Christianna Brand has long been one of my favourite mystery authors. She’s mostly forgotten now, remembered mainly for her Nurse Matilda stories which were adapted to make the recent Nanny McPhee films. But before that she wrote a series of exceptional mysteries, the most famous of which is probably Green For Danger, a tense and complex mystery set in a WWII hospital, which was itself adapted into a film starring Alastair Sim as her cantankerous detective Inspector Cockerill.

Brand’s books have a lot of the same charms as Christie’s but her characterisations are sharper and her plotting is twistier – one hallmark of her books is a parade of false solutions at the end, each one so different from the last and rattled off so quickly that it’s almost like watching a really good quick-change act. I find that even if I’ve solved the mystery and am familiar with the techniques she’s used in the construction, it’s no less impressive how she condenses everything into a taut finale.

A negative review of Brand’s Heads You Lose over at the always charming A Penguin A Week blog finally inspired me to complete my collection of the great lady’s mysteries. Which didn’t really seem like a dumb reason until I placed my order!

Heads You Lose is coming from America, so I’ll get to experience one of the great joys of ordering second hand books: forgetting you ordered it and then having it turn up months later as a wonderful surprise. But I also ordered a copy of Death in High Heels, Brand’s very first novel, and that arrived after only two days.

[Spoilers for Death in High Heels, The Mirror Crack’d From Side To Side and The ABC Murders, but this is spoiler free until at least halfway through, so you should be able to read on if you’re careful. I’ll put another spoiler warning in when things get dicey] Continue reading →