THE POET'S WAY OF DETECTION
by Nicholas Fuller

‘As a writer of detective fiction, Nicholas Blake was an innovator of style rather than form. He wrote within the accepted contemporary conventions of the genre: a vigorous and exciting narrative, a credible and tantalising mystery capable of solution by ratiocination and an amateur detective who combines defining eccentricities with successful detection…

‘[ The Beast Must Die ] has many of the conventions of its age: the literary quotations and allusions which gave the contemporary reader the gratifying if slightly snobbish pride of recognition; the methodical exposition in writing by the detective of the case against each of the suspects…; the cosy co-operation between the talented amateur and the professional police; the cunning manipulation of the reader by the shifting of suspicion between a limited group of suspects; and a solution which is a genuine surprise. But the novel is more than a well-crafted example of its age. Here, in addition to elegant writing and a poet's eye, we have moral passion, genuine pain – particularly the pain of bereavement – and a recognition that murder, the unique crime, is concerned as much with the mystery of the human heart as it is with material clues.'

- PD James, introduction to The Beast Must Die (London: Pan Books, 1999)

Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate) was, as one would expect, both a superb writer and a superb detective writer. With Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham, he was one of the writers most responsible for continuing the work started by Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L Sayers, and turning the detective story into the detective novel, with an emphasis on characterisation and psychology. He is unquestionably the darkest and most profoundly incisive of those writers, and in his awareness of and sympathy for human weakness, and concern with guilt and innocence, in many ways anticipates PD James.

Like James and Allingham, many of his books are an insider's look at institutions he knew well: public schools ( A Question of Proof , 1935), the civil service in WWII ( Minute for Murder , 1947), and the publishing industry ( End of Chapter , 1957). All of his characters, whether sympathetic or not, are individuals, with a great capacity both for good or evil. Because of his interest in the psychological and social pressures which lead people to commit murder, the culprit in several books is obvious before the end, but this does not detract from the interest of the book as a novel. Instead, his novels are highly rereadable for that very reason.

As a detective writer, Blake was strongly influenced by Agatha Christie. The mysteries are always solidly constructed, with a handful of suspects, all with strong motives, misleading clues, and fake alibis. The detective in many of his novels is Nigel Strangeways, an Oxbridge-educated professional detective, halfway between the professional sleuth and the amateur. He works closely with Inspectors Blount and Wright of Scotland Yard, and meets the two women in his life during his investigations: his wife, explorer Georgia Cavendish, in Thou Shell of Death (1936), and, after her death in the Blitz, his mistress, sculptress Clare Massinger, in another case, The Whisper in the Gloom (1954). He also becomes personally involved in many of his cases, often because he knows the suspects as friends, and on several occasions, when his sympathies are with the murderer, helps him to escape or to commit suicide.

Nigel first appears in A Question of Proof (1935). This is easily one of the best school detective novels, up there with classics like Mitchell's Tom Brown's Body , Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding , and Gilbert's Night of the Twelfth . The first victim is an obnoxiously precocious schoolboy, who is strangled in a haystack, and the main suspect is Michael Evans, a teacher at the school, who is having an affair with the headmaster's wife, and who calls in his friend Nigel to clear him. Already, Blake is a highly accomplished writer. Although almost all the characters are unpleasant, they are all well drawn, particularly the murderer, whose motive is unusual but convincing. His identity is at once inevitable and surprising, as it should be, and the murders are both recklessly and ingeniously committed, the last being praised by Carr for its Chestertonian brilliance. In short, this is an ideal detective novel, with a memorable setting, convincing characters, and clever plot. A highly auspicious debut.

Blake's next novel, Thou Shell of Death (1936), is a brilliant pastiche of the traditional mystery, complete with snow-bound country house, anonymous death threats that could have been sent by any of the unpleasant suspects, and a murder disguised as suicide. The characters, as always, are interesting, particularly the victim, war hero Fergus O'Brien (based on TE Lawrence of Arabia), and his mistress, woman explorer Georgia Cavendish, whom Nigel marries. The plot is brilliant, and, like Innes, is based on literature (Tourneur's Revenger's Tragedy , which has one of the best opening speeches in drama). The method used to dispatch Knott-Sloman really is clever, and the murderer's identity, coming as it does after a convincing false solution, is a whopping surprise.

There's Trouble Brewing (1937) is longer and heavier than the first two, with more detection than characterisation, and more political commentary. The setting is a brewery (hence the title) under the control of the tyrannical Eustace Bunnett, whose skeleton is found in a copper (an effectively macabre scene), and whose mismanagement lets Blake discuss the evils of business and the need for Socialism (hurrah for a politically aware detective writer other than the Coles!). It does drag a bit, though. There's a lot of investigation into alibis and serial interviewing of suspects, and so the book feels more like a conventional 1930s detective story. The murderer is also one of Blake's most obvious culprits, although the plot is ingenious (better in The Widow's Cruise ). The false teeth clue is similar to Sayers's “In the Teeth of the Evidence” and several Freeman stories.

