Joanna Cannan (1898 – 1961)

Born in 1898, Joanna Cannan was the youngest daughter of Oxford don Charles Cannan, and his wife Mary Wedderburn. Part of a family of authors, Joanna Cannan was cousin to novelist and playwright Gilbert Cannan, sister to poet May Wedderburn Cannan, mother to fellow pony-book authors Josephine Pullein-Thompson, Diana Pullein-Thompson and Christine Pullein-Thompson, as well as to screenwriter and playwright Denis Cannan, and grandmother to cookbook author Charlotte Popescu. Cannan worked as a VAD (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse during WWI, meeting her her future husband, Captain Harold J. “Cappy” Pullein-Thompson, in Oxford, during the course of that work. They were married in 1918, and Cannan (who never published under her married name) became the primary breadwinner for the family, after he was severely injured during the war, publishing approximately one book per year. Cannan suffered from ill health in the 1950s, and eventually diagnosed with tuberculosis. She died in 1961.

Prior to writing detective fiction, her books primarily explored the aftermath of World War I and life in England during the Great Depression. In 1932, she settled in rural Oxfordshire with her husband and four children; all four of her children went on to become writers themselves. She began to write fiction for young readers, and published nine books for children between 1936 and 1957. During the same period she wrote two novels featuring Inspector Guy Northeast, They Rang Up the Police (1939) and Death at The Dog (1941); following a nine-year hiatus from detective fiction, she returned to the genre in 1950 with the introduction of Inspector Ronald Price in Murder Included (1950), The Body in the Beck (1952), And Be a Villain (1958), Long Shadows (1955), and All Is Discovered (1962). (Source: Fantastic Fiction)

I came across Joanna Cannan name for the first time thanks to Curtis Evans very personal selection of 150 Favorite Golden Age British Detective Novels, here. Later on, Martin Edwards included Joanna Cannan’s No Walls of Jasper (1930) in his book The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, unfortunately this book is out of print and quite rare, though it is available in a few libraries. It has been reviewed at ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’ and at Dead Yesterday. Thus, I will content myself reading instead They Rang Up the Police, which is more readily available.

(Facsimile Dust Jacket, V. G. Gollancz (UK), 1939)

There’s a new detective on the scene…

When murder strikes in the quiet English countryside only Inspector Guy Northeast of Scotland Yard sees the vital clue.

When Delia Cathcart and Major Willoughby disappear from their quiet English village one Saturday morning in July 1937, it looks like a simple case of a frustrated spinster running off for a bit of fun with a straying husband.

But as the hours turn into days, Inspector Guy Northeast begins to suspect that she may have been the victim of foul play. On the surface, Delia appeared to be a quite ordinary middle-aged Englishwoman content to spend her evenings with her sisters and mother and her days with her beloved horses. But Delia led a secret life – and Guy turns up more than one person who would like to see Delia dead. Except Delia wasn’t the only person with a secret…

Never before published in the United States, They Rang Up the Police appeared in England in 1939 and is the first of two books to feature young Inspector Guy Northeast, who, as critics Jacques Barzun and Wendell Hertig Taylor point out, “marks a departure from the norm of the thirties.” (Source: Lume Books)

Nicholas Blake (1904–1972)

Nicholas Blake was born Cecil Day-Lewis in Ballintubbert, Ireland, on April 27, 1904, the only son of the Reverend F. C. Day-Lewis and Kathleen Blake Squires. After the death of his mother in 1908, his aunt helped to rear him, following his father, an Irish Protestant clergyman, as he moved from one London parish to another. Blake attended Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford University, where he received a master’s degree.

He taught at various schools from 1927 until 1935, running into trouble with school administrators because of his leftist political views. He married Constance Mary King, the daughter of one of his former teachers, in 1928, and the couple had two sons. Desperately in need of more money, Blake, who had read many mysteries himself, wrote and published his first one, A Question of Proof, in 1935. He was a member of the Communist Party in Great Britain from 1935 to 1938, and though he never resigned from it, his political views changed, particularly after the Spanish Civil War. He worked for the Ministry of Information during World War II and was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1950.

Blake divorced his first wife in 1951 and the same year married Jill Balcon, with whom he had a son and a daughter. His professional reputation remained high: He held the position of professor of poetry at Oxford University (1951-1956) and director of the publishing firm Chatto and Windus (1954-1972). He was the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry at Harvard University (1964-1965), and finally, poet laureate of England, from 1968 until his death in 1972. (Source: “Cecil Day Lewis – Biography” Masterpieces of Fiction, Detective and Mystery Edition Ed. Carl Rollyson. eNotes.com, Inc. 2008 eNotes.com 23 Mar, 2020 http://www.enotes.com/topics/cecil-day-lewis#biography-biography-3306)

His debut novel, A Question of Proof (1935) was set in a private school, and introduced Strangeways, a wealthy private investigator. Thou Shell of Death (1936), a superb impossible-crime novel, swiftly followed. By early 1939, the Marxist detective –fiction fan John Strachey was citing Blake as one of the outstanding writers of detective fiction, in an article which seems the first to have proclaimed that the Thirties were a ‘Golden Age’ for the genre. After the Second World War, Blake continued to write crime novels of quality, and Strangeways adapted to changing times in books such as End of Chapter (1957), set in a publishing house. In 1968, the year when he was appointed Poet Laureate, he produced his final crime novel. Strangeways does not appear in The Private Wound, set in the author’s native Ireland and containing thinly disguised autobiographical elements, but some judges regard it as the best of the Nicholas Blake books. (Source: Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books)

Nigel Strangeways Series: A Question of Proof (1935); Thou Shell of Death (1936) aka Shell of Death; There’s Trouble Brewing (1937); The Beast Must Die (1938); The Smiler with the Knife (1939); Malice in Wonderland (1940) aka The Summer Camp Mystery / The Malice with Murder; The Case of the Abominable Snowman (1941) aka The Corpse in the Snowman; Minute for Murder (1947); Head of a Traveler (1949); The Dreadful Hollow (1953); The Whisper in the Gloom (1954) aka Catch and Kill; End of Chapter (1957); The Widow’s Cruise (1959); The Worm of Death (1961); The Sad Variety (1964); and The Morning After Death (1966).

Novels: A Tangled Web (1956) aka Death and Daisy Bland; A Penknife in My Heart (1958); The Deadly Joker (1963); and The Private Wound (1968).

(Facsimile Dust Jacket, Collins The Crime Club (UK), 1938)

A 1001 Midnights Review: Nicholas Blake – The Beast Must Die

Nicholas Blake, The Beast Must Die at Vintage Pop Fictions

Forgotten Book – The Beats Must Die at ‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’

The book’s opening paragraph is as memorable as anything in the Francis Iles canon: ?I am going to kill a man. I don’t know his name, I don’t know where he lives, I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him.’ (Source: Martin Edwards, The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books).