Christianna Brand’s Impossible Crimes Transcript

Caroline: In the appreciation of detective fiction, there is a tendency to view certain elements of the form as an either/or situation. A writer can either be good at plot or at characters, dialogue or description, clewing or twists. It isn't normal, or indeed permitted, to have both sides of the equation be present in high quality form at the same time. This way of thinking can even be used as a way to subtly criticise, as in the oft-repeated cliché about Agatha Christie that she was uniformly great at the ideation of mystery plots but a writer of very boring prose. That's not true, as it happens, but it certainly demonstrates how one aspect of crime writing is always being played off against another.

I feel this comparison game particularly keenly with writers who were known to experiment with so-called impossible crimes. These are plots where the crime is presented in such a way that it seems utterly impossible upon a reasonable first glance, because of impediments like locked rooms, perfect alibis, sealed crime scenes, and so forth. Later, a detective is able to attack this apparent impossibility with deduction and demonstrate how the ingenious crime was, in fact, possible all along. Necessarily, such plots can end up very complicated, somewhat mechanical, and at times rather implausible, as their creators seek to overcome their self-created impossible obstacles. This complexity, and the sometimes-necessary sacrifice of emotional depth and atmospheric description it demands, is why I would count myself as more of an admirer than a fan of a writer like John Dickson Carr, for instance. I can appreciate the cleverness of this kind of mystery, I thought, but these are not stories that will capture my heart.

Or at least that's what I thought, until I began to immerse myself in Christianna Brand's impossible crimes.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Christianna Brand is a writer with an interesting, if scattered, bibliography. The list of books she produced has a restless, unsettled aspect to it, especially when compared to the regular, consistent output of authors like Agatha Christie or Ngaio Marsh. There are seven novels that I would categorise as golden age style mysteries, as well as almost a dozen more that are, variously, thrillers, melodramas, romances, historical fiction and sometimes all four. She wrote a lot of short stories, many of them very good, and yet today is best known to the general public for none of this work.

Perhaps it didn't help that she used quite a few different names over the course of her career. Her birth name was Mary Christianna Milne, changed to Mary Christianna Lewis when she married in 1936. Christianna Brand was her most used pseudonym, but there also books published under the names Mary Roland (Roland being her husband's first name), China Thompson, Annabel Jones and Mary Ann Ashe. Not exactly good for the personal brand, Christianna.

Until recent reprints of her crime fiction have begun to correct the record, if she was known at all it was for the children's fiction that she published in the 1960s, when she was already in her fifties. The Nurse Matilda stories and books quickly became children's classics and received a second boost in popularity in the 21st century when they were used as the source material for the Nanny McPhee films. For a long time, searching the name "Christianna Brand" on bookselling websites would bring up multiple editions of Nurse Matilda, Nurse Matilda Goes to Town and Nurse Matilda Goes to Hospital, but little evidence of the crime fiction upon which she had built most of her writing career.

Brand came late to golden age mystery writing; in the strictest sense, she cannot be said to be a golden age author at all, because her first book was published in 1941, after the canonical golden age period had come to an end in 1939 with the outbreak of the Second World War. Still, I think she is best understood as a product of that period, since she was heavily influenced by the writers who had dominated detective fiction in the 1930s and, as her own skill and fame grew, she was welcomed into the Detection Club while the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and more were active members.

Brand was 34 when this first novel, Death in High Heels, came out, and she had already had many different jobs since leaving school at the age of seventeen. She had been a nursery governess, a dance hostess and a youth club leader by the time she got the job that was to inspire her first novel: being a salesperson for Aga cookers and cookware in a London shop.

War had already broken out by this time and Christianna had continued living in the capital alone after her husband Roland, a surgeon, had been posted abroad with the Army Medical Corps. She was not a huge success at selling the Agas, which were expensive and hardly a wartime necessity, and instead did much better persuading customers to buy the (much cheaper) pots and pans the shop stocked. This brought the wrath of her supervisor down upon her regularly, creating an enmity that was to prove very inspiring. As she put it in a 1983 article:

"So great was her fear and detestation of this female that murderous thoughts arose in her heart and she finally said to her fellow sellers of cookers and pots and pans ‘I could murder her! But as I must not, I shall write a book and murder her in that.'"

Who among us has not had a job where we spend our time muttering about murdering our boss? Christianna did more than just mutter, though. She allowed her anger and resentment to fuel her all the way through the writing of a novel. Death in High Heels takes place not in a cookware shop, which would presumably have been too recognisable and thus risked legal problems, but rather in an upmarket West End dress shop called Christophe et Cie. Set in a pre-war world, this shop is largely staffed by women of various ages, who serve as sales assistants, models for the clothing on sale, seamstresses, cleaners and administrators, all under the supervision of Mr Bevan, the manager, and Mr Cecil, the designer. Rivalries and petty jealousies abound: who is going to get to go and work in the new branch that is opening up at a French seaside resort, who is currently having an affair with the boss, who is getting divorced, and so on.

