1935), based on Dostoevski’s classic novel. For obvious budgetary reasons director Josef von Sternberg makes no attempt to recreate mid-19th-century St. Petersburg, and we are told in an opening title that the story could take place at any time and anywhere.

   This is why the protagonist’s name morphs from Rodion to Roderick Raskolnikov, and also why we never see any automobiles or horse-drawn vehicles or any other form of transportation that might give us a clue to whether we are in the 19th or the 20th century.

   Amid grotesque shadows and bizarre camera angles, Peter Lorre in his first role after escaping from Hitler’s Europe played Raskolnikov — how could that whiny, sweaty, pop-eyed little toad have ever imagined himself to be an Ubermensch above the law? — while the police detective Porfiry Petrovich was played by Edward Arnold, who the following year would be cast, for one film only, as Nero Wolfe.

   If you missed the TCM debut of this version of Crime and Punishment, watch for it when next it’s shown.

***

   Speaking of Nero, it was my good fortune that I began reading Rex Stout in the late 1950s, when I was in my middle teens and also pigging out on a dozen or more TV Western series a week.

   Why was this a lucky break for me? Because one of those Western series saved me from misunderstanding Archie Goodwin.

   If you were following the Wolfe saga during the Hammett-Chandler era when the novels and novellas were first coming out, you might easily have tried to assimilate Archie to the legion of wisecracking PI/first person narrators of the time, and then rejected the character when you sensed what a poor fit that was.

   Even so astute a critic as John Dickson Carr, writing in 1946, referred to Archie as “insufferable” and a “latter-day Buster Brown.”

   But if you were fortunate enough to discover Stout in the late Fifties, at a time when millions of Americans including myself were watching Maverick every Sunday evening, you might have recognized Archie Goodwin and Bret Maverick as soul brothers.

   You might have credited Rex Stout with having created in prose the Great American Wiseass prototype which James Garner brought to perfection on film. You might have longed to see one of Stout’s novels filmed with Orson Welles as Wolfe and Garner as Archie. At least I did. What a shame that it never happened!

***

   When did TV movies begin? The first films that networks called by that name were broadcast in the fall of 1964. But if a TV movie is a feature-length film that tells a continuous story and was first seen in a single installment, the genre dates back at least to the suspense thrillers and Westerns that were aired one week out of four, beginning in the fall of 1956, as part of the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90 (1956-61).

   As a young teen I watched some of those films. Until recently the only one I had revisited as an adult was So Soon to Die (January 17, 1957), starring Richard Basehart and Anne Bancroft and based on the novel of the same name by Jeremy York, one of the many bylines of the hyper-prolific John Creasey (1908-1973).

   A few weeks ago I came upon another, one that I hadn’t seen in more than half a century. The Dungeon (April 10, 1958), written and directed by David Swift, starred Dennis Weaver as a man who, after being acquitted of murder, is kidnapped by a psychotic ex-judge and locked up in a cell in the attic of his isolated mansion, along with several other acquitted defendants.

   A great noir premise and a great cast to boot — Paul Douglas, Julie Adams, Agnes Moorehead, Patty McCormack, Patrick McVey, Thomas Gomez, Werner Klemperer, the list goes on and on. And the tension is heightened by the magnificently ominous music of a never credited Bernard Herrmann.

   I wish Swift had provided a backstory to explain what turned the judge into a sociopath, and my mind, not to say my nose, boggles when I start wondering how his prisoners (one of whom has been held for more than a year!) ever showered or kept clean-shaven or changed clothes. But if you have the good fortune to find this film on DVD as I did, it’s well worth seeing and, thanks to Herrmann, hearing.

***

   The Poetry Corner has been on sabbatical lately but I need to bring it back in order to tout perhaps the finest detective novel to deal centrally with the subject.

   The author was Nicholas Blake, known outside our genre as C. Day Lewis (1904-1972), poet laureate of England and the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis. The detective, as always except in Blake’s non-series crime novels, is Nigel Strangeways.

