A Penknife in My Heart by Nicholas Blake

Cecil Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, was born in County Laois, Ireland, in 1904. His pseudonym was NICHOLAS BLAKE. After his mother died in 1906, his father raised him in London, with summer vacations spent with family in Wexford. He attended Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford, where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1927. Blake worked as a teacher to support his poetry writing income, and his first Nigel Strangeways novel, A Matter of Evidence, was published in 1935. Blake went on to create nineteen more crime novels, with Nigel Strangeways appearing in all but four of them, as well as numerous poetry collections and translations.

He worked as a publishing editor in the Ministry of Information during WWII, which he used as the inspiration for the Ministry of Morale in Minute for Murder, and then as an editor and director at Chatto & Windus following the war. In 1968, he was named Poet Laureate, and in 1972, he died at the home of his friend, the novelist Kingsley Amis.