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                                      INSPIRATION FOR A NOVELIST

Picture
Picture
The poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, (1904-1972) resided in an early 18th century 
terraced house at the foot of Crooms Hill opposite what is now the Greenwich 
Theatre.  The house was the setting for his 1961 murder mystery novel 'The 
Worm of Death', the sixteenth in a series of twenty such novels written under
the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.  He had begun writing the novels in 1935 with 
'A Question of Proof', in which he created the character of the gentleman detective 
Nigel Strangeways, who featured in all but four of the subsequent novels.

The novel is set in foggy Greenwich in 1960 and some of the action takes place 
on and around Ballast Quay, the Cutty Sark Tavern and Robinson's scrapyard.  In 
a note to the reader Nicholas Blake reveals the three liberties he has taken in the 
writing of the book: "(a) to alter the weather of February 1960; (b) to build a house
where no house is - on a certain quay in East Greenwich; and (c) to install Dr. Piers
Loudron, his daughter and two of his sons, in my own house at Greenwich."


The poetry of the sights and sounds of the river vividly embellish a novel that keeps 
the reader guessing to the end which of the many possible suspects with a motive
is the real murderer.

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