Britain's Poet Laureate paid his bills writing detective novels as Nicholas Blake
Cecil Day-Lewis was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death, a former communist turned Oxford professor. He was also, under another name, the author of a long run of crime novels starring the gentleman sleuth Nigel Strangeways, first sketched as a portrait of his friend W. H. Auden. And he fathered actor Daniel Day-Lewis.
Born in 1904 in Ballintubbert, in what is now County Laois, Ireland, he was the son of a Church of Ireland rector whose own surname fused the names of his birth father and adoptive father. His mother died when he was two, and he grew up in London with his father and an aunt. At Wadham College, Oxford, he joined Auden's circle and helped edit Oxford Poetry 1927; his first collection appeared in 1925. He dropped the hyphen as a writer, calling it inverted snobbery.
In 1935 he wrote A Question of Proof to boost his income and adopted the pen name Nicholas Blake. The detective Strangeways, nephew of a senior Scotland Yard officer, started out extravagant like Auden and grew more serious over nineteen further novels. By the mid-1930s he could live by writing alone. One book, The Beast Must Die, was filmed in Argentina and by Claude Chabrol in France, and became a British television series in 2021.
Politics shaped his early verse. Amid the hardship of the Depression he held a British Communist Party card for three years from 1935, and edited a 1937 collection arguing capitalism had no use for culture. Stalin's purges drove him away, and he renounced his old views in his 1960 memoir The Buried Day. During the Second World War he edited publications at the Ministry of Information, and critics often see Word Over All, from 1943, as the moment he found a lyrical voice distinct from Auden's.
Honours followed: Oxford's Professor of Poetry from 1951 to 1956, the Norton chair at Harvard, and the laureateship after John Masefield, though one adviser consulted called his work run of the mill. His private life was tangled, involving simultaneous affairs with novelist Rosamond Lehmann and actress Jill Balcon, whom he married in 1951. He died on 22 May 1972 at the home of Kingsley Amis and was buried near his hero Thomas Hardy in Stinsford, Dorset.
Source: Cecil Day-Lewis
