But at the age of 30, Day-Lewis was a much-praised but struggling poet a married man and father in dire need of one hundred pounds to repair his family’s cottage roof in Cheltenham and a schoolmaster tenuously positioned at a public school where his leftist politics were increasingly frowned upon. Lawrence once described as “the one great man in England.” He was not the father of one of the greatest actors of our time.Īll of those people were Cecil Day-Lewis. He was not a professor at Oxford and Harvard, and a director and senior editor of one of Britain’s most distinguished publishing houses.
He was not a Commander of the British Empire. He was not the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom from 1968 to 1972. Nicholas Blake, however, was also just as notable for what he was not as for what he was. The novelist Elizabeth Bowen described his books as “something quite by themselves in English detective fiction.” The New Yorker praised him as “an extremely accomplished novelist with the rare ability to understand people whose psyches are a mess and, at the same time, to write about them without ever losing his own balance or lightness of touch.” His books were an instant hit. He is often credited as one of the writers responsible for turning the detective story into the detective novel. In elegant prose, often touched with humor, his twenty novels between 19 explored many dark passageways about the pressures-physical, mental, social-that caused such crimes the moral passions and human weaknesses that led people astray. He was fascinated with the psychology that produced a murderer, or a victim-the why more than the how. However, it wasn’t the puzzles that most interested him, nor the physical clues. Nicholas Blake liked a puzzle plot as much as the next guy, and he was very good at constructing them: the dramatic murder, the enigmatic clues, the shifting suspicions as the spotlight shone first on one suspect and then another and then another, the final unveiling.
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