In the second book in the Nigel Strangeways classic crime series, the poet turned private detective is called in to help a legendary World War One flying ace who has been receiving death threats
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 & 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.
"It has all the virtues of culture, intelligence and sensibility that the most exacting connoisseur could ask of detective fiction" Times Literary Supplement "A master of detective fiction" Daily Telegraph "The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction" -- Elizabeth Bowen
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