Post by Nalkarj on Mar 8, 2019 18:59:16 GMT
Christianna Brand, pen name of Mary Christianna Lewis (1907-1988), is one of the greatest writers you’ve probably never heard of—and why she’s not well-known is beyond me. You might have seen what is probably the all-time best cinematic whodunit, Green for Danger (1946), which was based on her book of the same name, or Emma Thompson’s 2005 Nanny McPhee, which was adapted from her Nurse Matilda. Yet Brand herself has been forgotten, which is too bad, as she remains one of the most skilled talents who ever wrote detective-fiction.
Her mystery stories, which she didn’t start writing until 1941 (contrast with Agatha Christie’s début in 1916, Ellery Queen’s in 1929, and John Dickson Carr’s in 1930), are, as critic Nick Fuller noted, “ultra-tricky whodunnits where every sentence is a clue, with multiple solutions, red herrings, and stunning surprise solutions.”
Possibly because she started off so late, her books also play with the form: a shambling and occasionally mistaken policeman is the detective (at a time when brilliant, aristocratic sleuths were the norm), the suspects draw up convincing cases against each other, and there are (as Fuller mentioned) usually a half-dozen false solutions before the truth is revealed—prefiguring such latter-day detective-story deconstructions as Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) and John Sladek’s Black Aura (1975).
Her books are also very warm and human, and her characterization excellent—an element at which Christie succeeded only intermittently (in Five Little Pigs and Towards Zero [the latter plotted like a Brand] most notably). Her cluing, ingenuity, and sense of story are closest to John Dickson Carr, though she eschews Carr’s melodrama, Gothicism, and politics and writes as smoothly and clearly as Christie.
To make another comparison to a distinct (but, in many ways, closely related) field, she is to the orthodox detective-story as Dorothy Fields is to lyrics: the professional’s professional. Every lyricist whose work I’ve ever read loves Fields’ work, yet she’s not well-known by the general public, and her lyrics are never flashy. Every word, rather, is carefully chosen and remarkably blended to make the lines seem naturalistic, like regular speech—very difficult to do when one considers how lyrics have to rhyme and match the music. She exerted a huge amount of effort to make her work seem effortless—something Brand does for her mysteries, as she herself noted in her introduction to London Particular (1952).
Brand came into her own with Green for Danger (1944), the movie adaptation of which (with the wonderful Alastair Sim as series-sleuth Insp. Cockrill) is just as good as the book, and developed her (aptly malleable) formula: a group of likeable characters in a clearly-defined community (e.g., doctors and nurses at a military hospital), the murder of an outsider to the community that brings the police in, and then a second murder, precipitated by the first, of a member of the group that brings the investigation closer to home for all the characters.
It is rare that you won’t be surprised by a Christianna Brand story. Because you like the characters so much, you don’t want any of them to be the killer—something she uses to her advantage in keeping you off your guard. Yet she doesn’t use any obvious gimmicks, as Christie sometimes did, to disguise the murderer’s identity—
If Brand says the killer is one of six suspects, the killer is one of those six suspects—yet still, somehow, the reader is almost always surprised and satisfied. Her talent was remarkable.
The only problem is that she wrote so few mysteries—eight novels, to be exact, and maybe a dozen short stories (also good, though obviously with more superficial characterization than the books). Of the novels, only two (Death in High Heels, 1941, and Suddenly at His Residence, 1946) are not up to her usual quality, though even they have points of interest; the rest are some of the best detective-stories ever written. Death of Jezebel (1948), with duelling sleuths and a complex (but comprehensible) impossible crime with a brilliantly Chestertonian solution, is perhaps the best, though it’s difficult to pick a favorite.
Has anyone else here read Brand? If you ever get the chance, pick up one of her books—highly recommended.
Her mystery stories, which she didn’t start writing until 1941 (contrast with Agatha Christie’s début in 1916, Ellery Queen’s in 1929, and John Dickson Carr’s in 1930), are, as critic Nick Fuller noted, “ultra-tricky whodunnits where every sentence is a clue, with multiple solutions, red herrings, and stunning surprise solutions.”
Possibly because she started off so late, her books also play with the form: a shambling and occasionally mistaken policeman is the detective (at a time when brilliant, aristocratic sleuths were the norm), the suspects draw up convincing cases against each other, and there are (as Fuller mentioned) usually a half-dozen false solutions before the truth is revealed—prefiguring such latter-day detective-story deconstructions as Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) and John Sladek’s Black Aura (1975).
Her books are also very warm and human, and her characterization excellent—an element at which Christie succeeded only intermittently (in Five Little Pigs and Towards Zero [the latter plotted like a Brand] most notably). Her cluing, ingenuity, and sense of story are closest to John Dickson Carr, though she eschews Carr’s melodrama, Gothicism, and politics and writes as smoothly and clearly as Christie.
To make another comparison to a distinct (but, in many ways, closely related) field, she is to the orthodox detective-story as Dorothy Fields is to lyrics: the professional’s professional. Every lyricist whose work I’ve ever read loves Fields’ work, yet she’s not well-known by the general public, and her lyrics are never flashy. Every word, rather, is carefully chosen and remarkably blended to make the lines seem naturalistic, like regular speech—very difficult to do when one considers how lyrics have to rhyme and match the music. She exerted a huge amount of effort to make her work seem effortless—something Brand does for her mysteries, as she herself noted in her introduction to London Particular (1952).
Brand came into her own with Green for Danger (1944), the movie adaptation of which (with the wonderful Alastair Sim as series-sleuth Insp. Cockrill) is just as good as the book, and developed her (aptly malleable) formula: a group of likeable characters in a clearly-defined community (e.g., doctors and nurses at a military hospital), the murder of an outsider to the community that brings the police in, and then a second murder, precipitated by the first, of a member of the group that brings the investigation closer to home for all the characters.
It is rare that you won’t be surprised by a Christianna Brand story. Because you like the characters so much, you don’t want any of them to be the killer—something she uses to her advantage in keeping you off your guard. Yet she doesn’t use any obvious gimmicks, as Christie sometimes did, to disguise the murderer’s identity—
no making the friendly narrator, the omniscient detective, or all the suspects the killer.
If Brand says the killer is one of six suspects, the killer is one of those six suspects—yet still, somehow, the reader is almost always surprised and satisfied. Her talent was remarkable.
The only problem is that she wrote so few mysteries—eight novels, to be exact, and maybe a dozen short stories (also good, though obviously with more superficial characterization than the books). Of the novels, only two (Death in High Heels, 1941, and Suddenly at His Residence, 1946) are not up to her usual quality, though even they have points of interest; the rest are some of the best detective-stories ever written. Death of Jezebel (1948), with duelling sleuths and a complex (but comprehensible) impossible crime with a brilliantly Chestertonian solution, is perhaps the best, though it’s difficult to pick a favorite.
Has anyone else here read Brand? If you ever get the chance, pick up one of her books—highly recommended.