There's Trouble Brewing

There's Trouble Brewing (1937) is an especially apt title for the third Nigel Strangeways mystery. It follows A Question of Proof (1935) and Thou Shell of Death (1936). Nigel Strangeways reluctantly accepts a request to discuss his recent book on Caroline poets at a meeting of the Maiden Astbury Literary Society in Dorset. Even more reluctantly he agrees to investigate the death of Mr. Bunnett's fox terrier, Truffles. Mr. Eustace Bunnett was not well liked, but as the owner of Bunnett's Brewery he was among the wealthiest and most influential inhabitants of Maiden Astbury. Within twenty-four hours, Mr. Bunnett himself was found dead inside a sealed pressure copper in his brewery. The plot is well-developed and the characters have depth. The solution is not entirely unexpected, but identifying the critical clues and assembling an irrefutable chain of logic is not without difficulty. Even in this early story, Nigel utilizes a keen sense of psychology as well as forensic clues to narrow the focus. The Nigel Strangeways mysteries span about thirty years. Nigel himself ages and matures from story to story, becoming somewhat less idealistic with age. The younger Nigel in There's Troubling Brewing is endowed with several idiosyncrasies that thankfully disappear in later stories. He drinks coffee incessantly and he has an unnerving habit of placing his coffee cup on the extreme edge of tables. He walks with an ostrich stride, whatever that might be. And, perhaps because the setting is a brewery, Nigel consumes several tankards of beer while piecing together his final deductions. In reading this story certain elements seemed vaguely familiar, and I wondered whether I might have read There's Trouble Brewing years ago. But no, I eventually realized that I was confusing this story with an Inspector Morse PBS movie, "The Sins of the Fathers", that aired in 1990. In this screenplay Inspector Morse investigates the murder of the managing director of a family-run brewery that is the target of a hostile take-over bid. The similarity to There's Troubling Brewing is noticeable. Nicholas Blake is a pseudonym for Cecil Day-Lewis, a professor of poetry at Oxford in 1951-56, and a lecturer in the 1960s at several universities. He was Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. The actor Daniel Day-Lewis is his son.