EX LIBRIS
VINTAGE CLASSICS
NICHOLAS BLAKE
Nicholas Blake was the pseudonym of Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, who was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. After his mother died in 1906, he was brought up in London by his father, spending summer holidays with relatives in Wexford. He was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, from which he graduated in 1927. Blake initially worked as a teacher to supplement his income from his poetry writing and he published his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Question of Proof, in 1935. Blake went on to write a further nineteen crime novels, all but four of which featured Nigel Strangeways, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.
During the Second World War he worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information, which he used as the basis for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and after the war he joined the publishers Chatto & Windus as an editor and director. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1968 and died in 1972 at the home of his friend, the writer Kingsley Amis.
ALSO BY NICHOLAS BLAKE
A Question of Proof
Thou Shell of Death
There’s Trouble Brewing
The Beast Must Die
The Widow’s Cruise
Malice in Wonderland
The Smiler with the Knife
Minute for Murder
Head of a Traveller
The Dreadful Hollow
The Whisper in the Gloom
End of Chapter
The Worm of Death
The Sad Variety
The Morning After Death
NICHOLAS BLAKE
THE CASE OF THE ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN
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Copyright © Nicholas Blake 1941
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain by Collins (The Crime Club) in 1941 First published in Vintage Classics in 2012 This paperback edition reissued in 2025
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ISBN 9781529971118
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