Category: Nicholas Blake

Book Review: MINUTE FOR MURDER (1947) by Nicholas Blake

1/26/2022

Until a recent reading remedied it, I had only read Minute for Murder once years and years ago, but the attributes of this mystery’s clever plotting and balanced structure had stayed with me. True, I could no longer recall the details, but the cleanness and unity of the story impressed me: what I remembered was a murder mystery where the detective drained the pool of suspects from six people to four to three, until just two remained to face each other in a deadly standoff. Revisiting the tale, I found that these satisfying elements were still there, and that the book remains (for me) one of the author’s best crime stories.

Knowing that the 16 detective novels featuring Nigel Strangeways were penned by British poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis as a way to generate income, I’m always more surprised than I should be that the author crafted his mysteries with such careful attention to detail and fair-play vigor. His best puzzle plots are as devious and deliberate as anything Agatha Christie would create, filled with notably individual and occasionally sensational crime scenarios and employing a cast of characters built to keep armchair sleuths guessing as the chapters flash by.

In short, the best mysteries published under the name Nicholas Blake play the game as spiritedly and as soundly as anything in Golden Age detective fiction. Day-Lewis wasn’t cynically churning out books within a popular, populist genre just to collect a paycheck; he seems genuinely interested in playing the game, using all his skills and talents to spin his stories and beguile his readers. Minute for Murder, with its intriguing office setting, colorful cast, tactile clues, and active logic intermixed, is an excellent example of the author’s abilities.

We are in the days following the allied victory in Europe, and the Ministry of Morale where Strangeways works will be dissolving soon. He has come to know his wartime colleagues well, and the Visual Propaganda Division is expecting a visit from Charles Kennington, a chatty extrovert who managed to ensnare a top Nazi official while fighting abroad. Charles brings a grim souvenir back with him and passes it around at the reunion party: an intact cyanide capsule to be hidden in a spy’s mouth and used in case of capture. Cups of coffee are passed around, and beautiful secretary Nita Prince chokes and dies after a fateful sip. The capsule can’t be found after a search, and Nigel worries that the young woman’s death may only be the beginning of a dangerous crime spree.

He is soon proven right: another office worker is stabbed while working late and a deliberate blaze destroys a photograph room containing negatives of thousands of classified pictures. As the criminal acts multiply, Strangeways must find answers to several key questions. Was the secretary the intended victim or was the poison meant for another person at the party? Was the fire meant to destroy incriminating evidence, and if so, what? And how to untangle the relationships of people connected to Nita Prince: the pretty secretary was having an affair with department director Jimmy Lake, yet the man is married to Alice Kennington, Charles’s sister. Ministry copy writer Brian Ingle was also in love with Nita, but he knew that she would never break with Jimmy, even if Jimmy could ultimately never leave Alice for her...

There are many incidents and events, and many plots and subplots, in Minute for Murder. While this creates a busy (and at times breathless) story, it never becomes overcomplicated or spins out of control. Some of this management is due to the aforementioned logic of it all – when a new action appears, it is handily examined and placed into context by the author through his detective. In that regard, Day-Lewis is an excellent organizer and presenter; it is not difficult to imagine how effective he was in his real-life wartime position as publications editor within the Ministry of Information. That experience provided the background that he utilizes so well here, creating a fictional Ministry of Morale to stage his story of murder. (“The government department in which the action of this book takes place never did, or could, exist,” writes Blake in an introductory disclaimer. He adds amusingly, “Whereas every disagreeable, incompetent, flagitious or homicidal type in it is a figment of my imagination, all the charming, efficient and noble characters are drawn straight from life.”)

The winnowing of viable suspects from many to few to one, a trait mentioned at the top, still occurs, even if it’s not quite as geometrically ordered as I remembered it. This is also one of the best middle-period Blake books, of kindred spirit with End of Chapter (1957) and The Widow’s Cruise (1959), later entries that show the author’s ongoing interest in crafting engaging and viable fair-play puzzle stories. Among frequent readers and reviewers of classic mystery fiction, Minute for Murder has a reputation as a very good, if not stellar, series entry. I think it still satisfies and plays the game with admirable success.

