> Skip to content
  • Published: 29 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099565574
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 244
  • RRP: $24.99

Minute for Murder



READ ALL AGATHA CHRISTIE? TRY A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY
Amateur detective Nigel Strangeways is working at the Ministry of Morale in London when a beautiful young secretary is poisoned in full view of seven people, including Nigel himself. The eighth Nigel Strangeways mystery

A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY

The Second World War has just finished and amateur detective and poet Nigel Strangeways is working at the Ministry of Morale in London, in the Visual Propaganda Division.With war over, life seems to be calm again, that is until the Director's beautiful secretary is poisoned in full view of seven members of the division, including Nigel himself. Who could have killed her? And how?

A Nigel Strangeways murder mystery - the perfect introduction to the most charming and erudite detective in Golden Age crime fiction.

  • Published: 29 May 2012
  • ISBN: 9780099565574
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 244
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Nicholas Blake

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 a further nineteen 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.

Also by Nicholas Blake

See all

Praise for Minute for Murder

An outstanding mystery novel. Mr Blake's writing is a delight in itself

New York Times

The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction

Elizabeth Bowen

His plots are ingenious

Times Literary Supplement

A master of detective fiction

Daily Telegraph