The Beast Must Die: Nicholas Blake

The story begins with these lines from Frank Cairnes' journal, in which he plans the death of the person who killed his son. 

I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him…

Cairnes is a writer of detective fiction, a widower, and cannot accept that his only son is dead and the hit-and-run driver has never been found. He describes his journey towards discovering who the killer is and how he gets close enough to the killer to follow up on his plan.

Cairnes meets his quarry, George Rattery, and his family, and the reader realizes that George is truly an awful man, one that might be worth killing. In fact there is a discussion of that topic at (Can it be valid to kill a man who is toxic to everyone around him?) at dinner one night. Cairnes' plan does not succeed, but George Rattery is killed, the diary is discovered, and Nigel Strangeways is hired to prove that Cairnes is not the killer.

As I read the book, I thought of many ways it could end and who could be the culprit. The way it did end was one of my many solutions but certainly low on the list. So the author successfully fooled me throughout the book.

I resisted reading this book for years, even though it is widely acknowledged as a crime classic. The reasons? The opening lines convinced me it would be a book about a dark, obsessed man... and I wasn't looking for that. I also did not see how it fit into the Nigel Strangeways series. The story is pretty dark, with the themes of revenge, obsession, and dysfunctional family dynamics. But a good read, nevertheless, and I am glad I finally did read it.

The Pan Classic Crime edition that I read has a brief introduction by P.D. James. The front matter in that edition includes this information about the author:

Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym for C. Day Lewis CBE, who was Poet Laureate [in the UK] from 1968 until his death in 1972, aged sixty-eight.

C. Day Lewis had an illustrious career both as an academic and as a literary figure, producing many collections of poetry, critical works, translations and novels under his own name.

However, for his twenty detective novels, and his crime short stories, he adopted the pen name of Blake. His central character in most of the novels was the cultivated amateur sleuth Nigel Strangeways, who appears in The Beast Must Die. Julian Symons described Strangeways as 'a real innovation, a genuine literary detective' and there is certainly a strong literary tone to the novels.

C. Day Lewis married his second wife, the actress Jill Balcon, in 1951. He had four children, one of whom is the actor Daniel Day Lewis.

More resources at Tipping My Fedora, Past Offences, crossexaminingcrime, A Hot Cup of Pleasure, and The Grandest Game in the World.

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Publisher:  Pan Books, 1999 (original publisher Collins, 1938)
Length:    260 pages
Format:   Paperback
Series:    Nigel Strangeways
Setting:   England
Genre:     Mystery
Source:   On my TBR pile since 2013.