Tag: Nicholas Blake

The Sad Variety by Nicholas Blake

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The Sad Variety is Nicholas Blake’s penultimate novel featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. It was published in 1964, so at this point the series had been going for almost thirty years, yet there is no sign of any decline in Blake’s powers or interest in his characters. This story is a compelling mixture of Golden Age detection and the harsh realities of the Cold War.

Here, Strangeways is asked by the security service to keep an eye on an important scientist, Professor Wragsby, who is spending the Christmas holiday at a guesthouse with his wife Elena and eight-year-old daughter Lucy. The girl is kidnapped by two British communists working for a Russian agent. She is ransomed, not for money, but for secrets. So far, so obvious you might think, the story will concern the attempts to get her back.

Things become far more complicated very quickly. The kidnappers arrive in the district with a small boy in tow. They cut and dye Lucy’s hair and substitute her for the boy, so as not to arouse suspicion. What will they do with the rather mysterious boy? It becomes obvious to Strangeways that the kidnappers must have a contact at the guesthouse and he has to try and work out who it is.

The guests are a mixed bunch. There’s a retired admiral and his wife, a young CND supporter and her beatnik boyfriend and a rather bland single man. They all have their secrets, as Strangeways discovers. The revelation when it comes is a real surprise to the reader, linked, as it is, to another jaw-dropping plot twist.

Lucy is a very intelligent and resourceful girl and much of the story is seen from her point of view. She comes up with a clever way of communicating her situation. Blake had written about resourceful young people before, in his 1948 children’s book The Otterbury Incident, published under his real name, C Day Lewis.

This novel is a masterclass in increasing tension and sense of threat and it becomes a real page-turner as the plot reaches its climax.

It takes place at a very specific time, the hard winter of 1962/63. The snowbound countryside, described with Blake’s customary poetic skill, almost becomes another character in the story. The really clever thing is the way the wintry conditions that make it so difficult to get anywhere are integrated into the plot. For example, a body lies undiscovered in a snowdrift, and the Russian agent thinks he is about to be arrested, not realising that the soldiers are only there to clear the roads.

Day Lewis was one of the political poets of the 1930s and the novel represents his final break with left-wing politics. It’s no surprise that the Hungarian uprising of 1956 features so prominently here, because this was the event that caused many former left-wing sympathisers such as Day Lewis to take a long, hard look at Russia and the inhumanity of the communist regime.

The Russian agent Petrov is a nasty piece of work, who enjoys violence for its own sake. Paul, the British communist, has been blackmailed by the Russians into taking part in the plot because of his homosexuality. He is thoroughly disillusioned with the Party: “I don’t set myself up as a model of the virtues, but at least I don’t pretend that whatever suits my book is the truth, like you and your bloody Party do.”          

Writers react to the rise of the motor car

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At the end of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Mr Stimpson and Mr Gorse, there is an extraordinary passage in which he depicts the rise of the motorcar as a plague of black beetles spreading out all over England. The beetles have taken over and made human beings their slaves and attendants. The novel was published in 1953 but set in 1928.

Hamilton had his own reasons for disliking cars. He had been badly injured in a hit-and-run incident in the 1930s. To ram the point home, he gave his villainous anti-hero, Gorse, an association with cars and the motor trade. There is something of this idea that cars may not altogether be a good thing in Nicholas Blake’s 1938 novel The Beast Must Die. The hit-and-run driver who kills a young boy and tries to cover it up is a garage owner. This novel was inspired by a “near miss” incident involving the author’s own young son.

In 1927, H V Morton had published an account of his travels round the country, In Search of England. In his foreword, he was much more enthusiastic about the rise of the petrol engine than Hamilton or Blake. He sees the provision of coach services and “the popularity of the cheap motor car” as reviving road travel and making remote areas of the countryside more accessible than they were in the railway age. He laments the “vulgar” behaviour of some visitors, but thinks that in general, the age of the car will lead to a greater understanding and love of the countryside, which will therefore help preserve it. The seaside holiday will go out of fashion, he suggests, to be replaced by the country holiday.

