"Thou Shell of Death"

Writing poetry, even for well-established poets, is not always a good way to earn a living. That appears to have been  the case with C. Day-Lewis, the late Poet Laureate of Britain, who found a very good way to supplement his family income by writing a series of absolutely top-grade mysteries, under the pen name of Nicholas Blake. Day-Lewis - the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis - wrote his mysteries beginning during the Golden Age, in 1935, and continued well into the 1960s.

One of his best books, "Thou Shell of Death," written in 1936, is reviewed on this week's Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the full review here. It's an extraordinary book. Blake's detective character , Nigel Strangeways, is invited to a most unusual house party by Fergus O'Brien, a flying hero of World War I. O'Brien has been receiving threatening letters warning that he will be killed on Boxing Day, December 26. He has responded by organizing this party and inviting everyone who could be suspected of having written the letters. Despite Strangeways' presence, O'Brien is indeed killed on the morning after Christmas.

And that's when the story starts to get really interesting. The more Strangeways digs into the case, the more complexities are revealed. Strangeways becomes convinced that he must look deep into O'Brien's mysterious past life, before he became a war hero, for the real motives behind the murder - and what he learns will be profoundly shocking.

This is a classic Golden Age novel. There is fair play throughout and brilliantly-placed clues, but, for most readers, it will be a challenge to unravel the complex mystery, a pleasure to meet the memorable characters - and the ending of the book is absolutely stunning. I can't praise it highly enough.

Comments

[Josiah]

I've really been wanting to try Nicholas Blake, but his books are pretty hard to find used. This one sounds really good though, so I'll keep an eye out.

Also, thank you for the warning about the amazon reviews. I've been reading a lot of mystery criticism lately, and I've had multiple books ruined for me by respectable writers. H.R.F. Keating, it is YOUR fault that I will never read The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Yours and yours, alone.

[Les Blatt]

There are places where spoilers may be unavoidable - in an online discussion of a particular book, for example. I run into it on the GAD wiki from time to time. But when that is necessary, the post's author INVARIABLY will include a SPOILER ALERT in capitals before proceeding, so that anyone who hasn't read the book knows to stop reading the post before hitting the spoiler. As for Roger Ackroyd, the same should have been true - a spoiler alert would have kept the book's secret quite adequately while allowing Keating to make his point. Grr.

The Rue Morgue Press has republished "Thou Shell of Death," and Amazon has it available pretty inexpensively - you might want to check it out, if your library doesn't have the book.