The Beast Must Die (novel)

The novel was adapted into films twice a 1952 Argentine film The Beast Must Die directed by Román Viñoly Barreto and starring Laura Hidalgo and a 1969 film This Man Must Die directed by Claude Chabrol and starring Michel Duchaussoy and Caroline Cellier.[2] In addition it was the basis of a 2021 British television series The Beast Must Die.

After his young son is run down and killed by a speeding car in the Gloucestershire village where he lives, mystery novelist Frank Cairns is angry when the police fail to trace the culprit. Deciding to investigate himself he finds out by chance that the passenger in the car is a rising film actress, Lena Lawson. Pretending to be writing a new novel set in a film studio, he meets Lena in London posing under his pen name Felix Lane. After a courtship he manages to gain an invitation to stay with her at the house of her brother-in-law George Rattery in Gloucestershire. For some time he has been planning to murder the man responsible as soon as he has the opportunity, whatever the consequences.

Now certain that Rattery, a wealthy and unpleasant bully, is the man who killed his son Cairns plots his revenge. Discovering that Rattery cannot swim he goads him into coming sailing with him on a stormy day. Complications ensue and the plan goes awry with Rattery able to walk away in apparent triumph. Only a few hours later, however, he collapses after dinner and dies almost instantly of poison. Knowing that he will be the prime suspect, Cairns calls in the private detective Nigel Strangeways to clear him of the murder.

• Goble, Alan. The Complete Index to Literary Sources in Film. Walter de Gruyter, 1999.
• Hopkins, Lisa. Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare. Springer, 2016.
• Reilly, John M. Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Writers. Springer, 2015.
• Stanford, Peter. C Day-Lewis: A Life. A&C Black, 2007.