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.)
The Good Reader 