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Book Review: THE MORNING AFTER DEATH (1966) by Nicholas Blake

11/29/2020

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The final mystery to feature Nigel Strangeways, 1966's The Morning After Death is the very definition of a literary mixed bag, and in the final analysis there is more disappointment than delight. I will start with the point that we have a lackluster mystery presented against an engaging setting: Nigel is visiting Cabot University, a fictional New England ivy league school, and makes the acquaintance of the academic Ahlberg brothers. Mark, a professor of English, has a reputation for puckish practical jokes while Chester, teaching Business, is both pragmatic and dull. But it is their step-brother Josiah whose body is found stuffed into a locker, and it does not appear that much love is lost among the group of people who knew and worked with him. Nigel investigates, and two more murderous attempts are made before the killer is exposed and brought to justice. 

Unlike so many other entries in this entertaining series, The Morning After Death is pinned onto a relatively weak and unsurprising puzzle, and although Nicholas Blake's detective does a fair amount of theorizing, neither the characters nor the mystery itself are particularly memorable. It is not an impossible slog, just one that never rises above mediocrity. Near the story's climax, Strangeways presents his accusation and explanation of events in the form of a letter to the murderer, and the reading and reaction by the guilty party provides a very welcome thrill. Blake seems quite interested in character psychology in his later novels, and while Morning strikes some tone-deaf notes in other places, the intellectual failing of the killer, literally spelled out with cruel precision by Nigel’s superior mind, is quite fascinating.

The Massachusetts college setting is also enjoyable, and although Nigel (and his creator, poet Cecil Day-Lewis) is quite at home among the halls of academe, the trip across the pond is a productive one. In part, this is due to the cultural differences between the English detective and the American academics he interacts with. For example, he must remind himself to check for traffic coming from the left and contrasts his own college days with those of the largely joyless students surrounding him:

Policemen stood talking together at each of the two gates that came within Nigel’s vision. Students, released to their normal tasks, brushed past them, carrying their books in canvas bags. They look so young, thought Nigel: can I ever have been as young as that? There is a firm intention in their walk – they neither saunter nor run, as we used to do, enjoying our brief spell of freedom between school and job: they are already seriously committed to the future.
He also tags along on pilgrimages to Walden Woods and Emily Dickinson's home in Amherst. (Indeed, Blake borrows his book's title from the latter's brief but striking poem "The Bustle in a House.")  In the final pages, Blake even has Nigel attend a Boston football game, with Yale battling Cabot University... standing in, one inevitably assumes, for Harvard.

But back to that mention of misguided psychology: along with The Worm of Death (1961), this title presents relationships between men and women that are often uncomfortable and chauvinistically facile. Easily the most ill-served is the character of Susannah "Sukie" Tate. (Why the reductive nickname? Answer that, and you can guess where my criticism is going...) Sukie, we are told, was once the target of an attempted rape by one drunken male character, and later, after a discussion about Clare, Nigel’s girlfriend in London, she seduces our intrepid detective, who is all too willing to yield to her charms and vulnerabilities.

It's an odd choice for Blake's detective nearing retirement to get physical with another woman with no guilt or remorse; it is his relationship with Clare Massinger that readers have been following and investing in over the past seven books. But equally troubling is the fact that Sukie is really the only female character of substance in The Morning After Death, and she is both stereotyped and sexualized. There are other women academics introduced, but they are rather interchangeable. For Sukie to be used as both vixen and victim to define the men in the story is troubling, even when one remembers the time (the "liberated" '60's) and place (hedonistic America) in which she appears.

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While I don’t want to presume that the detective’s morals and beliefs are completely aligned with the author’s in mouthpiece fashion, I do wonder what the ratio of personal viewpoint and concession to genre expectations might be. That Blake had a consumer readership in mind is rather obvious, so a little sex and vulgarity mixed in to balance (or to make more attractive?) a puzzle’s cerebral aspects is likely intentional. With the same wary caveat of presuming protagonist as author proxy, I end with an early-chapter exchange between Strangeways and a housemaster’s wife on the pitfalls facing both the classic and contemporary mystery writer:

Mrs. Edwardes bent forward and eyed Nigel solemnly. “Considering what I’ve heard of your background,” she said, “tell me, do you read detective fiction?”