The staff all eat lunch together in the shop every day — an innovation of Mr Bevan the manager, who was tired of the women he employed choosing to spend their meagre earnings on things other than three solid meals a day and then having fainting fits while they were at work. On the fateful day, they are having curried rabbit, served in the usual way from a communal dish. One person is later taken to hospital and dies of oxalic acid poisoning, while nobody else is affected at all. No outsiders can have got into the shop to poison one particular plate, nor seemingly did anyone among the staff have the opportunity either. And yet it was done, because someone is dead. An impossible crime, it would seem.

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Death in High Heels is not a perfect mystery by any means. The character of the victim is not well enough developed that the reader cares strongly about them and the crime probably comes a bit too early in the book, so that there's an awful lot of space to fill afterwards with the antics of Brand's somewhat chaotic and lovestruck Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Charlesworth. Although it does have an impossible or near-impossible scenario, it's not that difficult to work out the identity of the murderer on psychological, if not practical, grounds. What matters, though, is that the book was successful enough and enjoyable enough for Brand to write that she wanted to keep going. As a debut, it is impressive on the scale of The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I think.

There are also some wonderful glimpses in it of the snappy, incisive description and clever character work that recur more frequently in subsequent works. I love this turn of phrase as a way of evoking the physical sensation of shame: "Victoria felt cold slugs of embarrassment crawling down her spine." And this early description of Mr Cecil the fashion designer rewards a closer look, too. We are told that "He was a slim, fair man, with huge, brown, long-lashed eyes, a well-modelled nose and over-feminine mouth; at first sight one took him for a youth, but soft living had given him, too early, pouches beneath the eyes and a suspicion of a paunch. His trousers were draped over girlish hips and his suit and shirt were a miracle of lavender grey; over his forehead a lock of yellow hair was trained to perfection."

Much of this language is highly queer coded, of course — the over-feminine mouth, the girlish hips, the excessive interest in clothing and grooming. But Cecil is not really a queer coded character so much as a truly queer one. Brand writes straight forwardly about his romantic passions for men and his co-habitation arrangements with his lovers as if this is quite an ordinary sort of detail to include in a crime novel from 1941, over 25 years before homosexuality for men was decriminalised in the UK. This is not to say that she presents a wholly positive portrait of Cecil, far from it. There are plenty of digs at him from other characters, some of them featuring unchallenged homophobia, such as the nickname "Cissie" that some of his colleagues use behind his back and Inspector Charlesworth's description of him as "only half a man". But still, Cecil's presence in the book at all is remarkable and he does not fulfil the function in the plot that one might cynically expect. Brand also clearly liked him enough to keep writing about him: he is also a major character in her 1955 novel Tour de Force and appears again in 1957's The Three-Cornered Halo.

When looking at a writer's debut novel, it is always interesting to try and guess which aspects of it they will discard and which they will carry forward as part of the intrinsic style they bring to each new book. For Brand, it is not the urban setting, nor the focus on mostly female characters, or even the detective that she carried forward into her next work. No: the parts of Death in High Heels that she kept were that tightly drawn circle of suspects, and the impossibility of the crime that occurred in their midst.

After the break: the impossible becomes possible.

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Every crime writer has something from which they draw particular inspiration. For some, it is a well-known and loved detective character, for others an excitement over place and setting. For Christianna Brand, it was clearly the challenge of setting up her murder mystery plots in such a way that they looked completely impossible, and yet is ultimately solveable by a detective using logic and reason. I think every one of her seven detective novels demonstrates a different facet on this same idea.

In her second book, Heads You Lose, which came out in the same year as her debut, guests at a country house party keep being beheaded in the grounds when it is not physically possible for a murderer to have both reached the victim and escaped unobserved. 1944's Green for Danger, probably her best known book and the source material for a wonderful film from 1946 starring Alastair Sim, features a death in an operating theatre during which every one of the medical personnel present swear blind nobody did anything untoward. In Suddenly at his Residence from 1947, also sometimes known as The Crooked Wreath, a rich man who is about to disinherit his family is poisoned while spending the night in a lodge in the grounds of his country house, yet the physical evidence shows that nobody can have got in or out to administer the fatal dose.

In Death of Jezebel, I think Brand was just showing off. This 1948 novel sees an actress strangled in a locked room at the top of a tower and then thrown off. The twist: this occurs in full view of several thousand people during a performance of a medieval pageant, and not one of these people can say who the murderer is. Brand was really getting into her stride by this point. This book also features more than one possible ending, as she toys with the reader before presenting the ultimate solution. It is no surprise to me that Brand would later write a new ending for the most famous cascading solution mystery of them all, Anthony Berkeley's 1929 classic The Poisoned Chocolates Case. The woman never saw a plot impossibility that she didn't want to have fun with, I think.

