Nicholas Blake

• Born: April 27, 1904
• Birthplace: Ballintubbert, Ireland
• Died: May 22, 1972
• Place of death: Hadley Wood, Hertfordshire, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; inverted; psychological; thriller; cozy

Principal Series: Nigel Strangeways, 1935-1966

Contribution

The word often and accurately used in descriptions of Nicholas Blake’s twenty mystery novels is “literate.” He started writing mysteries in the period known as the Golden Age of the form in Great Britain, a period with such thoughtful and articulate practitioners as Michael Innes, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham. Blake excelled in his dual role as poet and mystery writer, producing, in the estimation of some critics, better mysteries than poems. His poetic talents undoubtedly influenced his novels, whether detective stories, thrillers, or crime novels. In the quantity and quality of literary allusion, in the diversity of characterization and physical description, and in the overt use of his own personal experience, Blake was of the class of writers who raised the standards of mystery fiction.

Biography

Nicholas Blake was born Cecil Day-Lewis in Ballintubbert, Ireland, on April 27, 1904, the only son of the Reverend F. C. Day-Lewis and Kathleen Blake Squires. After the death of his mother in 1908, his aunt helped to rear him, following his father, an Irish Protestant clergyman, as he moved from one London parish to another. Blake attended Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford University, where he received a master’s degree.

He taught at various schools from 1927 until 1935, running into trouble with school administrators because of his leftist political views. He married Constance Mary King, the daughter of one of his former teachers, in 1928, and the couple had two sons. Desperately in need of more money, Blake, who had read many mysteries himself, wrote and published his first one, A Question of Proof, in 1935. He was a member of the Communist Party in Great Britain from 1935 to 1938, and though he never resigned from it, his political views changed, particularly after the Spanish Civil War. He worked for the Ministry of Information during World War II and was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1950.

Blake divorced his first wife in 1951 and the same year married Jill Balcon, with whom he had a son and a daughter. His professional reputation remained high: He held the position of professor of poetry at Oxford University (1951-1956) and director of the publishing firm Chatto and Windus (1954-1972). He was the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University (1964-1965), and finally, poet laureate of England, from 1968 until his death in 1972.

Analysis

Summarizing his views on why authors write mystery fiction, Nicholas Blake said frankly—in the essay “The Detective Story: Why?”—that money was certainly a major motive for most. His first mystery novel, A Question of Proof, Earl F. Bargainnier reports, was written because Blake could think of no other honest way to come up with one hundred pounds to pay for a leaking roof.

Like the many academics of his day and those who have followed him, however, Blake’s own pleasure as a reader of mysteries contributed to his pleasure in writing them. In the same essay, he also noted that every drug addict wants to introduce other people to the habit, a habit that allows a tamed, civilized, “a-moral” society to revel in the pleasures of imaginary murder. It is a pleasure possibly of great significance to anthropologists of the future, Blake predicted; in the twenty-first century, the detective novel would be studied as the folk myth of the twentieth century, the rise of crime fiction coinciding with the decline of religion. Without the outlet for the sense of guilt provided by religion, Blake proposed, individuals turn to the detective novel, with its highly formalized ritual, as a means of purging their guilt. That is why the criminal, the high priest of the ritual, and the detective, the higher power who destroys the criminal, appeal equally to readers; they represent the light and dark sides of human nature. Blake draws the parallel between the denouement of a detective novel and the Christian concept of the Day of Judgment, when the problem is triumphantly resolved and the innocent suspects are separated from the guilty.

Nigel Strangeways

The solemnity of such views underlying the addictive attraction of mystery fiction is counterbalanced in Blake’s novels by what Julian Symons called their “bubbling high spirits” and the author’s evident pleasure in “playing with detection.” That quality of glee comes through in the range of the twenty novels Blake wrote, which sometimes delightfully echo other great amateur detectives and novels, reassuring readers that they are in the company of a fellow addict. There is, for example, a hint of Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey in Blake’s Nigel Strangeways. A tall, lean man with sandy-colored hair that habitually falls over his forehead, guileless pale-blue eyes, and an abstracted look, Strangeways, like Wimsey, has that deceptive innocence and gently comic air that often lead suspects to confide in him. Similarly, though Strangeways is paid for his work, his preoccupation between cases appears to be that of the gifted dilettante. Strangeways meets his first wife on a case; a world-famous explorer, Georgia Cavendish, is, like Sayers’s Harriet Vane, an independent woman with a well-established career before marriage to the great amateur detective.

