Blake, Nicholas
Entry updated 17 March 2025. Tagged: Author.
Pseudonym of Irish-born UK poet and author Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-1972) for his thrillers and detective novels, most of them featuring the detective Nigel Strangeways. Of these, The Smiler with the Knife (summer 1939 News Chronicle; 1939), the fifth in the Nigel Strangeways sequence, is of sf interest as a dreadful-warning tale, set in Near Future England, where a Nazi-inspired coup by Fascist aristocrats is very narrowly averted. The Invention sought after by later Villains in The Sad Variety (1964) is a McGuffin that its boffin creator disdains to understand. [JC]
Cecil Day-Lewis
born Ballintubbert, County Laois, Ireland: 27 April 1904
died London: 22 May 1972
works (highly selected)
- The Smiler with the Knife (London: Collins, 1939) [first appeared summer 1939 News Chronicle: in the publisher's Crime Club series: hb/]
- The Whisper in the Gloom (London: Collins, 1954) [in the publisher's Crime Club series: hb/]
- The Sad Variety (London: Collins, 1964) [in the publisher's Crime Club series: hb/]
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