• The Sad Variety

  • Nigel Strangeways, Book 15
  • By: Nicholas Blake
  • Narrated by: Kris Dyer
  • Length: 7 hrs and 31 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (3 ratings)

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The Sad Variety  By  cover art

The Sad Variety

By: Nicholas Blake
Narrated by: Kris Dyer
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Publisher's summary

The government's security department have asked private detective Nigel Strangeways to keep a discreet eye on Professor Alfred Wagley, a research scientist who is spending the Christmas holidays in the South-West of England.

But someone else is also very interested in the professor and his work, and when his young daughter is kidnapped, Nigel finds himself in a race to avert a tragedy.

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.

©2013 Nicholas Blake (P)2013 Audible Ltd

Critic reviews

"The Nicholas Blake books are something quite by themselves in English detective fiction." (Elizabeth Bowen)
"His plots are ingenious." (Times Literary Supplement)
"Master of detective fiction." (Daily Telegraph)

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