Other striking variations on the standard mystery include the first-person criminal in The Beast Must Die (1938), recalling Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), and the academic murder mystery construct of The Morning After Death (1966). Blake’s A Penknife in My Heart (1958) seems, on the surface, so similar to Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950) that Blake inserted a note to say that it was only after his book had gone to press that he discovered the amazing coincidence, as he had not read her book or seen the film.

Such similarities merely highlight the elements shared by the body of mystery fiction produced during what is referred to as the Golden Age of the genre in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s in Great Britain. As readers became more sophisticated and demanding, and as more writers entered the field, the quality of writing was raised. Blake was one of a handful of dons who took up the challenge of satisfying the exacting standards of this popular form, which required adherence to a formula as well as something fresh and challenging.

Blake’s analysis of this demand was that it required the juxtaposition of fantasy with reality that defines detective fiction and that there were two ways to achieve this juxtaposition: to put unreal characters into realistic situations or to put real characters into unreal or at least improbable situations. The second was the more prevalent, certainly in Blake’s fiction. It became a standard feature, according to LeRoy Lad Panek, for the great detective to be depicted as a sophisticated and cultured human being who might occasionally flounder and make a mistake.

To accommodate as well the period’s passion for puzzles, Panek reports, the Golden Age novel often contains maps, time tables, cautionary and informative footnotes, and other devices designed to engage the reader’s intellect in the story; these details make the great detective more realistic, ostensibly a person whose thinking process the reader can follow. Blake’s Strangeways often makes lists of motives and suspects or of questions about a case, thus neatly playing fair with readers by providing them with a full range of possibilities while simultaneously confusing them so thoroughly that the narrative interest is maintained because they still need Strangeways to pick among the plausible alternatives.

Though Blake’s Strangeways follows the tradition of the great detective—the intelligent, perceptive, and immensely likable amateur sleuth—the author’s complex other life brought a distinctive note to this Golden Age tradition. Not only an active and highly respected poet, Blake was also a leftist; he considered himself a revolutionary. Bargainnier suggests that in the battle between the poetic and political impulses within Blake, the poet won. Indeed, though he never formally gave up his membership in the Communist Party, Blake ceased to be involved actively. Yet the conflict between the contemplative and active life appears, as Bargainnier points out, in the recurring theme of schizophrenia in the mystery novels; in more than one novel, a character will wonder if he unknowingly committed a crime because there is another, hidden side to his nature.

Blake’s leftist leanings also appear in his attitude toward the detective novel. In the essay referred to above, Blake writes that there is a class bias in crime fiction; the detective novel, with the hero almost always on the side of law and order, appeals almost exclusively to the upper and professional classes, who have a stake in maintaining a stable society. The lower-middle and working classes read thrillers, where the criminal of the thriller is often its hero and nearly always a romantic figure, a descendant of the Robin Hood myth.

One way in which Blake bridged this gap he perceived between the classes in their choice of reading matter was probably also a result of his mind-set as a poet, a mind-set that more than any other genre calls for John Keats’s “negative capability,” that ability to subdue one’s own personality and give onself up to another’s. Consequently, Blake’s novels evince an unusual sympathy, even admiration, for the criminal. Enumerating the fates of the murderers in Blake’s novels, Bargainnier notes that more than half of the criminals commit suicide or are killed by others—that is, removed from the scene before they can face the established judicial system.

Following the conventions of the detective novel, the plot in a Blake novel unfolds over a relatively short period of time and the cast of characters is confined. What characterizes Blake, however, is his long view of the genesis of a crime. In novel after novel, Strangeways will learn information about characters, buried for twenty or thirty years, that serves as clues to the present situation. Thus, in Thou Shell of Death (1936), Strangeways finds the key to the death of a national air hero by investigating a mysterious incident in his past when he was an obscure handyman in Ireland; in End of Chapter (1957), he tracks down the cause of an intensely intimate rivalry between his co-workers to their roles in a tragic case of doomed romance; in The Corpse in the Snowman (1941), he picks up hints of the tragedy that changed a high-spirited young girl into a reckless drug addict.

