Suddenly At His Residence

A review of Suddenly at his Residence by Christianna Brand – 230702

It was once said that if you borrowed a crime fiction novel from a public library, always check that the last page is intact or else you run the risk of missing out whodunit. In truth, very few, if any, of the novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction have left it to the last page but in this novel by Christianna Brand, the third in her Inspector Cockrill series, originally published in 1946 and now reissued as part of the excellent British Library Crime Classics series, it is the very last sentence of the book that the solution to two impossible crimes is revealed. I will not put my foot in it by saying much more, but if you are reading a physical copy make sure that the vital final page is there.

On the face of it, the book, which goes by the alternative title of The Crooked Wreath, is a rather conventional story featuring a country house, a curmudgeonly, cantankerous head of the family, Sir Richard March, who rather mawkishly puts his first wife, Serafina, on a pedestal and marks the anniversary of her death with rituals that the rest of the family have to join in with, the rather foolish announcement that he is going to change his will, disinheriting his grandchildren, and settling all on his current wife, Belle, and the inevitable demise of Sir Richard, poisoned, and the disappearance of the new will.     

However, unsurprising as these events are, Brand decides to spice things up by turning March’s death into an impossible murder. He had gone off in high dudgeon to change his will, amusingly getting members of the family to give him the instruments he needed to disinherit them, a pen and access to a lawyer, to stay the night in the cottage in which Serafina had died. Unlike most impossible murders it does not involve locked rooms but rather rose bushes, the roses being at just that stage where the slightest brush against them will knock them to the ground, and paths which had been freshly sanded and would show any footprints. Nevertheless, someone had managed to poison the old man.

But not content with one impossible murder Brand throws in a second, the poisoning of the old gardener who knew a little more about the family than they gave him credit for and was not above exploiting it for his own gain. Again, footprints, or rather the absence of them, give his death the air of impossibility as he is surrounded by a sea of dust with only his footprints visible. There is a suicide note in which he confesses to Sir Richard’s murder but it always dangerous to assume a degree of literacy amongst the lower orders.

There are only six possible suspects, one of whom could be eliminated from the second murder, and by logic from the first after they had been arrested following a grave miscarriage of justice at the coroner’s hearing. Their crime was to be a foreigner, an outsider who was only a member of the family through marriage. Edward is the most interesting of the family members, a man whose exposure to alienists, the then term for psychiatrists, has convinced him that he is prone to “fugues” and can lose control of his actions without remembering what he has done, the perfect fall guy, in fact. His fragile psychological make-up is rather cruelly, in modern eyes, played upon.

As it is 1944 and the war is still on, a flying bomb appears deus ex machina to bring matters to a head and allows Cockrill, whose low-key approach to sleuthing primarily involves getting the suspects to talk amongst themselves and see what transpires, to play the role of God by deciding which of the two trapped in the resulting inferno should be rescued, the murderer or the innocent.

There are plenty of twists and turns and competing theories as to who and how the murders were done. The purist would argue that there are more holes in the plot than in a colander and while that is true and there is an element of impossibility to the explanation of the way both impossible murders were committed, Brand manages to divert the reader’s attention with a tour de force of some not inconsiderable brio and humour. It is well worth a read so that you can judge which side of the fence you sit on.

Death Of Jezebel

A review of Death of Jezebel by Christianna Barand – 230303

There is so much to talk about Death of Jezebel, the fourth in Brand’s Inspector Cockrill series, originally published in 1948 and now reissued as part of the inestimable British Library Crime Classics series, that a simple 700 or so word review cannot possibly do the book justice. It is a compelling read, a complex plot involving impossible murders in a variation of a locked room, misdirection galore, and two detectives trying to get the better of each other.

Brand takes the unusual step right at the outset of listing her principal characters, noting that three will receive death threats and one will be the murderer. She then, in a prologue, expounds the casus belli, the suicide out in Malaya of Johnny Wise, driven to distraction when he finds his fiancé, the flighty Perpetua Kirk, in a compromising position, have been intoxicated and set up by Isabel Drew and Earl Anderson. The three implicated in Johnny’s suicide each receive death threats and, assuming that the prospective murderer did not send one to themselves, the culprit, if there are any murders, can only be one of Edgar Port aka Sugar-Daddy, Brian Bryan from Sumatra, Susan Betchley aka Bitchley, and George Exmouth.