   The title is Head of a Traveler (1949). Thomas Leitch in his essay on Blake in Mystery and Suspense Writers, Volume 1 (Scribner, 1998), describes the novel as “one of his most tormentedly introverted. The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his vanished brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse. The events of the fatal night remain obscure even after Strangeways’ final explanation; the real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry — the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher in his short-lived “Speaking of Crime” column in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (August 1949) was a bit less enthusiastic: “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.”

   Whichever critic is right, when it comes to the intersection of crime fiction and poetry, Head of a Traveler remains the “locus classicus.”

NICHOLAS BLAKE – Thou Shell of Death.

Berkley F1002; paperback reprint, 1964. Hardcover first edition: Collins Crime Club (UK), 1936. US hardcover first edition: Harper & Brothers, 1936, as Shell of Death. [Reprinted in The Nicholas Blake Treasury (Volume 1), Nelson Doubleday, 1964, containing: Thou Shell of Death; The Beast Must Die; and The Corpse in the Snowman.] Other US paperbacks: Penguin, US, 1944, as Shell of Death; Perennial, US, 1977, as Thou Shell of Death.

NICHOLAS BLAKE Thou Shell of Death

   Even though they have the same author — Nicholas Blake — what a night and day difference there is between this book and the previous one by him, reported on here. This is the second mystery Blake wrote — the first was A Question of Proof — and it’s the second appearance of Nigel Strangeways as well.

   The conventions of the Golden Age of Detection are very much evident in this earlier book — complete with anonymous threatening letters, a call for assistance from the recipient, an aging but still engaging ex-flying hero of the previous war, a house party at Christmas time with all of the possible suspects in attendance.

   And then death strikes. Is it suicide? Only one set of footprints are found in the snow leading to the small hut where Fergus O’Brien’s body is found.

   Or is it murder? Strangeways’ deductions soon answer the question in positive fashion, solving as he does the “locked room” aspect of the case in quick order. By that I mean by page 72, out of a total of 192. (Paperbacks were thin and the print was small, back in 1964.)

   But I digress. More mysterious doings occur, all of them complicating the mystery even more, rather than clearing them up at all. It is all rather fascinating and interesting and static until (a) Nigel takes a quick trip to Ireland to uncover some facts about the past, and (b) he returns to Dower House only to find himself falling in love with one of the possible suspects, regretting greatly that his prior hypotheses made her one of the primary ones, in the eyes of Scotland Yard.

NICHOLAS BLAKE Thou Shell of Death

   As a detective, Nigel himself seems to be only an amateur, in the finest sense of the word. He is called upon in this instance due to the fact that his uncle, Sir John Strangeways, is an Assistant-Commissioner of Police. This allows the dilettantish Nigel to conduct his investigations with the full cooperation of the authorities, if not their down-right awe and admiration.

   I’m not sure that dilettante is precisely the right word. From the Internet comes the following definition: a dabbler: an amateur who engages in an activity without serious intentions and who pretends to have knowledge. Nigel Strangeways is serious all right, and he puts the pieces of the puzzle in excellent fashion.

   If the early Ellery Queen took after Philo Vance, then I believe that Nigel Strangeways follows in the same footsteps as that very same Ellery Queen, whether directly or in parallel — I have no way of knowing whether Cecil Day-Lewis ever read any of the Queenian adventures or not, but they’re cut from the same cloth, no doubt about it.

   As for the case in hand, inspired by a 17th century work by a playwright not previously known to me, Cyril Tourneur, who published The Revenger’s Tragedy in 1607. [NOTE: See Al Guthrie’s comment.] The title of Blake’s work, Thou Shell of Death, comes from a direct quote, which I dare not repeat, for fear of, um, forsooth, revealing too much.

NICHOLAS BLAKE Thou Shell of Death

   It takes Nigel the entire last chapter, eighteen pages (small print), to untangle all of the twisted threads of the plot, remarking once on a remarkable (well, yes) coincidence that made the killer’s plan succeed the way that it did, not mentioning the much huger one that initiated the entire sequence of events in the first place.

   That, plus the entire sheer unlikelihood of anyone plotting such a strikingly complex, ingenious, and therefore inept scheme in the second place — well, that’s simply the joy of author trying to outwit reader that makes the reading — and the challenge — all the more pleasurable.