The emphasis on the past is apparent in another feature of Blake’s works. Bargainnier points out that an unusually large number of children and teenagers appear in the novels. Sometimes the youths are directly involved in the crime, such as the little boy whose death in a hit-and-run incident in The Beast Must Die precipitates the story or the children whose lives become the battleground for control in The Corpse in the Snowman; the fate of a beloved child long dead motivates the run of malice and murder in End of Chapter. In The Widow’s Cruise (1959), The Morning After Death, and Head of a Traveler (1949), the conditioning of childhood experiences and tendencies becomes, similarly, important to analyzing the behavior of the adults in the present.

Golden Age fiction was characterized by its highly literate quality. Panek notes that the detective novelists, appealing to their well-educated readers, had characters who cited “[Charles] Dickens by the cartload and [William] Shakespeare by the ton.” A certain amount of banter about writers and writing and a self-referential quality was common. Here again, the well-read poet C. Day Lewis permeates the writing of Blake the mystery novelist. Julian Symons remarks that Blake

brought to the Golden Age detective story a distinctly literary tone, and also in his early books a Left Wing political attitude. Both of these things were unusual at the time. I can remember still the shock I felt when on the first page of Blake’s first book, A Question of Proof, T. S. Eliot’s name was mentioned. (I should be prepared to offer odds that there are less than a dozen crime stories written during the decades between the wars in which the name of any modern poet appears.)

It is not only that literary allusions abound in Blake’s writing but also, more important, that an intimate knowledge of literature assumes a major role in the solution of some of the mysteries. Toward the end of Thou Shell of Death, for example, Strangeways berates himself for not immediately recognizing the significance of the victim’s quoting a line from a Jacobean play. The poet’s propensity for metaphor, to yoke unlike things together, leads Strangeways, in The Widow’s Cruise, to link the nervous behavior of swans, which he had observed months before, to the strange behavior of two sisters he encounters on a cruise.

Head of a Traveler

Though The Private Wound (1968), his last novel, is the most autobiographical of Blake’s works, it is in Head of a Traveler (the title itself is a line from A. E. Housman’s parody of a Greek tragedy) that the influence of the poet on the novelist becomes central. The novel begins with Strangeways’s journal, as he jots down his impressions of a visit to the estate of a distinguished English poet, Robert Seaton. Strangeways notices the “cataleptic trance of white and yellow roses” and is himself entranced by the house:

It was like getting out into a dream. Walking past the front of the house, glancing in at the drawing-room windows, one might have expected to see a group of brocaded figures arrested in courtiers’ attitudes around a Sleeping Beauty, the stems of roses twining through their ceremonious fingers.

In this novel, as in so many of Blake’s novels, Strangeways’s early perceptions are prescient. The dreamlike, fairy-tale atmosphere of a Sleeping Beauty he picks up from the house does indeed prove to account for much inexplicable behavior on the part of both the poet, who has been pretending to be busy with a long poem, and of his wife, whose two main loves in life are the house, which once belonged to her family, and her husband’s work, which she and the rest of the family protect with an awe that makes it impossible for Seaton to write. For Strangeways, the house is animated:

The fairy-tale house, so unreal when first he had seen it, was still less real to-day; then it had been the fabulous exuberance of its roses, the trance of high summer; now it was as if Plash Meadow, having drunk too deep of horrors, suffered from a blighting hangover.

He realizes that the poet’s work is at the “very roots of the case.” A crucially suggestive clue for him is the sense that only since the murder of his brother has Seaton finally written a great poetic sequence. By not only piecing together his observations but also, more important, trusting his instinctive understanding of a poet’s life and personality, Strangeways does, finally, deconstruct the false suicide note to clear the poet of murder and find the truth. The image of catalepsy from the first page is repeated:

Robert jumped at the opportunity to leave Plash Meadow, to break the cataleptic trance it had thrown upon his Muse, to return to the conditions under which—however grim they had been—he had in the past produced poetry. To kill Oswald would be to destroy his last chance of freeing the creator in himself.

