I am glad Lucy Mangan liked the start of The Beast Must Die and encouraged us all to watch the BritBox serial to the end (TV review, 28 May). All the same, this version of the story is a bit of a travesty. I should know, as I was, in my father’s imagination, the six-year-old Martin or Martie whose death was caused by a bullish driver who knocked me down in our Cheltenham lane, failed to stop, and began the story. My father, the then-fashionable poet Cecil Day-Lewis, kept our family going with 20 detective novels written as Nicholas Blake. The father who saw the accident, and swore vengeance, was a detective story writer just like my dad.
The book, published in 1938, began and ended in Lyme Regis, Dorset, where my parents took us on summer holidays from Cheltenham, where we lived through most of that “low dishonest decade”. Our home was on a lane with just the blind corner that is in the story.
Considering the filmic attraction of Lyme Regis, it is hard to know why the TV version moves to the Isle of Wight as well as to an aggrieved mother. And by the way, Nigel Strangeways, originally a detective who looked and behaved just like WH Auden, was regularly on hand to achieve justice with mercy in all but one of the stories.
Sean Day-Lewis
Colyton, Devon
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