   Blake’s own career, as seen by the earlier post on this blog, eventually went in other directions, as did Ellery Queen’s in tandem. But which kind of story was better, and which are they better known for today? You tell me.

— November 2004.

NICHOLAS BLAKE – The Private Wound.

Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1968. US hardcover: Harper & Row, 1968. US paperbacks: Dell, 1970 (first cover shown); Perennial, 1981. Many British paperback editions, including Pan, 1971. Australian pb: J. M. Dent, 1987 (second cover shown).

NICHOLAS BLAKE The Private Wound

    “Nicholas Blake” is an author that I’ve neglected over the years (among many), and I’m trying, with a modicum of success, to catch up with some of them. I put the author’s name in quotes, since Blake was in real life the well-known Anglo-Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis, but as Blake, his primary sleuthing character was a fellow named Nigel Strangeways, who appeared in 16 of his 20 detective novels.

   Since The Private Wound is one of the four that Strangeways is not in, I’ll refrain from saying more about the gentleman for now — it will wait until I read one that he is in — except to say that one source on the Internet mentions that primary model for Mr Strangeways was Day-Lewis’s contemporary writer and poet, W.H. Auden.

   Day-Lewis was born in Ireland, and presumably had roots there all his life, which goes a long way in explaining the often poetic view of Ireland in the late 1930s there is to be found in The Private Wound. What one does not expect (or at least I did not) was the sensuality, the down-right earthiness, of the brief affair in which writer Dominic Eyre, visiting Ireland from England, finds himself enmeshed with Harry, short for Harriet, the wife of Eyre’s host, Flurry Leeson. (Flurry is short for Florence, “not an uncommon Christian name for men in Ireland.”)

   Here, with your permission, is a short introductory quote, from the very first page:

   When I remember that marvelous summer of 1939, in the West of Ireland almost thirty years ago, one picture always slips to the front of my mind. I am lying on a bed drenched with our sweat. She is standing by the open window to cool herself in the moonlight. I see again the hour-glass figure, the sloping shoulders, the rather short legs, that disturbing groove of the spine halfway hidden by her dark red hair which the moonlight has turned black. The fuchsia below the window will have turned to gouts of black blood. The river beyond is talking in its sleep. She is naked.

NICHOLAS BLAKE The Private Wound

   Blake died in 1972, and The Private Wound was the last detective novel he wrote. His first was A Question of Proof, which appeared in 1935, which is why I think of him as a Golden Age writer. But a paragraph such as the one above could have appeared in very few novels written in the 1930s, or so I’m conditioned to believe. If I’m in error, I don’t mind, please let me know.

   I’m weak on Irish history — but not as much as I was before I read this book. I knew that there was always a fierce hostility between the Irish and the English — and as Eyre soon discovers, Flurry was part of it. What I did not know was that certain factions in pre-war Ireland were seriously considering negotiations with Germany; uprisings in Ireland would seriously divert England’s attention to their west, rather than keeping their eye on what the Nazis were doing. And a conflict between Germany and England would leave the Northern counties open for takeover.

   I may not have that exactly right. The book that Blake wrote is not a history book, per se, but Dominic Eyre finds himself in the thick of things, of that there is no doubt: suspected both of being a spy and by all of the neighboring countryside of cuckolding his landlord. ((As note of technical accuracy, it is Flurry’s younger brother Kevin who owns the cottage where Eyre is staying.))

NICHOLAS BLAKE The Private Wound

   In the sentence before last, the latter is true, but the former is not, and thus the story is made. It makes for a formidable tale of detection as well — I will not tell you who the victim is, and who becomes Eyre’s partner in solving the crime — and I confess that I did not know who the killer was until two pages before All Is Revealed. And I should have. Known, that is, and much earlier. All in all, nicely done, in a sad and beautifully haunting sort of way.

   The same Internet source suggests that The Private Wound is considered the most autobiographical of the author’s works in the mystery genre. That may or may not be true — I have no way of knowing otherwise — but it does help explain the strange framing device. That the tale begins with “Dominic Eyre” describing the events that happened to him thirty years before is not so unusual — it was the closing short epilogue which was, when first read, the puzzler.

   The title comes from The Two Gentlemen from Verona: “The private wound is deepest.”

