Nigel Strangeways is spending the Christmas holiday with his artist partner, Claire Massenger, in a snowbound country house in the West Country. His true purpose, though, is to keep fellow guest Alfred Wragby and his family out of harm’s way. The professor has just completed some valuable formula work for the British government, and foreign countries would welcome the chance to pressure him into spilling his secrets. Indeed, a Russian agent named Petrov is making plans to do just that: when he and his gang kidnap Wragby’s young daughter Lucy, Strangeways must figure out both where the child is hidden and how to rescue her, all while keeping the professor from acting rashly as the hours stretch into days and hope seems to wane.
The Sad Variety is one of Nicholas Blake’s last Strangeways novels; author Cecil Day-Lewis would be appointed England’s Poet Laureate four years after this book’s publication. We are fairly far removed from the Golden Age of Detection, and Variety presents a story that is more of a thriller and potboiler than a classically clued mystery like the ones Strangeways encountered in his early career. This 1964 offering resembles another youth-kidnapped-by-international-villains tale, The Whisper in the Gloom, published a decade prior. In both books, Blake handles the suspense elements well, but neither can escape a feeling of manufactured melodrama, and a story that the reader knows instinctively will still adhere to genre conventions (i.e., the “good guys” of Britain will beat the foreign baddies just in time). It also doesn't help that the professor's valuable mental military knowledge is pure MacGuffin, barely defined and purposely vague, so the reader must just accept that enemy confiscation of it will be Very Bad Indeed.
With the moral and commercial outcome predestined – and perhaps I should be fair and note that nearly all of the 1950s and early ‘60s U.S. and UK-produced spy stories, even the James Bond books, are of the good-beats-evil, happy ending variety – it is interesting (if not especially appealing) to see where Blake allows the rawness of “realism” to creep in. For starters, there’s a sprinkling of profanity on the page, mostly coming from the generically sadistic Russian baddie Petrov. Coming across the occasional four- and five-letter swear words here, their inclusion feels anachronistic, as does the villain’s vulgar threats of rape and body mutilation to keep his enemies/victims in line. Blake also has Petrov blackmail one of his reluctant helpers, a self-loathing male college instructor, with photographs of a homosexual tryst; it’s a detail that would surely have been handled differently, if at all, in the more implicit era of puzzle mysteries 30 years earlier.
With the moral and commercial outcome predestined – and perhaps I should be fair and note that nearly all of the 1950s and early ‘60s U.S. and UK-produced spy stories, even the James Bond books, are of the good-beats-evil, happy ending variety – it is interesting (if not especially appealing) to see where Blake allows the rawness of “realism” to creep in. For starters, there’s a sprinkling of profanity on the page, mostly coming from the generically sadistic Russian baddie Petrov. Coming across the occasional four- and five-letter swear words here, their inclusion feels anachronistic, as does the villain’s vulgar threats of rape and body mutilation to keep his enemies/victims in line. Blake also has Petrov blackmail one of his reluctant helpers, a self-loathing male college instructor, with photographs of a homosexual tryst; it’s a detail that would surely have been handled differently, if at all, in the more implicit era of puzzle mysteries 30 years earlier.
Still, the author’s pacing and plotting are solid enough in The Sad Variety, even if they come nowhere near the heights reached in the best Strangeways books. And to its credit, Freudian psychology and sexual candor are not quite as intrusive as in some of Blake’s last mysteries, as with 1961’s The Worm of Death. I only wish the narrative and events felt more spontaneous and less conventional. There is a character who dies rather pitiably, mainly because he is one of the story’s only True Innocents. This death by freezing gives Variety a brief resonance that, for once, feels aligned with the more gritty “reality” that Blake has chosen to construct. But by the tale’s conclusion, which finishes vis-à-vis good v. bad genre expectations, that sting has been dulled in order to wrap everything in a tidy Christmas bow. Worth a look for Strangeways completists or for those seeking a literary segue from Ian Fleming to John le Carré.
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