Blake's next novel, The Beast Must Die (1938), is his best-known, but not his best, work. It's apparently a semi-inverted story: the first half is the diary of Frank Cairnes, a detective writer, who is going to kill the man who ran over his son. (This is based on an experience that happened to Day-Lewis.) The ‘beast' is the truly loathsome, George Rattery, a garage owner and domestic tyrant, who is poisoned with strychnine. The second half concerns Nigel's investigation and attempts to clear Cairnes. Although the characterisation is very good (Rattery and his mother are genuinely nasty, and his tormented wife, neurotic yet intelligent son, and ‘fast' but intelligent and good-natured sister-in-law are all convincing), and the moral debate about justifiable murder and the slaying of a ‘beast' (similar to Berkeley's argument in Jumping Jenny and Trial and Error ) intriguing, the book really needs to have been longer, since the second half is too slight to be powerful. As a detective story, it's not quite so successful, because the plot is in some ways a reworking of Henry Wade's disappointing Mist on the Saltings and Berkeley 's Second Shot.

With his next novel, The Smiler with the Knife (1939), Blake dramatically changes pace. This is a World War Two thriller, rather than a detective story, with Nigel's wife Georgia in the main role, rather like Emma Peel. It's obviously inspired by John Buchan's Thirty-nine Steps , with Nigel and Georgia discovering a conspiracy by accident, Georgia going undercover to discover the truth, and then being chased across country by the villains. The story is thoroughly entertaining, but rather episodic. The Father Christmas and Radiance Girls scenes are both excellent; the Flemingesque tortures suitably ghastly; and Georgia 's confrontation of the villain at the end dramatic and tense.

The book is also a warning against right-wing politics, showing how easy it is for a dictator to rise to power in a civilised, law-abiding country, by repeating the need to protect the country against an amorphous threat and appealing to the basest instincts of patriotism – a warning as relevant in the time of Hitler and Mussolini as it is in the era of George W Bush and John Howard.

Malice in Wonderland (1940), which followed, is a rather weird, disappointing, detective story without any crime to speak of. The setting is a holiday camp where Mass Observer hero Paul Perry watches the British middle classes at play, wins the daughter of Dickensian tailor Mr. Thistlethwaite, and proves his manhood. The “crimes” are a series of outrages and bizarre practical jokes, similar to Sayers's Gaudy Night or Innes's Stop Press . Without the scope of those two works, the plot feels very insignificant. There are a couple of murders, but they take place near the end, and are irrelevant. Nigel doesn't appear until halfway through (and Georgia isn't even mentioned), and seems more like Ellery Queen with his logic and the trap he sets for the villains (c.f. “The Mad Tea Party” in The Adventures of EQ ) than the sympathetic, introspective character who is one of the most likeable detectives.

Fortunately, the next book, The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941), is one of Blake's two or three best.

Like Thou Shell of Death , Blake deliberately uses the ultra-traditional country house mystery (complete with ‘a trollop, an Anglo-Saxon squire, an American wife, a rolling stone, a fribble, and a quack') to tell an unconventional story. Although it starts off quite lightly, almost like an Innes pastiche, with Nigel and Georgia (her last appearance, unfortunately) called in to discover why the family cat has been behaving so erratically, it develops into one of his darkest detective novels. The title refers both to the place in which the second body is found (right at the start of the book, but we're not told whose until very near the end), and to the most horrifying and convincing embodiment of evil in Blake's works, a drug dealer and blackmailer who ‘revels in evil…whose very existence seems to depend upon the power to hurt or degrade others'. Throughout, the plot is engrossing, characterisation is absolutely superb, and the psychology of the first victim and the murderer, and the morality of the last crime, are all penetrating. Absolutely superb.

Sadly, this is the last appearance of Georgia Strangeways, who is killed in the Blitz.

On his next appearance, in Minute for Murder (1947), Nigel is a much sadder, older man. The book itself is one of the most Jamesian of Blake's novels. It is set in the Ministry of Morale during WWII, making it one of the novels involving an insider's look at an institution (see A Question of Proof and End of Chapter ), and is the first book where Nigel (now, alas, a widower) is really personally involved with all the suspects, since he is head of the Editorial Unit of the Visual Propaganda Division. The characterisation of the director, his frigid wife, her ghastly brother, and his passionate secretary / mistress (poisoned with cyanide, in front of half a dozen people), is masterly, and, as often in Blake, the adulterous relationship is sympathetically treated. The mystery, though, is not as strong as other Blake books. The murderer is reasonably easy to spot, and the method is quite risky.