The action takes place at the Elysian Hall, venue for the Homes for Heroes Exhibition, the centre piece of which is a pageant, masterminded by Port and in which all seven protagonists are involved. The set is a castle tower and a courtyard. The rear to the stage is locked during the performance and everything that happens at the front is witnessed by the audience which includes Inspecter Cockrill, up to London from Kent ostensibly for a conference but who has been contacted by a frightened Perpetua.

The first death in the book is that of Isabel, who falls out of the tower having been strangled. I like a good fenestration. It seems impossible to see who murdered her, never mind how it was achieved. To add to the sense of mystery both Earl and Perpetua are missing, Perpetua found later by Brian Bryan locked in an outer room, and Earl later found to have been murdered too, when his head is delivered to the unfortunate Perpetua in a parcel.

Elysian Hall is not on Cockrill’s patch and the lead investigator is Inspector Charlesworth of the Yard, another of Brand’s series detectives. The two are chalk and cheese and while Charlesworth magnanimously allows Cockrill to lend a hand, there is an undercurrent of faint animosity between the two, each vying to prove that their methodology, Charlesworth representing the new school and Cockrill the old, is superior and the former never letting the latter forget that he made a mess of an earlier case. This adds some humour to the investigation and it is gratifying to see that Cockrill comes through with flying colours, even if he seemed to have made a potentially fatal error at the end.

Much of the investigation centres, naturally, upon how Isabel was defenestrated and theories are banded backwards and forwards, some more convincing than others and each, for a moment at least, shining guilt on one of the four suspects. At times it appears that they might have acted in collusion and at one point all four decide to confess separately to both murders. With such a small suspect list it is to Brand’s credit that she can keep the dramatic tension going for so long.

I did work out the culprit, thanks to a clever bit of wordplay, but it took me much longer than it normally does to get to the whodunit. As to the howdunit, even having reread the relevant passages several times, I am not convinced that there would have been enough time for the culprit to pull off Isabel’s murder in the way described, but that is a mere quibble.

The Far East campaign has often been described as the forgotten theatre of war and Brand’s text brings home the horrors of the Japanese invasion, wiping out families, records and causing untold psychological horrors. Pont’s wife is in a home after a nervous breakdown suffered as a result of the traumas of the invasion and the protagonists are each in their own way scarred by their experiences there, not just by the suicide of Wise. This is just another fascinating insight in a fabulous book.

For me, it had just the right mix of absurdity, clever plotting, and complex mystery. My only serious criticism is that her characterisation is not strong, with perhaps only Cockrill coming alive on the page. Still, you cannot have everything.

Green For Danger

A review of Green For Danger by Christianna Brand

The second in Brand’s Inspector Cockrill series, Green for Danger was originally published in 1944, was the inspiration for a popular film two years later, starring Alistair Sim as the Inspector, and is now reissued as part of the British Library’s impressive Crime Classics series. It is a clever, compelling, entertaining, sometimes amusing, closed circle murder mystery, but with so much more.

The story is set in a hospital in World War 2 and is both wonderfully atmospheric, there are bombing raids and air raid sirens about which Brand’s characters are cheerfully and stoically blasé, a criticism that forced her to add a note of explanation in later editions, and she captures the hustle and bustle of the hospital, with casualties coming in and out, periods of feverish activity interspersed with quiet moments for introspection. Brand’s husband worked in such a hospital during the blitz, and she uses her second-hand knowledge to good effect. There is just enough medical verisimilitude to make the story believable without overloading it with unnecessary detail.  

Brand cleverly plays on the reader’s concerns about ending up on an operating theatre, entrusting your life into the hands of a team of strangers you have never met and being enveloped by the fumes of an anaesthetic, never knowing whether you will come round again. Of course, there is a death in the operating theatre, Joseph Higgins, a postman, who dies during a routine operation, much to the surprise and distress of the operating team.

In a neat touch Higgins is used in the opening chapter to introduce us to the suspects, delivering their acceptance letters for positions at Heron’s Park, allowing her to give a thumbnail character of each of the suspects. Each has a secret and/or is embroiled in a romance with one another. Gervase Eden is a lady’s man who had a Harley Street practice, Mr Moon, an elderly surgeon, is grieving the loss of a son who was killed when he was knocked off his bicycle, Dr Barnes is an anaesthetist who was cleared of wrongdoing when a previous patient, Jane Woods who has become a nurse to repay for her previously frivolous life, Esther Sanson whose life has been dominated by her hypochondriac mother who subsequently dies in a bombing raids, Marion Bates who is on the look-out for a husband, and Frederica Linley, a flighty young girl escaping the clutches of her stepmother.

