Showing posts with label Nicholas Blake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Nicholas Blake. Show all posts

Thursday, June 16, 2016

A Penknife in My Heart by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1960)

One last book by Nicholas Blake--found at the Lifeline Bookfair:


Charles Hammer was ruthless ; he needed money quickly and he would get it if a certain person died.  When he met Ned Stowe he saw how he could commit the perfect murder.

Ned was by no means ruthless--but he was desperate.  Passionately in love with Laura, he was tied to a neurotic, clinging wife.  He sometimes felt he'd do anything to get rid of her.

Hammer proposes a contract.  As it works out it binds the two men together in a terrible grip which only death can relax.
If this plot seems familiar, it is.  Patricia Highsmith told the same basic story in Strangers on a Train (1950).  (Of course Blake denied having read Strangers on a Train, or having seen the Hitchcock movie of the same name!)

Thursday, May 19, 2016

Head of a Traveller by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1962)

Yet another prize from my Lifeline Bookfair Crime Spree!


They found the body in the Thames--the head, weeks later, in a string bag hanging on a tree.
 Short and sweet--and oh, boy, doesn't it make you want to read more!

Mind you, the blurb makes the book appear more hardboiled and gritty than it is.  And if it had been published in America, and started with the discovery of a headless corpse floating in the Hudson or San Francisco Bay, this book probably would be that kind of detective story.  One would expect the hero (either a jaded PI or a world-weary cop) to track the murderer through the mean back streets of the city, encountering various underworld types along the way.   However, Head of a Traveller was written by a British author, and the detective is a gentleman amateur who tracks the murderer to the country estate of a poet!




Tuesday, April 12, 2016

A Tangled Web by Nicholas Blake (Fontana, 1958)

Another book from my Lifeline Bookfair crime spree:


"... Daisy was conscious of his eyes upon her... something flashed between them, like magnesium, and in that instant he was printed on her memory for ever--the thin, swarthy face, the mouth arrested in a half-smile, the eyes brown, alert, ready to dance, with a sort of wildness asleep behind their steady gaze.  A poacher's face she said to herself ... she might as well have said an angel's ... or a fallen angel's--she was never to care which..."

Daisy and Hugo's love is a tangled web of joy and tragedy, vice and innocence, betrayal and loyalty.  This is a story which cannot be put down.
Who is the tough cookie on the cover of the book?  She certainly isn't Daisy, for Daisy is a true innocent (albeit one with bad taste in boyfriends!)

A Tangled Web is an updated and  fictionalised retelling of the story of John Williams, who was hanged for murder in 1913,  and of his mistress Florence Seymour.