Category: Nicholas Blake

Book Review: THE SMILER WITH THE KNIFE (1939) by Nicholas Blake

7/23/2021

The Smiler with the Knife is the first and best of the three spy-themed thrillers Nicholas Blake presented as part of his Nigel Strangeways fair-play mystery series. The other stories to deal with espionage and great danger to Great Britain are 1954’s The Whisper in the Gloom and The Sad Variety published a decade after that. It is also the only one where Blake (the pen name for poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis) wrested the protagonist detective post from the cerebral Strangeways and gave it to another character. It is not Nigel but his wife Georgia Strangeways, celebrated explorer and adventurer, who rises to the occasion and saves England from being dominated by Fascist right-wing powers trying to shatter Parliament and control the country by a coup.

I initially read The Smiler with the Knife more than 15 years ago, but that one reading has always stuck with me. It is a successful book on all fronts, as great entertainment, as a propulsive exercise in episodic and through-arc suspense, and as an engaging character study of allies and enemies featuring Georgia at its center. In some areas it surpasses John Buchan’s cornerstone man-on-the-run spy thriller The 39 Steps (1915), as Blake makes sure to define the very high stakes of the game and underscore the very real possibility that Georgia could lose the battle against an alert, wide-reaching, and formidable opponent. By the way, the narrative from the first chapter and throughout the story assures the reader that the heroine’s success is an eventual fait accompli; as early as page 14, for example, we learn that

...while it was not reasonable to suppose that a notice from a Rural District Council could cause anyone much trouble — let alone alter the course of history, or that England might be saved by the cutting of a hedge -- yet so it turned out.

I wonder if the choice to narratively reassure readers of a triumphant English outcome was due to the uncertainty and unease surely felt around the globe in 1939. Blake/Day-Lewis was very much a political being, and it is notable that the insidious enemy of Smiler is not a bomb-throwing radical leftist but a populist conservative planning to harness the working man’s anger at an ineffective government as a way to gain power, not through democratic means but by an insurrection approved and encouraged by his enthusiastic base. The people might see their new self-appointed leader as a patriot and a hero – after all, he is doing all this for his country and the people, or so his propaganda will claim – but a Fascist dictator by any other name still smells of rot.

That said, The Smiler with the Knife works even better as a grand entertainment than as a political cautionary tale. For it is a story that pushes forward, one adventure following the next, with wonderfully assured pacing and plotting. Nigel and Georgia Strangeways are first pulled into the mystery after finding a rather ordinary cameo locket along the hedgerow of their house in the country. An oddly acting neighbor arrives to claim it, and the photo of the middle-aged woman inside the locket proves the unlikely catalyst that soon has Georgia investigating a secret society called The English Banner.

Smiler is fashioned so that every chapter has a curious new puzzle to solve or piece of the conspiracy to collect, and chapter titles prove both accurate (if abstract) and delightfully enticing: “The Episode of the Clock-Golf Course”, “The Episode of the Nottingham Earthquake”. Resourceful, instinctive, and smart, Georgia Strangeways covers a great deal of ground figuratively and literally as she first infiltrates the inner circle of the powerful cabal and then must escape with what she knows. But the E.B.’s webs stretch far, and no one can truly be trusted until she reunites with Nigel and Sir John Strangeways, the latter in his capacity as head of C Branch at Scotland Yard.

Characterization is particularly good in this adventure, and Blake allows some of the heroes and villains that Georgia encounters to make a strong impression on her and the reader. As the suspected leader of the government uprising – the secret society is keeping both plans and players a mystery from the public until the time to act – the dangerously soft-spoken Chilton Canteloe makes a worthy target of investigation, while the charming cricketer Peter Braithwaite becomes one of Georgia’s few trusted confidantes, demonstrating his courage and duty to country to the end. Smiler can also claim to be one of those rare thrillers that is genuinely page-turning. If, like Georgia, the reader gets fully immersed into the tale, the conclusion will likely be a race to the finish for all involved.

