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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Unlike Any Other Nigel Strangeways story - Nicholas Blake's Only Thriller (1938 Vintage),
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This review is from: The Smiler With the Knife: A Nigel Strangeways Mystery (Paperback)
The phrase, The Smiler with the Knife, is a quote from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, and is a quite appropriate title for this Nigel Strangeways mystery. In this story the smiler is a well-liked, affable, highly successful, aristocratic businessman that is secretly planning a Fascist overthrow of Great Britain's democratic government. The Smiler with the Knife was probably written in 1938; it was first published in 1939 before the outbreak of World War II.
THe Smiler with a Knife is my twelfth Strangeways mystery and I look forward to the few remaining stories. I read these mysteries in no particular order. Although among the earliest stories written by Blake, The Smiler with the Knife is certainly the most unusual from a genre perspective. Unfamiliar with The Smiler with the Knife, I had been puzzled for sometime why Blake allowed the likeable, vibrant, resourceful Georgia Strangeways, Nigel's wife and confidant, to have died between stories. (She was a victim of one of the many German bombing raids on London). I now suspect that Nicholas Blake lost control of Georgia, and after her thrilling adventures in The Smiler with a Knife, Blake could not simply put her back in a domestic role. His scholarly, more reflective, poet-detective was in danger of being permanently overshadowed. The Smiler with the Knife is outdated, and from our historical vantage point seems rather farfetched. Did the reading public in the late thirties really believe that Great Britain might go the way of Germany, Italy, and Spain? Could the British public really have been seduced by offers of an aristocratic, home grown English Fascism? The Smiler with the Knife is not entirely successful. This spy thriller lacks authenticity and is not nearly as convincing as Eric Ambler's stories of espionage and crime of the same period such as The Coffin for Dimitrios and Journey into Fear. Unquestionably, I clearly prefer Blake's more traditional, more sophisticated mystery format found in other Strangeways stories. Nicholas Blake was actually a pseudonym for the poet Cecil Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951-56, and a lecturer in the 1960s at several universities. He was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis is his son.
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