This novel, which ends with Strangeways unable to decide whether he should report the true murderer, displays all the distinctive qualities of Blake’s detective fiction: It is sophisticated, lyrical, psychologically acute, and, withal, high-spirited. His novels were the result of the needs of the poet fulfilled by the talents of the mystery writer.

Principal Series Character:

• Nigel Strangeways , an amateur sleuth, is sometimes found writing scholarly treatises on esoteric topics before he is interrupted by a case. A tall, lean man with blue eyes and unkempt blond hair, he woos and marries a world-famous explorer, Georgia Cavendish. After her heroic death in World War II, he takes up with Clare Massinger, a sculptor, even though she refuses to marry him. Strangeways enjoys unraveling a mystery, although he sometimes finds himself respecting, even admiring, some of the murderers he uncovers.

Bibliography

Bayley, John. The Power of Delight: A Lifetime in Literature—Essays, 1962-2002. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. The collected essays of this major critic feature one on Blake (C. Day Lewis) and his use of pastiche, both in poetry and in fiction. Index.

Daiches, David. Poetry and the Modern World: A Study of Poetry in England Between 1900 and 1939. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1940. Daiches devotes a full chapter to Day Lewis and the problems facing the poet: how to face the disintegrating civilization after World War I? What audience would a poet write for? Instead of turning to mysticism or religion as did William Butler Yeats and T. S. Eliot, Day Lewis seeks a singleness of personality in revolutionary hope and mature self-understanding. A major study of this important poet.

Day-Lewis, Sean. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980. The first son of Blake wrote this year-by-year biography of his father within a decade of his father’s death. Family members and friends contributed material to an objective but intimate portrait of the poet. Both the poetry publications and the crime novels under the name Nicholas Blake are discussed.

Gelpi, Albert. Living in Time: The Poetry of C. Day Lewis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. A full-length critical study of the works of Day Lewis and a record of his poetry within the literary ferment of the twentieth century. Explores the three major periods of the poet’s development, beginning with the emergence of Day Lewis in the 1930’s as the most radical of the Oxford poets.

Gindin, James. “C. Day Lewis: Moral Doubling in Nicholas Blake’s Detective Fiction of the 1930’s.” In Recharting the Thirties, edited by Patrick J. Quinn. Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1996. Discusses the moral elements of Blake’s fiction that place it distinctively within the Great Britain of the 1930’s. Bibliographic references and index.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Discusses Blake’s Head of a Traveler and A Penknife in My Heart. Bibliographic references and index.

“Nicholas Blake.” In Modern Mystery Writers, edited by Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1995. Critical, scholarly examination of Blake’s work and its place in the mystery-fiction canon. Bibliographic references.

Riddel, Joseph N. C. Day Lewis. New York: Twayne, 1971. Riddel argues that Day Lewis should be known as more than a member of the “Auden group” of British poets of the 1930’s. His poetry is considered chronologically with emphasis on the creative and radical period from 1929 to 1938. The problems of language, individual psychology, the “divided self,” and the lyric impulse are enduring themes. An essential study supplemented by notes and a bibliography.

Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995. A post-structural analysis of the conventions of mystery and detective fiction. Examines 138 short stories and works from the 1840’s to the 1960’s. Helps place Blake within the context of the genre.

Smith, Elton Edward. The Angry Young Men of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1975. In his first chapter, “C. Day-Lewis: The Iron Lyricist,” Smith outlines the dilemma of British poets in the 1930’s, a decade of worldwide economic collapse. This study of poetry is thus useful for contextualizing the poet’s detective fiction as well.

Tolley, A. T. The Poetry of the Thirties. London: Gollancz, 1975. In chapter 6, “Poetry and Politics,” Tolley discusses the political content of Day Lewis’s poetry, his adherence to Marxism as a solution to the pressing contemporary problems, and the subsequent development away from the party in “Overtures to Death.” His concern for the Spanish Civil War conflict is apparent; the mood is somber and disaster seems imminent. Along with political events, the problem of a divided self continues to occupy the poet’s thoughts.