When Daniel Day-Lewis accepted the best actor Oscar in the spring of 2008 one of the people he acknowledged was his father, the late Cecil Day-Lewis. A few people in the audience perhaps recognized his father as the former English Poet Laureate. Fewer still realized that Cecil Day-Lewis was better known, especially in the United States, by his pseudonym, Nicholas Blake, under which he wrote twenty detective novels, sixteen of which featured Nigel Strangeways, a lanky, well-connected, Oxford-educated private inquiry agent.

Cecil Day-Lewis was already an established poet but forced to make ends meet by working as a schoolmaster when he published his first detective novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935, reportedly to pay for mending a leaky roof. While his publishers suggested the use of the pseudonym in order to keep his two literary careers separate, no real attempt was ever made to conceal his true identity. This was, after all, the height of the Golden Age of detective fiction and the form was a not-so-guilty pleasure embraced by numerous academics. A critic for London Times greeted his maiden effort: "A very competent and readable first essay on what may be called 'highbrow' detective fiction. The dialogue is sprinkled, as one would expect, with a number of literary quotations, but apart from this—for the style is perfectly simple and straightforward—there is nothing to show that the book is the work of a modern poet, although there is a certain significance in the fact that the plot is laid in a preparatory school."

That leaky roof turned out to be a lucky disaster. A Question of Proof sold well and Day-Lewis was encouraged to continue Strangeways' adventures. Mysteries paid better than poetry and after eight years of toiling as a teacher, he was finally able to support his family by his writing alone.

There is no evidence that Day-Lewis ever thought of himself as slumming when he turned to crime fiction. While he was often linked with some of the more "literary" mystery writers, for example Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, he himself was a major fan of Agatha Christie. His second novel, the superb Thou Shell of Death (1936), may have been based on Cyril Tourneur's 1607 play, The Revenger's Tragedy, but in most respects this tale set at a snowbound country house at Christmas time is pure Christie. Indeed, his earliest mysteries were all perfect examples of the Golden Age puzzler, complete with a somewhat larger than life sleuth modeled after his poetical mentor, W.H. Auden.

Unlike Christie, however, Blake's mysteries evolved as he moved into the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. While most Golden Age sleuths seemed immune to the ravages of time—Poirot, after all, was already retired when he first appeared in 1920 and was still going strong in the mid-1970s when he would have been well over 100—Strangeways not only aged but altered and changed his own world view. He shed some of the more extravagant attributes borrowed from Auden at about the same time that Day-Lewis moved out from under Auden's poetical shadow with his breakout book of poetry, Word Over All, in 1943.

Strangeways' politics also undergo a metamorphosis as the years pass that match that of his creator, who was growing uncomfortable with his own status as one of the more privileged members of society. This may explain why one of his first acts of rebellion was to very briefly drop the hyphen from his surname. A longtime committed leftist, Day-Lewis joined the communist party in 1935. His poetry during this period focused on social themes with a strong touch of political didacticism. Aspects of this social consciousness also crept into his crime fiction, where he tended to portray virtually any member of the working class as an honest, admirable convention-defying sort, especially when viewed next to a member of the upper class. He openly decried the evils of big business and championed socialism in his 1937 Strangeways' novel, There's Trouble Brewing. However, in his later books, he allowed that the working class was just as susceptible to the occasional transgression as any pampered Tory.

Day-Lewis' flirtation with active communism was relatively short-lived. Within three years he became disillusioned with its more doctrinaire aspects and left the party in 1938, a decision that was reaffirmed much later when the Soviet tanks rolled in Budapest in 1956 to quell the uprising. But even though he was no longer a card-carrying communist, Day-Lewis was still railing against right-wing politics in 1939's The Smiler with the Knife when, with an eye toward Hitler's Germany, he argued that a strongman can turn even a freedom-loving country like Britain into a dictatorship by subverting the very patriotism of its citizenry.