The prolific GAD genre bloggers Kate and Nick also have reviews of The Smiler with the Knife. Check out crossexaminingcrime and The Grandest Game in the World.

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Book Review: MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1940) by Nicholas Blake

4/26/2021

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Wonderland is a holiday camp promising fun and relaxation for the whole family: organized sports and leisure activities abound, and there are multiple opportunities to socialize and make new friends. Hundreds of visitors descend on the camp each season, and that means the potential for hundreds of suspects if crimes should occur. And crimes – or at least unpleasant incidents – soon begin to happen. Some visitors are pulled underwater while bathing in the sea; tennis balls are covered in treacle; and under cover of night a pet dog is poisoned and dies. Camp managers Teddy and Mortimer Wise begin to wonder whether the escalating pranks might be leading up to a serious attack on a person, and the vacationing visitors’ response to the work of the self-proclaimed “Mad Hatter” soon moves from curiosity to unease as they wonder the same thing.

Enter private consultant Nigel Strangeways (fairly late in the game, in Chapter 10 of 18) to investigate. Malice in Wonderland, which has also been variously published as The Summer Camp Mystery (the U.S. title), Malice with Murder, and Murder with Malice, is to me an underrated entry in Cecil Day-Lewis’ enjoyable detective series. Strangeways isn’t the only one to put in a delayed appearance; there is a murder in this story, but it only appears near the novel’s climax, and killer and motive are soon identified. Instead, Malice’s pleasures lie not solely with the puzzle but with its agreeable setting, tone, and characters.

While Blake was prone to becoming overly psychological and heavy-handed with characterization in his final Strangeways stories, like The Worm of Death (1961) or The Morning after Death (1966), he serves up a winning cast here. The staff at Wonderland are nicely delineated, whether between the slightly past-his-prime athlete Teddy Wise and his stuffier, more bureaucratic brother Mortimer or in describing the latter’s assistant, a resourceful and attractive young woman named Esmeralda Jones. Front and center amongst the holiday-makers are James Thistlethwaite, a fussy professional tailor who fancies himself a keen observer of people and places (and who may be right), and his energetic daughter Sally.

Sally quickly strikes up an acquaintance with a reserved young man named Paul Perry, and it is their flirtatious, hot-and-cold relationship that is both endearing and authentic. Both of these romantic leads – so often an unwanted and unconvincing element in mystery fiction – are deftly drawn, and it is their contradictions of personality that Blake gets so perceptively right. The two are (like so many young people attracted to each other) alternately cynical and sincere, defensive yet vulnerable, often generous one moment, selfish the next. In Paul and Sally, the author lets the reader feel genuine pathos for the couple and their situation, especially as it appears that Paul is Harboring a Secret and may be more involved in the Mad Hatter madness than he will admit.

U.S. Title: The Summer Camp Mystery

A tone that is often humorous with its details and dialogue, coupled with an intriguing outdoor setting that provides an idyll while a war rages around the world, adds to the book’s enjoyable qualities. And although we are largely focused on the “malice” of malevolent practical jokes instead of a murder investigation, Blake (through his anonymous anarchist) keeps the reader engaged with a busy run of incidents that often just evoke more questions: was a camper’s blistered fingers after a scavenger hunt a result of mustard gas or wild parsley? And if this was another Mad Hatter stunt, then does that incriminate the staff that had organized the search? What of the grudge-holding old hermit living on the outskirts of the camp? And is meek visitor Albert Morley really as bad a shot as he demonstrates at the shooting gallery? The question needs to be considered when a bullet nicks Teddy Wise’s ear as he stands on a balcony, and Albert emerges from the woods below.

For those wanting to take a lively holiday and experience the merry mischief vicariously, Malice in Wonderland is available in print and eBook editions from Agora Books. Les at Classic Mysteries and Margaret at BooksPlease have also posted reviews of this title.

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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.

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.

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: THE SMILER WITH THE KNIFE (1939) by Nicholas Blake

Book Review: MALICE IN WONDERLAND (1940) by Nicholas Blake

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

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

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