The Beast Must Die

Rating:
Summary: ahead of its time
Review: I just read a copy of this 30s thriller and I was deeply impressed at how much more elegant and mature it is than most examples of the genre. It concerns a man whose son is killed in a hit and run, and he decides to find and murder the person responsible. The first half of the book, his discovery of the driver and plot to murder him, it superb. It reminds me of Patricia Highsmith, with its ambiguity of motive and its difficulty of determining guilt. The second half becomes more conventional, as a detective tries to sort out what happened and so on, but even that is good writing, except for the ending. If you're in a hurry, just read Parts 1 and 2 and pretend it's an exercise in open-ended thrillers.

Rating:
Summary: ¿Nicholas Blake¿ is the pseudonym of C Day-Lewis
Review: The "Nigel Strangeways" books are a classic series of detective thrillers written under the "Nicholas Blake" pseudonym of Cecil Day-Lewis. "The Beast Must Die" is typical of the series, the 1938 melodramic tale of a man who decides to murder the hit-and-run killer of his only son. When someone else commits the evil deed first, Strangeways is called in to sort out the resulting mess.

Taken on one level, The Beast Must Die is an entertaining, if rather over-written, crime thriller. At another level, it's a much more entertaining spoof of the kind of mannered stories about the British middle class between the wars that were popular at the time. The book's opening sentence has become a classic: "I am going to kill a man... I have no idea what he looks like. But I am going to find him and kill him."

The title is taken from the Book of Ecclesiastes: The beast must die, the man dieth also, yea both must die.