The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941)
Blurb:
This is the first of Nicholas Blake’s famous detective novels to become a Penguin. It has to do with a snowman built on the lawn outside a house, with murder, with various remarkable people, and some intricate work. Like all his books it tells a good story with wit and distinction, and is superbly constructed. Nigel Strangeways is the detective and it is Scribbles, the cat, who gives him his first clue. For Scribbles, usually sedate, quiet, and well-behaved, made quite an exhibition of himself after drinking a saucer of milk, and to everyone’s surprise executed a wild dervish dance round the room. It may have been a small incident, but on it Nigel built a pile of evidence which shaped out the solution of one of his greatest cases.
My review:
A classic. Blake takes the snowbound country-house, with its household consisting of “a trollop, an Anglo-Saxon squire, an American wife, a rolling stone, a fribble, and a quack," and makes something new of it. Unlike the earlier Thou Shell of Death, however, this is no Innesian parody, but a psychologically bleak portrait of the horrors of drug addiction; the villainous drug dealer and blackmailer is perhaps the most horrifying, and convincing, embodiment of evil in Blake's works. The human sleuth Nigel Strangeways reasons from the cat Scribbles and Macbeth to discover whether Elizabeth Restarick hanged herself or was murdered, and who "the man who revels in evil ... whose very existence seems to depend upon the power to hurt or degrade others" is; the solution is quite unusual.