Book description
The Second World War has just finished and amateur detective and poet
Nigel Strangeways is working at the Ministry of Morale in London, in the
Visual Propaganda Division. With war over, life seems to be calm again,
that is until the Director's beautiful secretary is poisoned in full
view of seven members of the division, including Nigel himself. Who
could have killed her? And how?
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.
