Nicholas Blake

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The Case of the Abominable Snowman

A Question of Proof

There's Trouble Brewing

Thou Shell of Death

The Beast Must Die

The Smiler With The Knife

Malice in Wonderland

Minute for Murder

Head of a Traveller

The Whisper in the Gloom

End of Chapter

The Widow's Cruise

The Worm of Death

The Sad Variety

The Morning After Death

The Dreadful Hollow

Discover the Penguin books that shaped us

The story of anonymous letters in a little village can...be read with great pleasure

The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY 
 
Someone is sending poison pen letters in the small village of Prior's Umborne, and they have already driven one of the inhabitants to suicide. 
 
Private detective Nigel Strangeways is commissioned to find the source of the letters by arrogant financier Sir Archibald Blick, whose two sons live in the village, only for Sir Archibald to meet an untimely end at the bottom of the dreadful hollow... 
 
A Nigel Strangeways murder mystery - the perfect introduction to the most charming and erudite detective in Golden Age crime fiction.

READ ALL AGATHA CHRISTIE? TRY A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY 
In the tenth Nigel Strangeways mystery, someone is sending poison pen letters in a sleepy little village, and it's already driven one man to suicide. Can the amateur detective find the culprit before any more people die?

MORE VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERIES 
 MARGERY ALLINGHAM 
Mystery Mile 
Police at the Funeral 
Sweet Danger 
Flowers for the Judge 
The Case of the Late Pig 
The Fashion in Shrouds 
Traitor’s Purse 
Coroner’s Pidgin 
More Work for the Undertaker 
The Tiger in the Smoke 
The Beckoning Lady 
Hide My Eyes 
The China Governess 
The Mind Readers 
Cargo of Eagles 
 
E. F. BENSON 
The Blotting Book 
The Luck of the Vails 
 
NICHOLAS BLAKE 
A Question of Proof 
Thou Shell of Death 
There’s Trouble Brewing 
The Beast Must Die 
The Smiler With the Knife 
Malice in Wonderland 
The Case of the Abominable Snowman 
Minute for Murder 
Head of a Traveller 
The Dreadful Hollow 
The Whisper in the Gloom 
End of Chapter 
The Widow’s Cruise 
The Worm of Death 
The Sad Variety 
The Morning After Death 
 
EDMUND CRISPIN 
Buried for Pleasure 
The Case of the Gilded Fly 
Holy Disorders 
Love Lies Bleeding 
The Moving Toyshop 
Swan Song 
 
A. A. MILNE 
The Red House Mystery 
 
GLADYS MITCHELL 
Speedy Death 
The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop 
The Longer Bodies 
The Saltmarsh Murders 
Death and the Opera 
The Devil at Saxon Wall 
Dead Men’s Morris 
Come Away, Death 
St Peter’s Finger 
Brazen Tongue 
Hangman’s Curfew 
When Last I Died 
Laurels Are Poison 
Here Comes a Chopper 
Death and the Maiden 
Tom Brown’s Body 
Groaning Spinney 
The Devil’s Elbow 
The Echoing Strangers 
Watson’s Choice 
The Twenty-Third Man 
Spotted Hemlock 
My Bones Will Keep 
Three Quick and Five Dead 
Dance to Your Daddy 
A Hearse on May-Day 
Late, Late in the Evening 
Fault in the Structure 
Nest of Vipers

Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations. 
 
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto &amp; Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.

The Dreadful Hollow

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The story of anonymous letters in a little village can...be read with great pleasure

The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction

His plots are ingenious

A master of detective fiction

About Nicholas Blake

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