A headless corpse, an irascible poet whose reputation is on the decline and an unhappy family, all make for a classic crime read in the ninth book in the Nigel Strangeways series
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis,
who was born in County Laois, Ireland in 1904. After his mother
died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending
summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at
Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he
graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to
supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his
first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake
went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of
which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry
collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in
the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the
Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he
joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He
was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of
his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
Another grade A detective story
*New York Herald Tribune*
The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in
English detective fiction
*Elizabeth Bowen*
His plots are ingenious
*Times Literary Supplement*
A master of detective fiction
*Daily Telegraph*
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