Head of a Traveller (1949) is Blake's masterpiece: a detective story, a character-driven tragedy, and an exploration of the poetic process.

When a headless corpse is found floating down the Thames outside Plash Meadow, Oxfordshire home of the poet Robert Seaton, Nigel and Superintendent Blount investigate. Nigel is personally involved as a friend of the Seatons, and, conscious of his ambiguous position, at once a traitor to the Seatons and trying to protect them from the police, discovers the truth, almost against his will. He is faced at the end with a superb moral quandary, a deliberately disturbing open-ended conclusion (an approach first used, much less effectively, by Berkeley in Not to Be Taken ). As always with Blake, the book is an accomplished detective story, with misleading clues (including several bizarre appearances of heads) and a surprising solution.

The book is also Day-Lewis's most personal exploration in the Blake books of writing poetry. Robert Seaton has suffered from writer's block for the last decade, and starts writing again under the stimulus of the murder. Day-Lewis comments on the poetic catalyst, the germination of the idea and its final fruition as a poem.

The Dreadful Hollow (1953) is an entertaining village mystery – good by most writers' standards, but only average by Blake's. As one would expect, Blake is competent with such stock ingredients as the quietly idyllic village troubled by a poison pen-writer, the arrogant financier pushed into a quarry, and characters like the wheelchair-bound beauty, her highly-strung sister, the vicar, and two eccentric brothers. Only the Dickensian Daniel Durdle, leading light of the Plymouth Brethren, is original. Unsurprisingly, there isn't as much psychological penetration or plotting ingenuity as usual. Nigel is hired by the victim to find the poison-pen writer, and his detection is competent but unexciting, mainly involving timetables and alibis, and a few more original clues like an MR Jamesian nightmare and Tennyson's “Maud”. The murderer is pretty obvious (one of the oldest tricks in the book), and so both Nigel and Supt Blount seem pretty slow. The final chapter, which alternates between Nigel's logical solution and a mob driving the murderer to death, is excellent.

The Whisper in the Gloom (1954) is a Hitchcockian thriller, in which Nigel meets his mistress, sculptress Clare Massinger.

Blake's next work, A Tangled Web (1956), is a crime novel, rather than a detective novel, and without Nigel, for a change. Although a lot of critics, including Symons, like it, it's one of the worst Blakes.

It's a psychological study of the innocent (or terminally stupid) Daisy Bland, who falls in love with a burglar, Hugo Chesterman, who kills someone while committing a crime, and is betrayed to the police by his “best friend”, who manipulates Daisy into giving the damning evidence. The plot isn't particularly exciting, and a lot of the psychology is unconvincing. Hugo's criminal tendencies are the result of his hatred for his father, which he transfers to the ultimate father-figure of society. He is also a claustrophobe, perhaps the result of ‘some remote, buried memory of the womb and the struggle for birth'. Similarly, the traitor, the novel's main villain, is impotent, which makes him resentful and psychopathic. Not as good as Ruth Rendell, at all.

Worryingly, Blake seems to be channelling (or parodying?) DH Lawrence. For instance:

He gazed at her a moment across the little room. With a rush of excitement and terror, she saw his dark face change. His eyes, piercing bright, seemed to pin her against the wall where she stood. She felt impaled, powerless, yet wildly acquiescent. He was a stranger, he was a hawk hovering to swoop down upon her. They cam together as if whirled by a clap of wind out of a cloudless sky. She was naked, staring up at him transfixed, an animal in a snare shamming dead under the poacher's hands, then quivering and struggling. But the pain was good, the surrender and fierce abjection were wonderful; and presently she heard him say, ‘There's no one like you, my love.' […] They were upstairs again: and this time Daisy came into full possession of her womanhood. She could not have enough of him. ‘Master! Master!' her peasant blood cried out. She went to sleep, still sobbing with pleasure, a scent of wallflowers from the window-boxes blowing into the room.

Fortunately, Nigel returns in End of Chapter (1957), which is set in the publishing industry, and draws on Day-Lewis's experiences as director and senior editor of Chatto & Windus. The plot is straightforward, if rather workmanlike: the proof copy of a book of memoirs is tampered with by person or persons unknown, and a bitchy popular novelist has her throat cut. While Inspector Wright investigates the physical clues (alibis and keys), Nigel, who knows some of the people, including a poet similar to Robert Seaton in Head of a Traveller, investigates their pasts and psychology, and nearly gets murdered for his pains. The murderer is one of Blake's more obvious culprits, and his motive is similar to The Beast Must Die .

PD James arguably reworked the plot in Original Sin .

A Penknife in My Heart (1958) is a non-series crime novel with the same plot as Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train .