Other, more subtle changes also slipped into his work as the years passed. The later books showed a much greater sense of realism and relied less on the tried-and-true—and often comically absurd—hallmarks of the Golden Age novel. No longer would the murderer, the jig definitely up, be pointed to a room where a waiting revolver sits on the table and be told to do the right thing. And while literary references continued to pepper his books, he began more and more to use aspects of his own life in his fiction. An actual incident from his own experience—a near fatal hit-and-run accident involving one of his sons—was the inspiration for an early novel, 1938's The Beast Must Die, picked by H.R.F. Keating as one of 100 best detective novels of all time, though most other critics, ourselves included, favor other Blake titles, including two that drew upon Day-Lewis' work experiences. Minute for Murder (1947) is set at the Ministry of Morale, an institution similar to the Ministry of Information where Day-Lewis worked as an editor during World War II. It's a brilliant character study where the victim is poisoned in full view of a half-dozens suspects. Nearly as good is End of Chapter (1957) in which Strangeways investigates a murder in a publishing house that bears a remarkable resemblance to Chatto and Windus, the firm where Day-Lewis was hired as a director in 1954. Critic Nicholas Fuller opts for 1949's The Head of Traveller as his masterpiece, calling it a "character-driven tragedy" and offering up a personal and detailed exploration of the poetic process

By this point, the years had begun to take their toll on Strangeways. By allowing his detective to age and suffer the calamities of time, Day-Lewis was able to add a depth to his books that was lacking in the works of many of his contemporaries. The loss of Strangeways' wife in the Blitz, the explorer Georgia Cavendish whom he met in Thou Shell of Death, deeply affects him but is somewhat abated when he meets and beds Clare Massinger, who becomes his mistress. We learn a great deal about his personal life, but what we never really find out is how Strangeways manages to put food on the table and a roof over his head. He is described as a private inquiry agent, but money never seems to change hands. Why this amateur sleuth should enjoy the confidence of his usual ally, Superintendent Blount of the Yard, is a question that would no doubt perplex most real coppers, although any true mystery fan knows that these are topics best left alone.

The creator of Nigel Strangeways was born in April 27, 1904, in Ballintubbert, Laois, Ireland, the son of a minister who moved his infant son to London following his wife's death in 1906. While Day-Lewis continued to refer to himself as Anglo-Irish for the rest of his life, he threw his lot in with Britain after the creation of the Irish Republic and was greatly troubled by Ireland's neutrality—and unofficial support for Germany—during World War II. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he was graduated in 1927. In 1928, he married Mary King, the daughter of a teacher at Sherborne, and began an eight-year teaching career. With Mary he had two sons, one of whom, Sean, wrote a biography of his father: C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980). He also had another son (some authorities say two) by a Dorset farmer's wife in the early 1940s. Day-Lewis also had a very public and tumultuous affair with the novelist Rosamund Lehmann during the 1940s. In 1951, he and Mary were divorced and he married the actress Jill Balcon with whom he had a son (Daniel) and a daughter, Tamasin Day-Lewis, a journalist specializing in writing about food.

From the 1950s on Day-Lewis taught poetry at a number of universities, including Oxford and Harvard. In 1968, 45 years after his first volume of verse, Beechen Vigil and Other Poems, was published, he was appointed Poet Laureate of England, succeeding John Masefield, who had held the post for 37 years. Sadly, Day-Lewis' reign was to be a short one. He died of pancreatic cancer on May 22, 1972, at the age of 68 at the home of Kingsley Amis, where he and his wife were staying. A great admirer of Thomas Hardy, he asked to be buried near his grave.

So, was Cecil Day-Lewis a poet first and mystery writer second? Does it make any difference? There is no question that he took both fields very seriously and did his best to produce quality work no matter what hat he wore. And when it came to mystery fiction, he understood better than most that one of the most important of the literary skills is the power to entertain.

Tom & Enid Schantz
June 2008

Note: The editors wish to acknowledge the work of Nicholas Fuller ("The Poet's Way of Detection") and James Gindin ("Nicholas Blake"), an entry in The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers.