Forgotten Book - The Dreadful Hollow

My first Forgotten Book of 2025 is The Dreadful Hollow, first published in 1953. This is an interesting and bold attempt by Nicholas Blake (the crime writing alter ego of Cecil Day-Lewis) to fuse classic ingredients of traditional detection (brilliant consulting detective, an outbreak of poison pen letters in a seemingly idyllic English village, an enigmatic person in a wheelchair, an unpleasant financier, a likeable vicar, and so on) with the psychologically complex, character-driven crime novel which was coming into fashion at the time.

Blake was an accomplished writer, and this is a very readable book. The structure is striking and unusual. At the start of Part One, Sir Archibald Blick hires Nigel Strangeways to find out who is sending poison pen letters in the Dorset village of Prior's Umborne, where both Blick's sons live. This investigation takes up half the book. And then, at the end of Part One, almost out of the blue, someone is murdered in the village. So Part Two is devoted to Strangeways' attempt to solve that crime. 

There are several oddities, it must be said. Sir Archibald is, we're told (and later reminded, more than once) very keen on eugenics (one might have assumed this had become deeply unfashionable by 1953) and he keeps in his office a photograph of a naked woman. Neither of these striking features of the first chapter have any real significance in the story. And I did find some of the suspects irritating in the extreme, which reduced my interest. There are also one or two plot points that I didn't find convincing, including an incident involving boobytrapped binoculars - though it was certainly dramatic.

Having said that, there was enough in this book to keep me interested throughout, and the final chapter is strong enough to help overcome one's reservations about some of the earlier scenes. I thought that the interplay between Nigel and the police officers was particularly well done; it isn't easy to justify an outsider's involvement in an official investigation in a crime novel that strives for a degree of realism. The title comes from Tennyson's poem 'Maud', as do some of the chapter headings, but I must admit that I'm not clear how the poem relates to the story, if at all. But then, there's an untranslated Latin quotation on the first page of the story and it may be that Day-Lewis was even more of a literary elitist than his Detection Club colleague Dorothy L. Sayers. Not to worry, though. This is an ambitious book, and although I wouldn't say it's wholly successful, I was interested to watch the way the author painted himself into several corners during the course of the story and then managed, with quite a bit of skill, to get out of them.