The Dreadful Hollow (1953)
Blurb:
My review:
Although standard Blake, entertaining. It is competently done, but we expect more than competence from Nicholas Blake. Everything about the book is taken from the stock cupboard: the quietly idyllic village (this one, Prior's Umborne, is in Dorset, although it is found in a thousand books under as many names and in as many places), its poison-pen, the unpleasantly arrogant financier who quarrels with the villagers and is found dead in the quarry, his two sons (one of whom is eccentric), the crippled beauty, her highly-strung sister and the vicar. Only the Dickensian Daniel Durdle, leading light of the Plymouth Brethren, is particularly original. Strangeways is fairly routine; he is hired by the victim to investigate the poison pen, discovers who it is (the identity should not come as much of a surprise to the reader) well before the halfway mark, and then, his client dead, sets about investigating the murder. Despite being hampered by romantic complications, he detects competently but unexcitingly from timetables and alibis, although there are a few psychological and literary clues, including an M.R. Jamesian nightmare and some quotes from Tennyson's Maud. The reader (who will probably tumble to the murderer’s identity, concealed by one of the oldest tricks in the book, quite early on in the piece) may be surprised that Superintendent Blount, despite the fact that his “Pickwickian exterior camouflaged a mind as ruthlessly purposeful as a guided missile”, chases up so many wrong trees, and that Nigel takes so long to discover the particularly glaring truth. There is a particularly fine climax, an effective contrast between the careful logic of Nigel Strangeways on the one hand and mob violence around the quarry on the other—which partly makes up for the fact that the reader has had to trudge through alibis and stock situations.