“Sometimes,” said Nigel.

“I hope you are sound on it.”

“Sound?” asked Nigel.

“As an art form.”

“It’s not an art form. It’s an entertainment.”

May nodded approvingly. “Excellent. I have no use for those who seek to turn the crime novel into an exercise in morbid psychology. Its chief virtue lies in its consistent flouting of reality: but crime novelists today are trying to write variations on Crime and Punishment without possessing a grain of Dostoevsky’s talent. They’ve lost the courage of their own agreeable fantasies, and want to be accepted as serious writers.” This seemed to annoy her.

[Nigel:] “Still, novels that are all plot – just clever patterns concealing a vacuum – one does get bored with them. I can understand readers getting sick of blood that’s obviously only red ink.”

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Book Review: THE SAD VARIETY (1964) by Nicholas Blake

10/25/2020

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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.


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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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Book Review: END OF CHAPTER (1957) by Nicholas Blake

3/4/2020

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Nigel Strangeways is called to the publishing house of Wenham & Geraldine to investigate a bit of pernicious galley proof sabotage. It turns out a controversial author's book was printed with libelous passages intact, even though they were marked for deletion by the editor supervising the project. While looking into the matter, Strangeways stirs up darker currents of animosity and suspicion between the publishers, their staff and their clients. One person in particular, romance writer Millicent Miles, seems to delight in ruffling the feathers of all who cross her path. When she is found with her throat cut in the W&G office she was using to write her memoirs, the consulting detective's investigation moves onto new and dangerous ground.

End of Chapter is a satisfyingly solid later book in Nicholas Blake's series of Nigel Strangeways mysteries. For me, much of its success is due to its clean emulation of the narratives found in detective stories of the genre's Golden Age two decades before. While both elements are present here, this story doesn't get bogged down in either tone or character psychology, but instead focuses on cleverly tactile clues (the manuscript page not perfectly aligned in the typewriter; marks on a window jamb that hint at a recent staple, now removed) and a very well-drawn circle of suspects. 

While other late-period entries like The Worm of Death (1961) and The Sad Variety (1964) can't seem to shake a sort of era-emanating nihilism (which likely mirrored poet Cecil Day-Lewis's worldview as he pushed forward into his 60s during the 1960s), End of Chapter is a return to a simpler time and genre style. The story and its revelations are sufficiently twisty to keep the reader engaged, and Blake makes the rare but rewarding choice to stage Millicent Miles' murder from the (unidentified) killer's perspective. As we are allowed to be a witness to the act, Nigel's uncovering of clues at the crime scene pays double dividends: we think we know how and why the murderer staged the crime in this particular way, and yet Strangeways discovers multiple details that let him see through the subterfuge.

And although the doomed romance novelist and manipulator of lovers and colleagues is an unlikable figure, she is also a fully delineated character, one who manages to impact anyone in her orbit. This definition is in noted contrast to the unfortunate victim at the center of 1941's The Case of the Abominable Snowman; where that mystery was muted for me because Elizabeth Restorick was never really allowed to be understood as a character, Millicent Miles gives End of Chapter a weighted, impressive center. 

Miles' disaffected son Cyprian Gleed – such a Dickensian moniker! – is another well-observed and pitiable creation, a young man who disdains his mother and loathes the establishment to which she and other successful adults belong. There is a beautifully observed moment that, like a good writer or detective, uses the details of setting to inform characterization:

There were unwashed cups, plates and wine glasses everywhere; sheets of music on the floor; encyclopedia volumes on an elegant harpsichord in one corner; a dusty easel in another; a single ski and, rather oddly, a pair of boxing gloves hanging from a nail, in a third corner. An open door revealed the bedroom, an unmade bed with a woman's nightdress dangling from it, and a breakfast tray half concealed by a heap of clothes on the floor. These fragments he has shored against his ruin, thought Nigel, feeling a little sorry for Millicent Miles' son.

... Nigel gazed round the fantastic room again, so deeply occupied with his own thoughts that, when Cyprian Gleed asked, "Well, do you like my flat?" he uttered without premeditation what was in his mind:


"It looks like a museum of false starts."