— November 2004


[UPDATE] 06-14-08.    I’ll be posting a review one of Blake’s detective novels with Nigel Strangeways in it sometime soon, perhaps not tomorrow, but by Monday at the latest.

FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins

   There’s a general rule to which the most conspicuous exception in our genre is Agatha Christie: when an author dies, his work dies too. Certainly Aaron Marc Stein’s has. He was born in 1906, graduated summa cum laude from Princeton, wrote a couple of avant-garde novels which were published thanks to endorsements from Theodore Dreiser, then turned to mystery fiction under the pseudonym of George Bagby and, a few years later, under his own name too.

AARON MARC STEIN George Bagby

   He quickly learned how to parlay his day jobs and other activities into backgrounds for the early Bagby novels, using his time as radio critic for a New York paper to create his own station in Murder on the Nose (1938), dipping into his memories of apparently liquor-soaked Princeton reunions for The Corpse with the Purple Thighs (1939), employing his stint at the madhouse known as Time magazine in Red Is for Killing (1941).

   During World War II he abandoned fiction to serve as an Army cryptographer, but after the war he became a full-time author and wrote so prolifically and skillfully that in the early 1950s, when he was turning out four or more titles a year, New York Times mystery critic Anthony Boucher called him the most reliable professional detective novelist in the United States.

   Between 1935 and his death half a century later he produced an astounding 110 book-length mysteries: 51 as Bagby chronicling the cases of the NYPD’s sore-footed Inspector Schmidt; 18 as Hampton Stone about New York Assistant District Attorneys Gibson and Mac; 18 under his own name with the archaeologist-detective duo of Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt as protagonists and, when his publishers demanded stronger beer in their Steins, 23 with adventurous civil engineer Matt Erridge in the lead.

AARON MARC STEIN George Bagby

   Factor in his one non-crime novel as Bagby plus one stand-alone crime novel under his own name and those two early literary experiments and you have a total of 114 books. He also wrote occasional short stories, which cry out to be collected. Most of his Bagby and Stone novels are set in and around New York, which Aaron knew and loved and characterized as vividly as any of his human beings, while most of his orthonymous books feature exotic locales in Central and South America or Europe.

   I had been reading him since my teens but never got to spend quality time with him until the mid-1970s when we both joined the board of the University of California’s Mystery Library, and we remained friends for the rest of his life. In 1979 he received the Grand Master award from Mystery Writers of America. Later he and I served together on the board of Bantam s Collection of Mystery Classics.

   His health was failing but he continued to turn out a book or two a year well into his seventies. Acclaimed by colleagues and connoisseurs, he never attained the popular success he so richly deserved. He died of cancer in 1985. That was almost a quarter century ago but I still remember him fondly.

AARON MARC STEIN George Bagby

   Since the early 1960s he had lived in a co-op on Park Avenue and 88th Street with his sister Miriam-Ann Hagen (who also wrote a few whodunits of her own) and her husband Joe. They had bought it for $34,000 which they’d won gambling at Las Vegas in a single night. At the time of his death the unit was worth well over a million. In effect he had an apartment inside the apartment, and after he and Miriam had died Joe invited me to stay in Aaron’s quarters whenever I was in New York – which allowed me the unique experience of reading several of Aaron’s later novels in the room where he’d written them.

   For most readers today his huge body of work remains an undiscovered treasure. Any who care to remedy that loss would do well to begin with his books from the years when he earned that accolade from Boucher: perhaps the Bagby titles Drop Dead (1949) and Dead Drunk (1953), or The Girl with the Hole in Her Head (1949) as by Stone, or Days of Misfortune (1949) under his own name. I still reread him regularly and with pleasure.

***

   Of all the 20th-century poets who made significant contributions to the whodunit, our Poetry Corner guest this month is probably the most distinguished. Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) is best known today as the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis, but in his lifetime he served as England’s Poet Laureate and, as Nicholas Blake, the creator of amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, he was considered one of the finest crime novelists of his generation.

