Nicholas Blake
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Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (27 April 1904 – 22 May 1972) was an Irish poet, as well as Poet Laureate for Britain between 1968 and 1972, and, under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake, a mystery writer. Day-Lewis was born in Ballintubber, Queen's County (now County Laois), Ireland. He was the son of the Reverend Frank Cecil Day-Lewis (December, 1872 – 19 April 1938) and Kathleen Squires. After Day-Lewis's mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, with the help of an aunt, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. Day-Lewis continued to regard himself as "Anglo-Irish" for the remainder of his life, though after the declaration of the Republic of Ireland in 1948 he chose British rather than Irish citizenship, on the grounds that 1940 had taught him where his deepest roots lay. He was educated at Sherborne School and at Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. In 1935 Day-Lewis decided to supplement his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof, in which he created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective. This was followed by nineteen more crime novels. (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modeled on W. H. Auden, but Strangeways becomes a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.) From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing. Four of the Blake novels - A Tangled Web, Penknife In My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound - do not feature Strangeways.