Doubts about Higgins’ death indicate that he has been murdered and the chain-smoking Inspector Cockrill is called upon to investigate. He quickly realises that the murderer can only be one of the seven identified in the opening chapter and the field is narrowed further when Marion Bates, who indicates that she has some vital evidence that will unmask the culprit, is killed in the operating theatre, dressed in gown and mask and stabbed twice, once after she had been died, and an attempt to gas Felicity Linley is thwarted by her discovery by Sanson.

A smear of black paint gives Cockrill the clue to how Higgins was murdered, a theory that he tests with a dangerous experiment when William, whom Sanson has fallen in love with during his stay in hospital, undergoes a near fatal experience on the table during another routine operation. Cockrill’s methods are unconventional to say the least and he cranks up the pressure on the remaining suspects as he keeps them housed together, waiting for one to crack. Inevitably, one does, and the murderer is revealed as well as the motive for the crimes.

Brand cleverly racks up the pressure and the latter part of the book is as much a psychological thriller as a straightforward whodunit. Even with a limited field of suspects she throws in enough red herrings and misdirections to keep the reader question whether their idea of the culprit is correct and the denouement leaves an element of doubt until the true chain of events is straightened out.

I really enjoyed this book from start to finish and am glad that with such a long NHS waiting list I am unlikely to be on an operating table in the next decade or so!

Book Corner – June 2018 (2)

The Long Arm of the Law – edited by Martin Edwards

Very few policemen make it into the golden pantheon of literary detection. Of the crème de la crème only Maigret, in my view, is comparable with Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey and Agatha Christie’s creations, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot. Where the local plod appear in the pages of Conan Doyle, Christie, Chesterton, Sayers et al, they are pedestrian, slow-witted, literary devices to illustrate the brilliance of the grey cells contained within the cranium of the amateur sleuth.

Of course, if we are looking for the antecedents of literary detection, we cannot ignore Dickens’ Inspector Bucket (Bleak House, 1853) and Wilkie Collins’ Sergeant Cuff (The Moonstone, 1868) but they are both preceded by Edgar Allan Poe’s amateur, Auguste Dupin, whose mastery of ratiocination was amply exemplified in The Murders of the Rue Morgue (1841). In an attempt to rescue the much maligned officer of the constabulary, the indefatigable Martin Edwards has put together an interesting collection of fifteen short stories showing the professional policeman at his best.

Anthologies are patchy in quality at best and I sensed at times that Edwards was scraping the barrel to provide enough examples from a varied array of writers to make his point. The other problem is that often the resolution of the problem is not the result of structured, forensic enquiry and investigation which, I assume, is the staple fare of police work but the inspired deduction of one of the officers. In other words, there is little difference in the way the culprit is unmasked it just happens that the grey cells belong to a police officer, not a leisured amateur.

The book’s opening story, The Mystery of Chenholt by Alice and Claude Askew, sets the collection off on the wrong foot. The detective, in order to discover what was going on in the house, has to put his fiancée, albeit an officer in another force but not a detective, into the place as an undercover agent. Her evidence results in the unmasking of the villain. Reggie, the detective, pulls it all together but it is not a shining example of straightforward police brilliance.

That said, there are some gems to be found within. Laurence Meynell, a writer I had never come across although, according to Edwards’ insightful and punchy introductions to each story, he had been writing for sixty years across a number of genres, produced my favourite, the Cleverest Clue. The eponymous clue was staring all of us in the face but it took a stroke of genius for it to be spotted and its importance to be recognised. A great story.

After The Event, by Christianna Brand, was another of my favourites, not least because its format was so different and seeing two detectives competing and pitting their wits against each other was fun. Michael Gilbert’s Old Mr Martin has an unexpected twist at the end that I didn’t see coming – one that might offend the sticklers for the rules and conventions of detective fiction but provides a satisfying ending to the spookiest and most atmospheric of the tales.

Choosing a title is one of the hardest tasks facing a writer and my enjoyment of the entertaining romp that is Roy Vickers’ The Man Who Married Too Often was marred somewhat by the fact that the title pretty much gave the game away. None of the other stories reach the heights of these but that is one of the joys and risks of reading an anthology.

An interesting collection but I’m not sure that the case is made for a reconsideration of the merits of police officer-led detective fiction.