The Widow's Cruise (1959), which is set on a cruise around Greece , is easily the most straightforwardly entertaining book since Thou Shell of Death , and feels rather like a first-class Christie . Nigel is in relaxed holiday mood, without any sign of angst, as he and Clare Massinger investigate the murders of a horrible frump and the obnoxious daughter of a pair of lay-analysts. Lots of good local colour; interesting suspects, including the frump's glamorous sister, a priggish youth with calf-love, and his strong-willed sister; plenty of skulduggery and mystifying events; and excellent detection. Although the solution is a variation on There's Trouble Brewing and (according to some critics) Brand 's Tour de Force (arguably a reworking of Blake's book, and of Christie's short story “The Companion” in The Thirteen Problems ), it is a brilliant surprise, and superbly clued. Absolutely delightful from start to finish.

The Worm of Death (1961) is a late, rather mournful, story, set near Day-Lewis's own Greenwich home, and which feels rather like a James. It's a straightforward family murder: Dr. Piers Loudron is found with his wrists cut in the Thames , murder clumsily disguised as suicide, and suspicion falls on his family. Characterisation is good, if slightly hackneyed – we've met the vamp, the lower-class fiancé, the siblings who hate each other and those who protect each other in Blake's books before, but they're still well drawn. Solid detection, and Nigel is, as usual, more interested in psychology and literature than material clues. The book is, in some ways, a reworking of Christie's Hercule Poirot's Christmas , and the murderer is pretty obvious. The murder is almost as busy as the murder of Rasputin, with A drugging the victim, B killing him, and C removing the body, all independently of each other.

Nigel is missing again from The Deadly Joker (1963), which is in some ways a reworking of The Dreadful Hollow. The book is set in a Dorset village, where accidental detective and narrator Dr. John Waterson lives, and the crimes are a series of practical jokes ranging from the mischievous to the nasty, and which culminate in murder. The crimes build up suitable tension, and the murder is not committed until near the end, and the identity of the victim is not obvious. As always, characterisation is excellent, with the story developing naturally through the characters, but there is less detection than in the Strangeways books, because Dr. Waterson is an amateur and a slightly unwilling one, although he is in some ways an older version of Nigel. The solution is based on some nicely obscure clues (‘a telephone, a Biblical quotation, and a bee'), and the murderer is one we have seen several times already.

Nigel returns in The Sad Variety (1964), a Cold War thriller, with the Communists unequivocally the baddies, unlike The Smiler with the Knife , where the threat comes from the far right. The plot is pretty boring: Russian Communists kidnap the daughter of a nuclear physicist from a snow-bound inn, and hold her hostage. Lucy Wrayling, the heroine, is a good child heroine, suitably courageous and strong-willed, while also being convincing as a child. The ‘mystery' is which guest at the hotel helped the Communists kidnap Lucy, a problem which Nigel solves without much difficulty. Not much tension, and pretty bland.

Nigel's last appearance is in The Morning After Death (1966), set in an American university. Although the setting is interesting, the plot is pretty familiar: an unpleasant, power-hungry tyrant is killed, probably by one of his brothers. The murderer is pretty obvious, and the plot isn't very tight – lots of digressions, on everything from the poems of Emily Dickinson (hence the title) to American cultural mores (driving on the wrong side of the road, fast food waitresses, etc). There's also a lot more sex, which makes both Blake and Nigel (who bows out as a semi-adulterer) come across as dirty old men.

Blake's last work, The Private Wound (1968), is a semi-autobiographical novel, set in Ireland in 1939.

Dominic Eyre, a ‘West Britisher' novelist, moves to Ireland to write a book, has a torrid affair with the nymphomaniac Harriet, wife of war hero Flurry, and becomes a suspect when she is murdered. Eyre, an Anglo-Irish novelist and clergyman's son, is obviously Day-Lewis himself, and Thou Shell of Death suggests that Blake was in Ireland in the mid-30s. Excellent West Irish setting – very rural and poor, dominated by Irish Catholic Church and teeming with political troublemakers and agitators in the lead-up to WWII. The plot involves many of Blake's favourite themes (bad blood between brothers, an almost accidental murder, a sympathetic murder and unsympathetic / morally dubious victim, a femme fatale, and a revenge murder), but, because of the treatment of adultery and passion, is extremely powerful. The murderer is not one of the main suspects, but is nevertheless inevitable, and the ending is excellent.

Title from Two Gentlemen of Verona , which is partly about love / lust leading to the betrayal of a friend. (It also has that mind-boggling scene where Valentine proposes to hand over his fiancée to Proteus, who has just tried to rape her, because friendship comes before self-interested sexual love – similar to the novel's triangle.) Flurry is also called ‘a soldier whose occupation is gone', which obviously echoes Othello, married to a much younger wife, whom he suspects of adultery.