‘Nicholas Blake’ (1901–1972) was the pen name of the Irish writer and poet Cecil Day Lewis, who was educated at Sherborne and Wadham College, Oxford. As Blake, Day Lewis wrote twenty novels, a handful of short stories and a couple of plays; he also reviewed crime fiction. Some of his novels are pure detective stories with clues to find and alibis to unravel—novels like There’s Trouble Brewing (1937) and Malice in Wonderland (1940)—but he also wrote psychological crime novels, the foremost being A Tangled Web (1956), which incidentally was the only one of his titles not published by the Crime Club.
The Nicholas Blake books were immensely popular, not least for the strictly fair-play approach to the detection of the criminal that he takes in the sixteen novels that feature Nigel Strangeways, an amateur sleuth in the classic mould. Arguably the best of the Strangeways canon is The Beast Must Die (1938), in which a man sets out to commit murder but events do not go entirely as planned, and the suitably tongue-in-cheek End of Chapter (1957), in which Strangeways investigates murder at a publishing house.
‘Mr Prendergast and the Orange’ was published by the Sunday Dispatch on 27 March 1938.