Head of a Traveller

   He combined both interests in the Strangeways novel Head of a Traveler (1949), which Thomas M. Leitch summarized superbly in his chapter on Blake for Volume One of Mystery and Suspense Writers: The Literature of Crime, Detection, and Espionage (1998). “The central figure is the distinguished poet Robert Seaton, whose household is destroyed by the unexpected discovery of his brother Oswald’s decapitated corpse….[T]he real interest of the novel is in its impassioned examination of the costs of poetry – the lengths to which poets and those who love them will go in pursuit of their craft.”

   Anthony Boucher, reviewing the novel in his “Speaking of Crime” column (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, August 1949), suggested that “Blake knows so much about his theme, the nature of poetic creation, that he never quite conveys it convincingly to the reader.” But those with twin passions for poetry and mystery fiction may well find Head of a Traveler the single most rewarding whodunit they’ve ever read.

***

MACDONALD Drowning Pool

   As one whose usual breakfast is fruit and a piece of whole-grain toast, I am avocado-green with envy at the morning meals characters like Nero Wolfe can tuck away. But Wolfe’s most lavish spread seems Spartan next to that of Walter Kilbourne, the cartoonish take on Sydney Greenstreet in Ross Macdonald’s second Lew Archer novel, The Drowning Pool (1950):

    “He ate with a gobbling passion. A piece of ham and four eggs, six pieces of toast; a kidney and a pair of mountain trout; eight pancakes with eight small sausages; a quart of raspberries, a pint of cream, a quart of coffee. I watched him the way you watch the animals at the zoo, hoping he’d choke to death….”

   What, no platter of cream-filled tortes for dessert?

***

   Just as this column was about to sail off into cyberspace to its destination came the news that Sydney Pollack died of cancer on Memorial Day at age 73. He was a Hoosier, born in Lafayette, Indiana on July 1, 1934, and began his show-business career as an actor. In the early Sixties he moved into directing and helmed episodes of many network TV crime-suspense series including Cain’s Hundred, Target: The Corruptors, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Defenders, The Fugitive.

   His Hitchcock episode “The Black Curtain” (November 16, 1962) was nominally based on Cornell Woolrich’s 1941 noir novel of the same name but had almost nothing in common with the book except for the springboard situation as Frank Townsend (Richard Basehart) recovers from a second blow on the head and learns that for the past few years he’s been suffering from amnesia and leading another life.

   Pollack’s most successful feature-length contributions to our genre were the cynical thrillers Three Days of the Condor (1975) and The Firm (1993), whose bad guys were respectively the CIA and the legal profession: not bad choices at all.

Three Days of the Condor

REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


NICHOLAS KILMER – Dirty Linen. Henry Holt & Co., hardcover, March 1999. Poisoned Pen Press, softcover, March 2001.

MICHELLE BLAKE – The 8ook of Light. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, hardcover, May 2003. Berkley, paperback, May 2004.

   Both these books are by authors I’ve not read before and feature plot hooks that I can’t resist: an art historical mystery (Dirty Linen) in which a batch of J. W. M. Turner drawings turn up in a country auction; and, in The Book of Light, the discovery of an ancient document, the “Q” manuscript that was purportedly the source for much of the biblical texts of Matthew and Luke. But apart from irresistible hooks, they couldn’t be more different.

   In Kilmer’s book, Fred Taylor is an agent for Boston collector Clayton Reed charged to bid on a lot at a benefit auction. Fred has no idea what is in the lot and when it turns out to be a series of erotic drawings by the English landscape master Turner, he finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of murder and attempted murder that has him trying to trace the history of the contested works in an attempt to establish the provenance of the drawings and thwart other murders.

   Blake’s compelling theological thriller plays out in a constricted setting dominated by Lilly Connor, an Episcopalian priest filling in as a Boston area college religious counselor, who’s asked to validate a manuscript, which she comes to suspect may be the legendary Book of Light, a collection of the transcribed words of Jesus, rather than the “Q” document.

   Kilmer’s novel is a raunchy, humorous caper. Blake’s stylistically acute novel is a record of souls in anguish, with a centuries old secret group committed to guarding the secrets of the ancient document that places Lilly’s small frightened group in extreme peril.

   I’ll undoubtedly return to both writers, but my expectations will be higher for Blake than for Kilmer.