Two more books to include in our survey here. London Particular, also known as Fog of Doubt, is perhaps the weak link in the chain, because although the thick, pea-soupy London fog provides the means by which a number of suspects can mill about the London streets in the vicinity of a house where a man is shot in a way that defies explanation, I'm not sure that this one is a true impossibility. I don't think the reader has all the information they need to solve this one. That doesn't stop it being one of my favourite of her books, though, full of gut-wrenching deaths and a surprising yet informative diversion into contemporary abortion regulation. It was also her own favourite of her books, she later wrote.

And then finally, we arrive at 1955's Tour de Force, which sees Brand try her hand at an impossibility abroad, with her country detective Inspector Cockrill newly retired and on a package holiday in Europe. He secures the impossibility himself in this one, occupying a position between the sun-soaked beach where all the suspects are and the hotel room where the murder victim is. Nobody came past him, so nobody can have committed the murder. And yet somebody did.

By the time Brand published this, her last proper golden age detective novel to my mind, we are at least a decade and a half beyond that interwar period to which this style really belonged. The popular fashion in crime fiction had moved on — police procedurals and thrillers were becoming the dominant form. But I love that she was still largely adhering to the fashions from the 1930s. One detail especially always pleases me every time I see it one of her books. She liked to include a list of characters at the start of a novel, as is fairly common in a murder mystery, laying out each person's name and a brief explanation of their role at the start of the story.

But then she would also add a revelatory sentence at the bottom of the list, such as this one from London Particular: "Within this group of people were found two victims and a murderer". Death of Jezebel takes this even further, noting that the characters include "Johnny Wise, who died: and to avenge whose death two of the following also died — and one was a murderer." Since there are only seven in the cast list for that novel, it would seem that Brand is giving away quite a bit on the first page here, but she still manages to baffle the reader for a couple of hundred pages afterwards. These cast list declarations are a form of the classic "challenge to the reader", I think. They're an invitation for the reader to pit their wits against the writer's, and an indication that she is pretty confident she can win. Sadly these lines are sometimes omitted from modern editions, but if you ever get a chance to see an early or first edition Christianna Brand, they're well worth looking out for as an expression of confidence and boldness from a writer who felt secure in her ability to entertain and mislead.

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London Particular is also the book that provides us the best insight into Brand as a writer. She wrote an introduction for a subsequent edition of it in which she reflected on the process of writing it. She set it in her own house in Maida Vale in west London, using the real street names, her own furniture and her own cat — a decision taken "just for fun" and because it gave the book "a sort of reality". The kind of murder that takes place in this house, complicated and elaborately impossible, is very unlikely, she cheerfully admits, but then is not every kind of murder that appears in this sort of book? The realism comes from thinking about how so-called ordinary characters would react to such an unreal situation, and that is where I think London Particular thrives.

Although it does not fully play fair as I said, I still think this book is one of Brand's best, easily rivalling Green for Danger for her best ever. It is deceptively straightforward and pleasantly simple to read. As she says herself: "This is a very difficult kind of book to write. Because it’s made (I hope) 'easy to read' that doesn’t mean that a huge amount of work and concentration doesn’t go into the making of it." There are no stray words or phrases in this book. Everything is intended, either as a way of feeding the impossibility of the murder plot, or to evoke a potentially significant character trait, or both. Brand was very proud of this precision and economy. "I like to say that no two lines could be removed from any work of mine, whose removal would not leave somewhere else in the book, a gap, which those lines referred to."

As a reader of Christianna Brand, we must always be alert in case she is slipping something by us, concealing her cunning plot mechanisms. In her fixation on impossibility, she is continuing the golden age mystery tradition long after the period itself had concluded. Because do not all golden age mysteries, in a way, contain an element of impossibility, even those that do not contain elaborate locked room murders? They ask us to believe the utterly unbelievable: that our fellow human beings, in many cases apparently upstanding individuals beloved of their communities, are capable of the ultimate evil while appearing anything but. This is, I think, why at their best, Christianna Brand's books are so irresistible and memorable. She drew that closed circle of suspects incredibly tight with the skill of the master plotter, but then within that circle she placed deeply complex and highly memorable characters. Long after I finished reading their books, I am still thinking regularly about Rosie from London Particular, Mr Cecil from Death in High Heels and Louli from Tour de Force, and suspect I will be for some time to come.

The unravelling of an impossibility in a Brand novel feels less like the clinical, anti-climactic demonstration of how a magic trick was really done, and more like the emotional body-blow that would really accompany the revelation that someone close to you had deliberately taken a life. Once all of the clever misdirection and subterfuge is cleared away, the harm still remains, the scar now etched into the lives that must continue. That is, for me, what places the best of Brand's detective fiction among the very best the genre has to offer. Her people are chess pieces the she strategically moves about the board in service of her mysterious games, but they are not wooden or forgettable. And as such, she pulled off something rare: impossible crimes in which the reader actually cares about what will happen once the impossible has been proved possible.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, narrated and produced by me, Caroline Crampton. If you'd like more from the podcast, including extra interviews, behind the scenes commentaries and the chance to read a book each month with a community of other mystery lovers, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com.

You can find a full list of the books I mentioned in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/christiannabrandsimpossiblecrimes. We publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

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