A review of The Case Of The Abominable Snowman by Nicholas Blake – 231212

I do like a bit of ring composition and who better to deliver it than a poet? This, the seventh in Blake’s Nigel Strangeways series, originally published in 1941, begins with a Snowman built to resemble Queen Victoria slowly melting to reveal a corpse inside. As the book draws to a conclusion, the scene is repeated and the identity of the body is revealed. The further twist is that it is not who we are led to believe it to be. Either side of these scenes we are treated to the circumstances which lead up to this astonishing discovery.

Blake aka Cecil Day-Lewis has fashioned an entertaining and intriguing story from unpromising beginnings, a country house owned by Hereward Restorick set in a part of the country which is blanketed in snow and contains the usual collection of motley characters including a rather creepy and sinister medic, Bogan.

The death which sparks the action provides a haunting image, a naked young woman with her face made up hanging from a beam. It is Elizabeth Restorick and it looks as though she had committed suicide. On closer inspection, Strangeways believes that this is a case of murder dressed up as suicide. Why otherwise would a woman have gone to bed, taken off her make up in front of the maid only to put it back on again, if she wasn’t expecting to entertain a guest, a lover perhaps?

We never meet Elizabeth aka Betty alive. What we learn about her comes from others and from Strangeways’ investigations. We learn of her troubled adolescence and an event in America which was to have a transformative effect on her life. However, for all that Elizabeth remains a rather aloof character, one around whom a plot has been constructed rather than a vibrant character who has met an untimely end.

There have also been other rum goings-on at the house, not least the bizarre behaviour of the cat, Scribbles, which Strangeways is initially invited to investigate, a ghostly appearance of Betty in the children’s room shortly before her death, and an attempt to poison Andrew Restorick. There is more than enough for Strangeways to get his teeth into.

The title of the book is clever and is key to the motivation behind the story. Yes, the snowman in the garden is abominable because it hides a body, but there is another connotation to snowman. It is a tale of drugs and the consequences of addiction. Initially hooked on marijuana – there is an aside where the difference between marijuana and hashish and the latter’s role in the derivation of assassin – Elizabeth progresses on to cocaine, “snow”, her supplier being an Abominable Snowman in the guise of Dr Bogan who is supposedly treating her for nervous disorders. As is often the case, the more prosaic American title for the book, The Corpse in the Snowman, misses this nuance.

There are really only two suspects and Strangeways lays a trap to smoke the culprit out but to the local police’s chagrin it goes wrong and both Dr Bogan and Andrew Restorick disappear, the presumption being that one has killed the other, but who has killed whom and where is the body. After an exhaustive and fruitless search of the area, after a car had been found in a snowdrift, a change in temperature leads to a thaw and they discover that the object of their search was in front of them all the time.

Nigel Strangeways is far from the infallible sleuth, a little too clever for his own good at times. Despite falling into a trap over the cause of Elizabeth’s death and misjudging the behaviour of the suspects, he gets there in the end. I enjoyed the book but there was something a little cold and clinical about the way the plot unfolded, apt though for a tale about snowmen.