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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The First Nigel Strangeways Mystery - Begin at the Beginning?,
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This review is from: Question of Proof (Paperback)
A Question of Proof (1935) is the first of fifteen Strangeways stories written by Nicholas Blake over a period of nearly thirty years. Common sense might suggest that the best way to read a series is to begin at the beginning. Nonetheless, although A Question of Proof is interesting in that we meet the young Nigel Strangeways, many of his best stories come later.A Question of Proof is not unlike other mysteries from the 1930s in that the setting (in this case, Sudeley preparatory school) is populated by an abundance of suspects. Algernon Wyvern-Wemyss, a most unpopular student, is found strangled. A young instructor, Michael Evans, is on the list of suspects for this heinous crime. Nigel Strangeways is asked to investigate the murder on behalf of the school, a task made more difficult as Evans and Strangeways were good friends during their school years at Oxford. Strangeways had been having difficulty making ends meet as a poet, and had settled upon a career as a private investigator. Strangeways said it was the only career left which offered scope to good manners and scientific curiosity, and even paid, on occasion, quite handsomely. It helped somewhat that his uncle was a commissioner with Scotland Yard. A poet-detective might at first seem a bit much, but interestingly, Nicholas Blake was actually a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis, himself a poet and professor of English. In 1968 Day-Lewis was selected to be poet laureate. His son is the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. Even in this first story Strangeways' approach to deduction was already in place: physical evidence is less important than astute psychological observations of the suspects. Critical clues are often revealed in oblique comments and nuanced conversations. Nonetheless, I found this particular solution to be overly dependent on clever psychological reasoning. Perhaps I was disappointed that my prime suspect proved innocent, and in fact was even murdered himself. For those reading the Strangeway's mysteries in sequence, Blake's next novel, Thou Shell of Death (1936), is patterned on The Revenger's Tragedy, a lesser known Elizabethan play of uncertain authorship. Despite this literary framework, this second story has a rather eccentric cast including a legendary WWI flying ace and an intrepid African explorer (female in gender).
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