Book description
Netherplash Cantorum in Dorset was the village John Waterson and his
young wife chose to live in after his retirement. In the event, this
idyllic spot had one severe but unforeseeable drawback: among its
inhabitants was a practical joker whose fertile mind ran to the most
bizarre and grotesque designs. The Village was no place for a quite
retirement, or for a gentle recuperation from the nervous breakdown that
had afflicted Waterson's wife. In Netherplash Cantorum you couldn't tell
what was going to happen next. Extra-ordinary events tripped over each
other. Maybe it was just good fun - or fairly good fun, except that it
became less and less funny, and eventually someone died hideously and
painfully of it.
There has never been a village murder story with a flavour comparable to
that of The Deadly Joker. The weird events at Netherplash Contorum are
made fascinating and convincing by characters who are both bizarre and
credible, including the beautiful Indian Vera Paston, the brothers
called Card, and Waterson himself. The many crime readers who are
addicts of Nicholas Blake will delighted with the originality of this
tour-de-force of crime fiction. Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of
poet and author, Cecil Day-Lewis, used primarily for his mystery series.
Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904 - 22) was a British poet from Ireland and the
Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He is the father of
actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef
Tamasin Day-Lewis.
Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland. He was the
son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis and Kathleen Squires. After
Day-Lewis s mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his
father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with
relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as
Anglo-Irish for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration
of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish
citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest
roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College,
Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927.
