End of Chapter – Nicholas Blake
It is 1957. Wenham & Geraldine is a long-established, well-regarded – read: stuffy and stuck-up - London publishing firm. To the shock of the second-generation owner-operators, the firm is facing derision, scandal and a financial kick in the pants in the form of a libel suit.
High class and bookish private eye Nigel Strangeways is hired by the firm to identify who tampered with the memoirs of General Richard Thoresby so as to re-insert passages publisher and author agreed to delete, passages that peed on the reputation of Thoresby’s superior, Major General Sir Charles Blair-Chatterley. Strangeways’ cover is that he is a temp, hired to do specialized consultations. The cover is, as usual, short-lived; his stint as a parapsychologist didn’t last long in The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) either.
Strangeways interviews Blake's always interesting characters. Stephen Protheroe wrote one poetic masterpiece in his youth and then burned out. He ended up reading books every single workday, eight hours a day, for 25 years, an activity that would drive anybody to anxiety, depression, and rage. Millicent Miles is writer of paperback romances, who is in the office only because eager to goose sales, the young member of firm hired her to write her hot memoirs.
After World War II mystery writers like Margery Allingham and Desmond Begley often deplored in passing These Kids Today. Blake is no exception. Dealing with a very serious young woman, Nigel bemoans to himself “How very stern the young are.” But another girl reveals her taste-free giddiness by recognizing Johnny Ray "The Prince of Wails" as her heart-throb.* Cyprian Gleed, son of Millicent Miles, is a spoiled creep not above committing felonies out of pique, wearing silk pajamas and letting hamsters have the run of his apartment as if he’s Count Fosco. When she hears that her secretary is sleeping with her BF, the senior member of the firm says, “‘Miriam?’ exclaimed Liz Wenham. ‘But she’s a First in History.’”
Call it coincidence or living in a small society but Strangeways finds that these people have connections with each other that extend into the past. In a great scene, General Thoresby recalls how he and his officers embarrassed a snooty Millicent Miles when they demonstrated they knew more about Henry James and the modernists than she did. Blake is always worth reading for the characterization and solid plotting, even if Strangeways isn’t a quirk of nature and the story may move a little less than briskly. As in another Strangeways mystery Minute for Murder (1947), Blake captures office life for brain workers, with unruly passions mostly covered up by badinage or distant professional coolness.
Cecil Day-Lewis, poet and translator of Latin classics, added to his probably low income as a prof by writing detective novels under this pen-name. As we’d expect from a professor of classics, his writing is erudite, witty, and lucid enough to put up with the usual British whodunit machinery of red herrings, giddy girls, and victims that needed killing.
*The Nabob of Sob was arguably more popular in the UK and Australia than in his native US
Others by the Same Author: Click
on the title to go to the review
- A Question of Proof (1935)
- The Beast Must Die (1938)
- The Smiler with the Knife (1939)
- The Corpse in the Snowman (1941)
- Minute for Murder (1947)
- The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
- Whisper in the Gloom (1957)
- The Widow’s Cruise (1959)
- The Worm of Death (1961)
- The Private Wound (1968)
No comments:
Post a Comment