RogerBW's Blog: Green for Danger, Christianna Brand

1944 detective fiction; second of Brand's novels of Inspector Cockrill. At a military hospital during the Blitz, a patient dies under anæsthetic. Later, someone who'd claimed to know who was responsible is stabbed to death. Six suspects are left, and there's not a visible motive among them.

This is a formal detective story, with a limited pool of suspects and a constrained setting. But it's a story in which the suspects are aware of their status: it's established quite early that nobody else could have done the deed, and as they realise other people are keeping clear of all of them they draw together somewhat nervously.

There are seven of them at first. Gervase Eden, the Harley Street practitioner for rich young women without anything terribly wrong with them, and an inveterate womaniser; Jane Woods, clothes designer turned V.A.D.; Esther Sanson, getting away from her hypochondriac mother; Mr Moon, the old local surgeon who never recovered from the death of his young son, and his friend Barnes, the anæsthetist, who recently lost a patient on the table; Frederica Linley, avoiding her father's new wife; and Sister Marion Bates, hoping to meet some nice officers.

Frederica's father who for thirty years had been a legend in some outpost of Empire, had subsequently settled down in Dinard, where he could by no means be got to appreciate that the inhabitants had not only never heard of the legend, but had never even heard of the Outpost. The war put an end to this embarrassing state of affairs and, on a nightmare voyage to England, he met and affianced himself to a wealthy widow with a proper respect for the pioneers of the East. Frederica received the news with her habitual calm. "I think she's too frightful, Daddy," she said, "but it's you that's got to sleep with her, not me," and she absented herself from the new home upon a series of lectures, and finally wrote off to Heron's Park that she would be arriving for duty on such-and-such a day, as instructed. Since a blowsy trollop of fifty cannot be expected to care for competition from an exquisite, self-possessed little creature of twenty-two, the ex-widow was not sorry to see her go.

Brand plays them all masterfully, keeping everyone except the second victim in contention as a suspect right until the last moment. A little more character development would have been welcome, but would probably have made the book lag unacceptably. There are clues, but not many, and I fell at the last fence. The how is tricky but soluble; the why is much harder (why on Earth should someone want to kill an elderly postman?), and cracking this will give you the who. There's a little coincidence, but I think within the bounds of plausibility. Pacing slacks a bit towards the end, when Cockrill, having his own idea about the culprit but wanting a confession, isolates them under police supervision until he thinks they're ready to crack.

What this book has become since its publication is an effective period piece, showing life in a military hospital during the Blitz; Brand didn't work in one herself, but her ENT-surgeon husband did, and she sometimes joined the staff in the shelters. The atmosphere of life on the wards, with air raids every night, seems effectively captured, and as someone with a little medical knowledge I found the equipment and procedures convincing if frighteningly primitive. One unexpected note: when the murderer commits suicide after confessing, Cockrill treats this as an unwelcome evasion of justice, rather than as saving everyone the bother of a trial; I suppose this might well have been the attitude at the time, but I can't help feeling that dead is probably just as dead whether by one's own hand or from a hangman's noose.

I read this for Past Offences' 1944 month, but I'll be seeking out more of Brand's work in the future. Followed by Suddenly at His Residence.

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