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Only a few nominal disappointments are to be found within its pages, such as a noisily telegraphed murder attempt on our intrepid detective; otherwise, End of Chapter is a largely successful literary effort from a strong writer and poet who hasn't quite gotten bored with the process of mystery puzzle construction.

Reviews from Nick Fuller and The Puzzle Doctor are also online.


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Book Review: THE CASE OF THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN (1941) by Nicholas Blake

2/8/2020

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We start with the good (and in The Case of the Abominable Snowman, first published in 1941, the good is very good): the beginning and ending moments of this Nigel Strangeways story are striking and memorable. The American title The Corpse in the Snowman gives away the revelation of the first chapter, where two children watch from a bedroom window as melting snow uncovers a very human face under their seasonal sculpture. But it is the apparent suicide of a troubled woman upon which this snowbound manor house mystery revolves. In addition to the discovery of the body of poor Elizabeth Restorick in her bedroom, early eerie clues include a cat whose behavior goes haywire and a potentially supernatural appearance by the victim at the time of her death.

The ending, where Strangeways sets a trap for the killer and gets more of a reaction than he hoped for, is exciting and well staged by author Nicholas Blake. And the explanation offered that puts all of the collected puzzle pieces in place is both novel and rather unbelievable, even for the generally permissive world of detective fiction; I discuss these aspects a little later in the review. While the book begins and ends strongly, I found myself a little listless as author and investigator lay out the groundwork and do the heavy lifting. 

While Blake shapes and complicates his plot with his customary inventiveness and attention to detail, there is something that keeps me at a distance from the characters and, ultimately, from the thrill of the chase itself. Snowman's middle section, with its theories and interviews and evidence gathering, is technically successful, but I found it difficult to focus on and engage with it all. The group of suspects should be engaging, and each character has enough definition to fill his or her assigned role in the larger drama. All the same, there's an overriding feeling of chess-play at work, with figures moved around on the board (or biding their time on their square) simply for the game's sake, so it is difficult at times to feel invested in the story of people touched by tragedy.

This criticism may have its roots in Blake's handling of Elizabeth Restorick, the victim at the center of the story. The reader never really becomes acquainted with her as a personality, yet she makes an unforgettable introduction as a corpse, hanging from a beam, her body naked and her face painted. Then we learn (through Nigel) of her troubled adolescence and adult addictions, and she becomes the impetus for future murderous acts. All this should inspire an exemplary drama on the page that has the fatalistic propulsion of Macbeth, but the mystery stays academic and somewhat abstract. I'm also setting the standard high simply because Blake, the pen name for poet Cecil Day-Lewis, has delivered several excellent crime stories with strong characterization and engrossing puzzle plotting, including Thou Shell of Death (1936) and The Beast Must Die (1938).

By the time Strangeways arrives at the climax leading to his extraordinary solution, however, all torpor has been shaken off. And the author's tying up of all of his threads -- with more than a little hypothesizing about motives and mechanics of the characters by his detective -- lands another rather extreme effect: it is an innovative and bold solution that pushes the bounds of accepted reality for the reader.

I say this because at least two elements require a faith (or suspension of disbelief) that a certain character would act almost counterintuitively to what a typical person would do under similar circumstances. To analyze either predicament here would require spoilers, and the enjoyable surprise in the revelations for new readers is too delicate to destroy. And in vaudeville, there is a delightful maxim/warning for its audience: "You buy the premise, you buy the bit." If you can believe two characters in this story would choose an extreme road of action over a far more practical pathway to see justice done, then The Case of the Abominable Snowman provides one of the most unusual and original resolutions in all of Golden Age Detection fiction.


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One last detail: this is another example of a once-contemporary but now-historical crime novel that incorporates drug use and abuse by a character into the plot, and it paints the same curious, almost quaint, picture of the subject that modern readers often find in work from that era. Although talk of sidewalk "dope-peddlers" and "marijuana cigarettes" that "create erotic hallucinations" seems amusing today, I don't mean to minimize the power of drugs -- just look at our modern overreliance on prescription pills -- or the ravages of addiction.

Other blog reviewers have braved the snow and some have found a similar weathery mix of strengths and weakness with this book. Check out reviews from Nick at The Grandest Game in the World, Kate at crossexaminingcrime, and The Puzzle Doctor at In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel.
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