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Author:

Nicholas Blake (pseudonym of Cecil Day Lewis - Poet Laureate and Professor of Poetry at Cambridge and later Oxford)

Title:

A Question of Proof

Published:

1935

Genre/Sub-Genre:

Golden Age ‘puzzle’ mystery

Plot summary:

In an English preparatory school in 1935, a schoolboy - the headmaster’s orphaned nephew - is murdered and the police are flummoxed. Then Nigel Strangeways, nephew to the Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, is called in to help by his friend Michael Evans, a Master at the school who is having an affair with the headmaster’s wife, Hero. Suspicion falls on Evans and Hero but Nigel is not convinced. Then the Headmaster is also murdered, in plain daylight. Can Nigel solve the mystery before the police charge Evans and Hero?

Overall:

I quite enjoyed this Golden Age mystery, complete with a closed community, numerous suspects, red herrings, a perceptive amateur detective and a somewhat rigid policeman with little insight into the dynamics of the school.

Plotting:

I thought it was well done - plenty of intrigue and false trails to lead us astray. In the end it stretched credibility but was just strong enough to be convincing. It reflected a bridge between the hypocritical values of Victorian England and the more open values of the post-Great War electrical age.

Characterisation:

Excellent evocation of the people who inhabit this closed, privileged world, with its rules and rituals, its exclusionary boyhood culture, its ambivalent attitude towards the police and other outsiders and their condescendence towards their social ‘inferiors’.

Dialogue:

Uses just enough special vocabulary to be convincing:

- among the Masters: ‘fullahs’ not ‘fellers’;  ‘Here, I say, hang it, old man’;

- among the boys: ‘you poor simp’; ‘squit’.

He also catches the local working-class dialect - ‘Tur’ble business, this, sur’.

Setting and Description:

Cecil Day Lewis must have known this type of  environment from firsthand experience and he calls it up skilfully.

Readability:

It’s easy to read although somewhat old fashioned in its style. Lewis doesn’t hesitate to act as a Universal Narrator peeking into everyone’s head and telling us what’s going on - to the point where author intrusion takes over at times. Still, one can accept that as part of its era.

Sub-plots:

These were essential to the plot and skilfully woven in.

Read another by same author?

Probably

Rating

8/10

 

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