Forgotten Books Friday - Suddenly at His Residence

Christianna Brand was born Mary Christianna Milne in 1907 in Malaya, spending her early years in India. When at age 17 she learned her father had lost all his money, she took on a series of jobs including governess, nightclub hostess, ballroom dancer, dress shop model and secretary. She didn't turn her hand to fiction until 1939, with her first novel making it to print after being rejected by fifteen publishers. Death in High Heels was the title of that book, and in an apocryphal story, she got the idea while working as a salesgirl fantasizing about killing a co-worker.

She went on to write several crime fiction novels and short stories, but achieved her peak with the series featuring Inspector Cockrill of the Kent County Police who was modeled on her father-in-law, William Lewis, a doctor. One Cockrill novel, Green for Danger, was hailed by H.R.F. Keating as "the last golden crown of the Golden Age detective story" and made into a movie in 1946 starring Alastair Sim. Unfortunately for crime fiction fans, she mostly dropped the genre, at least in novel form, in the 1950s and concentrated on children's books, most notably Nurse Matilda, which Emma Thompson adapted in 2005 for as the film Nanny McPhee.

Brand was nominated three times for Edgar Awards, twice for short stories and once for a nonfiction work about a true-crime Scottish murder case. She also served as Chair of the Crime Writers Association in 1972-73. She penned essays including some of the best accounts available form the early days of London's Detection Club including remembrances of members Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkely.

Brand has been called the "female John Dickson Carr" for her locked-room style mysteries, one of which was Suddenly at His Residence (a/k/a The Crooked Wreath, in the U.S.), from the Inspector Cockrill series. Cockrill is another in the long line of eccentric detectives, insightful yet shabby, often called "sparrow-like," or, as he was introduced in his first novel (Heads You Lose),

"He was a little brown man who seemed much older than he actually was, with deep-set eyes beneath a fine broad brow, an aquiline nose and a mop of fluffy white hair fringing a magnificent head. He wore his soft felt hat set sideways, as though he would at any moment break out into an amateur rendering of ‘Napoleon’s Farewell to his Troops’; and he was known to Torrington and in all its surrounding villages as Cockie. He was widely advertised as having a heart of gold beneath his irascible exterior; but there were those who said bitterly that the heart was so infinitesimal and you had to dig so deep down to get to it, that it was hardly worth the trouble. The fingers of his right hand were so stained with nicotine as to appear to be tipped with wood."

In Suddenly at His Residence, the plot starts off in a fairly traditional way, where patriarch Sir Richard March is found dead in a Grecian lodge on his estate and suspicion falls on the family members gathered who he was getting ready to disinherit. After Cockrill begins to investigate, another body turns up, and the Inspector will also learn just how far World War II can reach from the battlefield into the countryside. He's also faced with a double "impossible crime" scenario: no footprints or marks at one crime scene involving sand and in another involving dust. Brand's writing is wry and engaging, with plenty of twists and the traditional British Golden Age red herrings, and in fact, her intricate plotting is generally considered the greatest strength of her novels.

Comments

[Patti Abbott]

Read Green For Danger, but not this one, I think.

[Evan Lewis]

Fine review, and a nice passage from Brand.

[BV Lawson]

I still haven't read "Green for Danger", Patti, but I'll have to add it to my growing tower of TBR books. Many say its her "masterpiece," but others disagree.

[BV Lawson]

Thanks, Evan! One thing I love about books from the Golden Age and even a few years back is that a writer could take their time setting the stage and characters. Nowadays, writers, agents, publishers, and even readers expect the body in the first sentence, short words, short sentences, short paragraphs, short chapters. I think our short-attention-span 21st century misses a lot from that. Love your blog, by the way!