Compare this to a report in the “I” newspaper of 16 November 2019. It is headed “Pay As You Go”, and continues “As UK resorts clog up with traffic, Dean Kirby reports on a plan to charge tourists a congestion fee in the Lake District.” There is now a conflict in many areas between tourist traffic and local road use.

Things have been heading this way for a long time. Some years ago, I went to Lyme Regis in Dorset. From the top of a double-decker bus, I could see the “park and ride” car park, necessary to prevent the town’s high street seizing up completely in the summer. A little further off, was the disused viaduct of the now closed railway line to the town.

We tend to think now of the inter-war years as a “golden age of motoring”, bringing to mind the image of a uniformed AA patrolman saluting a passing sportscar, the only vehicle on an otherwise empty road. We can’t really blame H V Morton for not having a crystal ball, but it’s interesting that he did not seem to have thought out the implications of increased car use.

We see the 1930s as the Shell Guide era of motoring. Paul Nash took the photographs for the Dorset volume. But these detailed descriptions of rural England were sponsored by a petrol company. The original editions were spiral bound so they could be opened flat on a car seat. Admittedly Hamilton was writing with the benefit of hindsight, but he seems to be one of the only writers who saw that Britain would have to change to accommodate the motor revolution.

Of course, it was a fictional character who appeared as early as 1908, who caught the deep appeal of this new form of personal transport. I am thinking of Mr Toad, staring after the speeding car with a gleam in his eye. Despite his string of accidents and fines, Toad could not resist getting into a car again. “Toot Toot!”

John le Carré and Nicholas Blake

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David Cornwell was educated in the 1940s at Sherborne, one of the great Public Schools of England, and he didn’t like it very much. Some years later, he took his revenge, when as John le Carré, he published his second novel, A Murder of Quality (1962).

Sherborne became Carne, an unpleasant institution, riddled with snobbery and class prejudice. Those who run the school are not above a bit of blackmail when it comes to getting a teacher in on the cheap.

Unusually for le Carré, this is a detective story rather than a spy novel. It’s actually an extremely good example of a genre with which he is not usually associated. (Although you could argue that Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is really a whodunnit.) Here, a newly retired George Smiley plays detective.

Like all le Carré’s early fiction, this novel has its roots in the second world war. Smiley becomes involved in the mystery because a wartime intelligence colleague contacts him about it. It turns out that one of the masters at the school, and a potential suspect, is the brother of Smiley’s wartime boss. Smiley therefore feels obliged to take the case on.

Oddly enough, le Carré was not the first old boy of Sherborne to write a detective story set in a school. In 1935 Nicholas Blake had published A Question of Proof. This was the penname of the poet Cecil Day Lewis, formerly of Sherborne and like le Carré, a schoolteacher before becoming a full-time writer. I don’t think either of them ever returned to teach at Sherborne, though. Le Carré taught at a prep school and then Eton; Day Lewis taught at several other schools.

Day Lewis had much fonder memories of Sherborne than le Carré. He wrote warmly about his time there in the poems The Chrysanthemum Show and Sketches for a Portrait. Sudeley Hall in A Question of Proof is a prep school in the heart of the country, not a grand institution like Carne. Dark deeds take place against the background of a rural idyll, when the body of the school’s most unpopular boy is found in a haystack on sports day. The climax comes after a second murder a week later, on the day of the parents versus pupils cricket match.

The atmosphere is that of the inter-war years with references to the first world war, the general strike and the scarcity of jobs. It feels like an accurate portrait of life at a school of that type at that time.

The main character, a teacher who comes under suspicion of murder, is having an affair with the headmaster’s wife. I have read that this nearly cost Day Lewis his job at the time, as the chair of governors of the school in which he was then teaching, refused to believe that this was fiction.

A Question of Proof was the first novel to feature the amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, who appeared in many more, including The Beast Must Die (1938).  Blake was still publishing in the 1960s, as le Carré was getting started, so the careers of the two writers overlapped.

