Thou Shell of Death (1936)
Blurb:
My review:
"On the rare occasions afterwards when Nigel could be induced to talk about the fantastic and paradoxical case of the "Chatcombe Killings", as the newspapers once termed them, he was wont to say that it had been solved by a professor of Greek and a seventeenth century dramatist."
Like the later Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941), Thou Shell of Death derives its effects from new changes rung on old themes—the snow-bound country house, the group of unpleasant suspects with motives for murder, the anonymous death threats, and the murder disguised as suicide. As befits the satirical nature of the book, the tone is both more humorous and more consciously literate than the previous A Question of Proof (1935). The plot is, as always with Blake, surprising and ingenious: "the series of revelations they had just been hearing, like magnesium-flashes in a dark room, had only served to blind the eye. Each fresh clue seemed to lead in a different direction and then to break off in the hand before it had got them anywhere." The method used to dispatch Knott-Sloman is ingenious, "the nut was a delayed action shell and contained the kernel of the problem"; and the effective misdirection of the first (and false) solution followed by the really unexpected true solution is excellent. As usual in Blake, the ingenuity of the plot is made human by his keen insight into character: the victim Fergus O'Brien, and his mistress Georgia Cavendish, Nigel Strangeways's future wife, "everything that a woman should be—attractively ugly, eccentric without being a frump, witty, a good cook, sensible and sensual, faithful, and a perfect seat—I am told—on anything from an armadillo to a camel", are fine portraits—as fine a portrait as Vendice's mock skull, used to dispatch the Duke, in the classic basis of the tale.