Additional reviews can be found from Tracy at Bitter Tea and Mystery and Nick at The Grandest Game in the World.

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Book Review: THE WIDOW'S CRUISE (1959) by Nicholas Blake

9/27/2021

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Poet and scholar Cecil Day-Lewis may have penned the detective novels featuring Nigel Strangeways to bring in some money (as has been stated), but he nevertheless plays the game asked of his chosen genre with energy, wit, and careful, clever strategy. I am continually impressed just how strong so many of the mysteries Day-Lewis published under his Nicholas Blake pseudonym are: throughout, the author shows inspired variation in crime fiction plotting and character building. The surprise isn’t that the United Kingdom’s eventual Poet Laureate could write engaging prose and plot intricate fair-play puzzles of bluff and double-bluff; it’s that he has put so much heart into the writing and seems to enjoy crafting the classically structured mystery tales he tells.

Published well after detective fiction’s Golden Age, The Widow’s Cruise from 1959 is still very much a product of that halcyon time. For one, it is a fair-play puzzle to a fault. Readers will likely reach the solution (or at least half of it) precisely because the author salts the clues so liberally and logically. This doesn’t really detract from Cruise’s enjoyable journey, however. Blake populates this story with a typically colorful and well-defined cast of characters, including a glad-handing blackmailer, two grudge-bearing teenagers, a pensive academic, a lustful Greek cruise manager, and two sisters – one a radiant beauty, the other a plain ex-schoolmistress recovering from a nervous breakdown – into whose orbit Strangeways and the other passengers are pulled.

Nigel and his girlfriend Clare Massenger are sailing on the Menelaos, a cruise ship touring the Greek islands. It is interesting to note that Blake’s Greece is tonally quite different in contrast to that offered by mystery writing peer Gladys Mitchell. The Greek terrain trod in Mitchell’s 1937 mystery Come Away, Death is dry, sun-baked, dusty, and listless: a hard ground where snakes and insects (and the reptilian Mrs. Bradley) can thrive. The landscape Blake offers is more tourist-friendly, with an emphasis not so much on sun but on water. Indeed, the waters on this Cruise are decidedly dangerous: one victim’s body is found drowned in the sea, while another person meets her fate in the ship’s swimming pool.

If The Widow’s Cruise falls short of the best Strangeways mystery stories, it is still a smart and very readable later entry in the series. And there is much to admire, from the clever use of character psychology woven into the solution and the killer’s revelation of guilt to the tale’s neat Aristotelian (i.e., Greek) unity: the story begins as the Menelaos starts its cruise and Nigel unmasks the murderer just as the ship finishes its fateful voyage and prepares to dock once more. That all-suspects-gathered climax is itself an entertaining parody of the ones Day-Lewis admired so much in Agatha Christie’s fiction. Strangeways uses the first officer’s cabin to build up and tear down a case against each suspect, with said suspects questioning both his authority – he is only an uncredentialled surrogate for the police, after all – and his explanations. Yet the detective has his eye on the larger game being played, and times his accusations for maximum effect.

The Widow’s Cruise is an enjoyable and bright journey with much to see and appreciate along the way. I’m grateful the poet and scholar found it worthwhile to conceive and craft 16 Nigel Strangeways detective stories as he chased his other literary pursuits. His commitment to the fair-play puzzle genre is commendable, and the uniform quality of these tales makes me think he took his genre writing seriously while having great fun with each book's formation and follow-through.

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

7/23/2021

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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: MINUTE FOR MURDER (1947) by Nicholas Blake

Book Review: THE WIDOW'S CRUISE (1959) by Nicholas Blake

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

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

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