Carne is not the only school to feature prominently in a le Carré novel. Thursgood’s prep school in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a rather seedy establishment, named after its owner. He is unaware that Jim Prideaux, last-minute replacement teacher at the beginning of the term, is a retired spy. Buried in the countryside, it’s an ideal place for someone who wants to lie low. Jim seems like a man out of his time, with his Alvis sports car, and fondness for reading Jeffrey Farnol to the boys. In fact, both he and the school belong more to the world of A Question of Proof than the 1970s.

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake

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Surbiton Festival (4) XA

The Beast Must Die by Nicholas Blake was published in 1938. It is an example of the type of detective story where the identity of the criminal is known, or appears to be, right from the start. It has some of the expected features of novels of the “golden age”, but is also strikingly different. It feels like an attempt to do something more realistic with the genre conventions, closer to Graham Greene than Agatha Christie.

This is hardly surprising, given that Nicholas Blake was the pen name of Cecil Day Lewis, poet and critic, who was poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The Beast Must Die was the fourth book to feature his series detective, Nigel Strangeways.

Depending on your view of these things, you might see him as a serious poet writing commercial fiction on the side, or as an innovative and brilliant crime writer who also wrote a great deal of poetry. What is undeniable is his talent for language.

Day Lewis wrote sixteen Strangeways novels, and four “stand alone” mysteries, from the early 1930s to the late 1960s. All of them anticipate the more psychological approach adopted by later writers in this genre.

The plot of The Beast Must Die concerns the attempts of Felix Lane to take revenge on the man who killed his young son in a hit-and-run accident. The opening section of the novel is presented as Felix Lane’s diary, describing in great detail how he goes about identifying and tracking down the driver.

Like his creator, Lane is a man with an alter ego. He is in fact, Frank Cairns and Felix Lane is the pen name under which he writes detective stories. It is his knowledge of detection that enables him to find the speeding driver, garage owner George Ratteray, and the use of his pen name that enables him to cover his tracks.

Lane/Cairns has told us right from the start that once he has found the driver he intends to kill him, yet when Ratteray is found dead, Lane insists he has been framed and calls in Nigel Strangeways to clear his name.

The latter part of the novel is on the face of it, more conventional, as all the occupants of Ratteray’s household come under suspicion, and Strangeways works in conjunction with the police inspector to crack the case.

Strangeways begins to suspect that all may not be as it seems when the evidence he gathers conflicts with what Lane wrote in his diary. Has Lane deliberately falsified his account, or has he accurately recorded that Ratteray lied to him?

Strangeways gets to the truth in the end, and the solution is highly ingenious, involving the interpretation of a literary reference in Lane’s diary. It’s an early example of textual analysis as detection, the sort of thing done later on by Colin Dexter in The Wench is Dead.

The greater depth than usual comes from the characterisation and the moral questions that the reader is asked to ponder. Ratteray is a domestic monster who beats his wife and tyrannizes his sensitive son. He has callously covered up his responsibility for the death of a young boy. He would be no great loss to the world.

But the central question of the book, on which the mystery depends, is just what sort of man is Felix Lane.

The criticism that is often made of “golden age” stories is that tragic events seem to make no real impact on anyone. That is not the case here; Lane has been devastated by his boy’s death and there is a suggestion that his nurturing relationship with Ratteray’s son Phil is a substitute for that with his own lost son.

Like all the Blake novels, it is fluently written and highly readable. The peaceful English rural locations, seen at their best in the summertime, are an effective counterpoint to the sad events of the story.

The 1969 Claude Chabrol film adaptation of this book is very good, but omits Strangeways altogether and alters the ending somewhat. The use of the diary in the book would be difficult to reproduce on screen in any case, as it depends for its impact on the sense that Lane/Cairns is confessing directly to the reader.

I am pleased but also somewhat wary to find that the BBC are going to do another adaptation. Pleased because I am a huge admirer of the Blake novels and I think they deserve to be better known today. Wary, though, because I wonder how the finished version will actually turn out. This story is quite dark enough as it is, and does not need any alterations. In the end, there is more than one victim.

(An interesting footnote is that the story was said to have been inspired by a similar incident in Day Lewis’ own life, when his young son had a “near miss”. Perhaps Blake/Day Lewis and Lane/Cairns had more in common than we might think.)