Tag: Nigel Strangeways

Two more Nicholas Blake mysteries: Head of a Traveller and The Dreadful Hollow

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After reading my first Nicholas Blake novel last year, I knew I wanted to read more. Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of the poet Cecil Day-Lewis and the name under which his series of Nigel Strangeways mysteries was published. With plenty to choose from (sixteen in the series in total) I found myself picking up two in quick succession, so I am writing about both of them here.

Head of a Traveller (published in 1949) is the ninth in the series. At the beginning of the book, private investigator Nigel Strangeways is staying with a friend in Oxfordshire and is introduced to the poet Robert Seaton, who lives at the nearby estate of Plash Meadows with his wife and two children. Nigel is enchanted by their beautiful house and intrigued to hear the history of how it came to be in Robert’s possession. A few months later he is summoned back to Plash Meadows under less happy circumstances: a headless body has been found in the river just upstream from the Seatons’ house. Superintendent Blount has been called in to investigate and Nigel, who has worked with Blount before, decides to make some unofficial enquiries of his own.

This is a complex mystery with a surprisingly simple solution. My first assumptions proved to be right, but I was misled by discussions of alibis and timescales, mistaken identities and who could be protecting whom. I enjoyed following the investigations of Nigel and Blount, who have a great partnership and complement each other perfectly, but they were certainly making things more complicated than they needed to be!

Bearing in mind that this is a book from the 1940s, there are some attitudes which could be offensive to modern day readers, particularly surrounding the character of Finny Black, who is a dwarf, and also regarding the rape of another character ten years earlier. These views are not at all uncommon in books from this era, but are still a little bit uncomfortable to read. Overall, though, I enjoyed this book – not as much as The Corpse in the Snowman, but it still kept me entertained for a while. And as a poet himself, Nicholas Blake writes convincingly about Robert Seaton and his work, and has some interesting thoughts to share.

Now, The Dreadful Hollow, which was first published in 1953. I’ve had a terrible time with that title…I keep wanting to call it The Deathly Hallows, although there’s nothing remotely Harry Potter-ish about the book! The title is actually taken from a poem by Tennyson (“I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood”). Anyway, this is the tenth book in the Nigel Strangeways series and in this one, Nigel is commissioned by the financier Sir Archibald Blick to investigate a number of anonymous letters received by the residents of Prior’s Umborne, a small village in Dorset. On his arrival, Nigel is quickly able to identify some possible suspects: Blick’s two sons, the eccentric, reclusive Stanford and the serious, hardworking Charles; Rosebay Chantmerle and her sister Celandine, who has been confined to a wheelchair for many years; and the sinister, religiously obsessed Daniel Durdle.

It doesn’t take Nigel long to solve the mystery of the poison pen letters – or to think that he has, anyway – but everything is thrown into doubt again when a man’s dead body is found in the quarry. Are the murderer and the letter writer the same person or are these two separate crimes?

Again, this is a very complicated mystery and I needed to concentrate to follow Nigel’s deductions and to keep the sequence of events straight in my mind. I thought it was easy to spot the culprit (or culprits, as I’m not saying whether there were one, two or more of them) but the interest is in watching Nigel – and Blount, who arrives in Prior’s Umborne after the murder is committed – try to gather the evidence to prove it. This is my least favourite of the Strangeways novels I’ve read so far, though, and that’s partly because I found the characters in this one so unlikeable. It’s quite normal for a crime novel to have some unlikeable characters, of course, but I really did think the Blicks, the Chantmerles and the Durdles were all particularly unpleasant!

The final chapter is excellent with the tension building as the story moves towards a dramatic conclusion and this helps to make up for the novel’s weaker points. Although I didn’t like either of these books as much as the first Strangeways mystery I read, I think I’ll probably read more of them at some point.

The Corpse in the Snowman by Nicholas Blake

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Nicholas Blake was a pseudonym of the Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis under which he wrote a series of mystery novels featuring the private investigator Nigel Strangeways. It seems there are sixteen in the series, published between 1935 and 1966, which is good news for me as The Corpse in the Snowman is my first and I enjoyed it so much I will certainly be reading more of them!

This book is set in winter, as you will have guessed from the title – and yes, there is a snowman and yes, there’s a dead body hidden inside it. We know this from the very first chapter, but what we don’t know is whose body it is and how it has come to be in such a strange and macabre hiding place. To find out what is going on, we have to go back several weeks to the moment earlier in the winter when Nigel and Georgia Strangeways arrive at Easterham Manor in Essex, home of the Restorick family. They have been invited by Clarissa Cavendish, an elderly cousin of Georgia’s who lives on the estate and who has become convinced that there is something badly wrong at the Manor.

Clarissa’s fears are proved correct when, the day after the Strangeways’ arrival, the beautiful Elizabeth Restorick is found dead in her bedroom. It looks like a suicide, but Nigel is sure it is murder – and with a large party of guests gathered at Easterham for the festive season, there are plenty of suspects to choose from.

All the elements of a classic mystery novel are here – a country house cut off by snow; a locked room murder; an amateur detective working alongside the local police; family secrets, clues and red herrings – but a lot of attention is also given to themes such as drugs and drug addiction (with some interesting insights into the attitudes of the time). Published in 1941, the war is in the background but doesn’t really have any influence on the story; it’s set in those early days of the war when not much seemed to be happening and apart from a reference to blackout curtains and Nigel’s complaint at having to travel to Essex in wartime on an old woman’s whim, it is barely mentioned at all.

Although Nigel Strangeways is very ordinary as far as literary detectives go (there’s nothing to make him stand out amongst the Poirots, Campions and Wimseys of the genre), I did like him and will be happy to spend more time in his company. I was intrigued by mentions of his wife Georgia’s past career as an explorer; she doesn’t have a very big part to play in the novel, but I enjoyed what we do see of her. As for the other characters, there are a good variety of them within the Restorick household, ranging from an author who is in love with Elizabeth to a doctor whose speciality is ‘nervous disorders’ in women. I particularly loved Clarissa Cavendish, who is obsessed with the Georgian period and speaks of it as ‘in my day’ as if she had actually been alive at the time.

I am so pleased to have discovered Nicholas Blake and I’m sure I’ll be trying another of his books soon!

Note: This book has also been published as The Case of the Abominable Snowman.

Thanks to Ipso Books for providing a copy of this book for review via NetGalley.