One of the Observer's 1,000 novels everyone must read, The Beast Must
Die is a darkly compelling psychological thriller in which a crime
writer plans to commit the perfect murder. The fourth Nigel Strangeways
mystery.
Respected crime writer Frank Cairns plots the perfect murder--a murder
that he himself will commit. Cairns intends to murder the hit-and-run
driver who killed his young son, but when his intended victim is found
dead and Cairns becomes the prime suspect, the author insists that he
has been framed. An old friend of Cairns calls in private detective
Nigel Strangeways, who must unravel a fiendishly plotted mystery if he
is to discover what really happened to George Rattery.
About the author: 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 19 more 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.
