There’s Trouble Brewing
A review of There’s Trouble Brewing by Nicholas Blake – 230501
Another new author to me, Blake is the nom de plume of C. Day Lewis, who was later to become Poet Laureate in 1968. Crime fiction was a way to earn some money as he sought to make his name as a poet and his go-to amateur sleuth, Nigel Strangeways, is also someone who dabbles in poetry. This is his third outing, the book originally published in 1937. I usually follow a series in chronological order, but decided to sample this one to see if I liked his style. I did.
The set up appealed to me, with an unusual form of death. Eustace Bunnett is a sadistic, lecherous old man, who runs the local brewery with a rod of iron, refusing to modernise it until absolutely necessary and there are rumours that he is considering selling it to a larger rival. He leads his shrew-like wife a dog’s life as he does his dog, whose decomposed body is found boiled in the brewery’s copper boiler. Bunnett commissions Strangeways, to the sleuth’s amazement, to establish who it was that had done away with the dog in this particularly cruel manner.
Before Strangeways can make much progress in this unusual commission, although it does allow him to make the quip when seeking entry to the brewery that he is there to see a man about a dog, human remains are found in the very same copper boiler, the flesh boiled away so that its identity cannot be exclusively established but there is enough circumstantial evidence – false teeth, clothing, etc – to suggest that it is Bunnett himself. Was the death of the dog a dry run for the murder of his master?
While wandering around the brewery, Strangeways finds a small green object, resting above some frost in the refrigerating room, the significance of which escapes him at the time, but which proves to be crucial to the unravelling of the mystery. Whilst the focus of the enquiries is who would have sufficient motive to kill Bunnett, and there are a number, all of whose motives and alibis have to be checked, Strangeways is not entirely convinced that the murder had gone to plan. Why was it necessary to boil Bunnett’s body so that it was barely recognisable? And where was Bunnett’s brother, Joe, who was supposed to be on a sailing trip but neither hide nor hair had been seen of him or his boat?
Eventually, after an evening’s contemplation over a few bottles of beer – I hope they were Bunnett’s – all the pieces of an intriguing mystery fall into place and Strangeways has the answers. The culprit is apprehended in a dramatic penultimate chapter and Strangeways relates how he figured out what had really happened in the final chapter. Blake plays fair with his reader – all the clues are there – and I was on the right track but was struggling with the motivation.
Strangeways is an amiable companion, a little full of himself and apes his creator’s erudition by throwing in some literary allusions from time to time. As a Classics graduate, I particularly enjoyed his comments that solving a crime mystery was like tackling a Greek or Latin unseen, searching for the subject (victim), verb (motive), and object (culprit). There was no little humour in the book, Blake excellently portraying the pettiness and small-mindedness of close communities and the description of the brewery, its workers, and the brewing process struck me as convincing.
I enjoyed the book and there is yet another series to add to my ever-growing TBR pile, which will see me well into my seventies.
