Private detective Nigel Strangeways receives a call for help from
Wonderland, a new holiday camp that has recently opened only to be
plagued by a series of cruel practical jokes conducted by someone
calling themselves 'The Mad Hatter.' The camp's owners are convinced a
rival firm, desperate to put them out of business, is behind the events.
Or could it be a disgruntled employee, or even one of the four hundred
guests currently staying at the camp? As the pranks become increasingly
dangerous and tensions rise, Nigel must do all he can to uncover the Mad
Hatter's true identity--before it's too late.
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who
was born in County Laois, Ireland in 1904. After his mother died in
1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer
holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School
and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake
initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry
writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question
of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime
novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as
numerous poetry collections and translations. During the Second World
War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information,
which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for
Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an
editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in
1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
