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Wenham & Geraldine are a long-established and very well-respected publishing firm, so when a printer's proof is sabotaged and libellous passages are mysteriously reinstated, they call in private detective Nigel Strangeways. But the situation takes a turn for the worse when one of the publishers' bestselling authors--glamorous novelist Millicent Miles--is found dead in the offices. Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland in show more 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. show lessTags
Recommendations
Member Recommendations
KayCliff Both novels are set in publishers' offices, with distinctly similar plots.
Member Reviews
A rather complicated mystery starting Nigel Strangeways. A publishing company is sued for libel, the libelous material having been published apparently by mistake. Soon a writer is gruesomely murdered. Nigel begins his patient untangling of a convoluted mess of motives and resentments going back many years.
The plot resolution is perfectly sensible but somewhat unpredictable. The characters are well-developed. This is a fine example of a Golden Age mystery.
“It was another of those gray days, the skyline a dirty dish cloth...”
Part of the pleasure of this series is the writing of Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis.
The plot resolution is perfectly sensible but somewhat unpredictable. The characters are well-developed. This is a fine example of a Golden Age mystery.
“It was another of those gray days, the skyline a dirty dish cloth...”
Part of the pleasure of this series is the writing of Poet Laureate Cecil Day Lewis.
Very enjoyable: well-paced, good setting (the world of publishing) and characters, but a fairly obvious culprit.
A detective story set in a publishers' office, with the splendid chapter titles: Set Up; First Impressions; Stet; Verso; Run On; Delete; Query; Lower Case; Insert; Revise; Bring Back; Lead In; Transpose; Wrong Fount; Close Up; Final Proof
Read in the omnibus "The Nicholas Blake Treasury, Volume 4"
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Books mentioned in Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder
438 works; 6 members
Author Information
30+ Works 3,394 Members
Series
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- End of Chapter
- Original title
- End of Chapter
- Original publication date
- 1957
- People/Characters
- Nigel Strangeways; Arthur Geraldine; Liz Wenham; Basil Ryle; Stephen Protheroe; Millicent Miles (show all 8); Cyprian Gleed; Clare Massinger
- Important places
- London, England, UK
- Dedication
- To
N. S. and I. M. P.
with great affection
from their unsleeping partner
in a very different
kind of firm - First words
- Nigel Strangeways turned into Adelphi, and soon arrived at the distinguished backwater of Angel Street, the Strand traffic roaring softly behind him like a weir.
- Quotations
- Stephen... buried his head in the typescript he was reading. He appeared to read with his nose, which hovered over the pages like a humming-bird hawk-moth, darting down now and then as if the smell the author's style, twitchi... (show all)ng and sniffing frequently.
The trouble with this firm is advertising in a sort of well-bred undertone, like a butler offering red wine or white. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Basil Ryle offered Nigel his hand; then, with a glance at Clare and a glint of his old perkiness, added, "You're a lucky chap."
- Original language
- English UK
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 204
- Popularity
- 160,202
- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.53)
- Languages
- 8 — Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 15
- ASINs
- 15
