Forgotten Book - Suddenly at His Residence

Recently I attended a meeting with colleagues from the Publications Department at the British Library. We were discussing forthcoming titles in the British Library Crime Classics series as well as other projects, and I was delighted to learn that the books - both the novels and the anthologies - are selling as well as ever. I also had the pleasure of meeting the team member responsible for selling translation rights and it seems that the books are doing increasingly well in different parts of the world. So all the signs are that the series will flourish for a considerable time to come. The main challenge is choosing which books - among the hundreds of worthwhile possibilities - to include so as to maintain and enhance the series' reputation for variety and quality.

I'm the consultant to the series, but of course I'm not the decision-taker and the ultimate responsibility for negotiating on rights and so on rests with others - thankfully! But it's pretty clear that a series like this succeeds by combining popular favourites (albeit relatively recently discovered ones in some cases, E.C.R. Lorac being a good example) with stories that are unknown even to many long-term fans of classic crime (such as Billie Houston's Twice Round the Clock). Among the writers who has made a strong impression on returning to print is Christianna Brand and another of her titles, Suddenly at His Residence (aka The Crooked Wreath) will feature in the series next summer. The Library has given it a new sub-title: A Kent Mystery.

This book makes ingenious use of several tropes of Golden Age fiction. So we have a family tree, a cast of characters and a note indicating that the cast includes two victims and a murderer. There are multiple solutions and not one but two impossible crimes. There's also a final reveal right at the end of the story. Oh, and a rather likeable Great Detective in Inspector Cockrill.

One of Brand's greatest strengths as a crime writer was her commitment to playing fair with her reader. So the clues are supplied, but she disguises them so craftily that it's far from easy to figure out exactly what is going on before Cockrill reveals all. This is a novel published after the Second World War, but it's set in wartime and that background reality makes an important contribution to the storyline. All in all, a pleasing mystery and I'm delighted that it will, before too long, become available again to a very wide readership. 

Forgotten Book - Heads You Lose

I have a vivid recollection of my first encounter with Christianna Brand's Heads You Lose. As a fourteen year old schoolboy, I raced to the local library one Saturday morning in September and borrowed it (in a reprint edition introduced by Michael Gilbert) before nipping back home and settling down to watch my favourite cricket team play their first cup final on television. Alas, my heroes were thrashed, and I was in a very grumpy mood for the rest of that weekend.

My humour wasn't improved by the fact that I felt Brand's novel didn't play fair with me as a reader. I'd greatly admired Green for Danger, but I felt that this village mystery was a let-down. I'm afraid that I'll forever associate it with a day when my juvenile dreams were dashed! However, I was encouraged to give it another go by a thought-provoking discussion of the story in Samantha Walton's Guilty but Insane, which deals with the treatment of psychological disturbance in Golden Age fiction.

On a second reading, my revised conclusion is that the book is a curate's egg. Brand skates over thin ice more cleverly than I appreciated in my youth. There's a pleasing false solution, but this was only her second novel, and it's well short of her best. It introduced her main character Inspector Cockrill, aka "Cockie", but I must admit I've never found him quite as engaging as do some fans. The book was published in 1942, and one of the characters, who is Jewish, is presented in sympathetic fashion - yet he still has to put up with a good deal of casual antisemitism before the story reaches its end.

On the plus side, there's a nice map and a neatly contrived "closed circle" of suspects. Samantha Walton's discussion has given me greater insight into Brand's handling of homicidal psychology, and is an uncommon example of an academic study which actually enhances the pleasure of reading Golden Age fiction. I still don't think Heads You Lose is really a fair play mystery, but I also think I judged it too harshly on first reading. As for that cricket match, well the scars run deep, but back then, I never dreamed that one day I'd become friendly with my team's opening batsman, Peter Gibbs, and that we'd go to a Society of Authors meeting together. Peter told me that they just froze on the big occasion. Oh well, even heroes are human...

Forgotten Book - Tour De Force

Tour De Force by Christianna Brand, first published in 1955, is today a Forgotten Book, perhaps because, after it appeared, the author turned away from the genre for a number of years. But many connoisseurs think highly of it.

The novel features Brand’s most regular detective, Inspector Cockrill, and also a character who appeared in an earlier mystery (and therefore seems by definition to be an unlikely killer)  but the setting is unusual – a fictitious island off the Italian coast. Cockrill is part of a tour party, and Brand clearly enjoyed writing about the island, as she set a subsequent book there as well.

A member of the tour party is found dead. She has been stabbed to death with a dagger, and there is a suggestion that she may have liked to indulge in blackmail. She was also at the centre of some romantic convolutions, involving one of the suspects, Leo Rodd. Rodd is a one-armed musician who appears highly attractive to women, although he was so unpleasant that I struggled to figure out why any of them would bother with him. A map is supplied in the best Golden Age tradition.

A fairly obvious solution to the murder mystery is put forward, but then Brand supplies a clever and unexpected (at least by me) twist – although it depends on something so unlikely that I didn’t find it easy to suspend belief. There are various pleasing features in the book, not least the setting, but I’m afraid that Brand’s novels seem to me to suffer from a recurrent weakness. There is always a closed circle of suspects, which is fine, but those suspects always seem to succumb before long to “rising hysteria” and their highly-strung behaviour and chit-chat rather gets on my nerves. So it was here.

However, Brand’s skill with plot was formidable. She isn’t too far behind Christie and Berkeley in that respect and I also gather that in person she was truly charismatic. To my mind, her short stories tend to be more satisfying than her novels, because they are punchier and the characters in them don’t have time to grate on the reader. One of these days I will say more about her short stories, but for now I’ll rank Tour De Force as well-constructed, but a long way short of a masterpiece.