Christianna Brand

• Born: December 17, 1907
• Birthplace: Malaya
• Died: March 11, 1988
• Place of death: Unknown

Types of Plot: Master sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Inspector Cockrill, 1942-1955

Contribution

Christianna Brand may be considered a pioneer of the medical thriller, as her highly honored 1944 novel Green for Danger preceded by decades the popular works of Patricia Cornwell and Robin Cook. Indeed, H. R. F. Keating called it the finest novel of the Golden Age of mystery fiction. Her detective fiction illustrates the dictum of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that a change in quantity may become transformed into a change in quality. The standard British mystery emphasized complex plotting in which the reader was challenged to decipher the clues to the perpetrator of the crime.

Brand’s works took the emphasis on surprise to new heights: Sometimes the key to the story emerged only with the novel’s last line. Few readers proved able to match wits with her Inspector Cockrill, and if he was not present, she had other ways to fool the audience. On one occasion, she “gave away” the story by a subtle clue in the first paragraph. Also, many of her books show an irrepressible humor that she carried to much further lengths than most of her contemporaries.

Biography

Christianna Brand was born Mary Christianna Milne in Malaya in December, 1907, and grew up there and in India. She was sent to England to attend a Franciscan convent school in Somerset, an area of England known for its beauty. Her happiness at school received a rude upset when her father lost all of his money; she had to begin earning her own living at the age of seventeen.

Brand went through a rapid succession of ill-paid jobs, mostly in sales, but also in modeling, professional ballroom dancing, receptionist and secretarial work, shop assistant work, interior design, and governess work. At one point, she opened a club for working girls in a slum section of London. Her financial prospects took a turn for the better when she met and fell in love with a young surgeon, Roland Lewis. She married him in 1939 and became Mary Christianna Lewis in her personal life.

Before her marriage, Brand had already begun to write. Her decision to try detective stories had behind it no previous experience in fiction writing. (It is said that she wrote her first book, Death in High Heels, 1941, while working as a salesgirl, as a way to fantasize about killing a coworker.) She nevertheless was soon a success, and her second novel won a prize of one thousand dollars offered by Dodd, Mead and Company for its prestigious Red Badge series. Her early success proved to be no fluke; by the time of the publication of Green for Danger (1944), she had come to be generally regarded as one of the most important mystery writers of her time.

Brand once more did the unexpected by ceasing to write mystery novels according to her hitherto successful recipe. Instead, she turned to short stories. After the appearance of Starrbelow (1958), she did not write another mystery novel for ten years. Her writing career, however, was by no means over. She had in the meantime tried her hand at several other varieties of fiction, including historical romances and screenplays. Although she never achieved the renown for these that her mysteries had brought her, her Nurse Matilda series of novels for children gained wide popularity. She returned to the ranks of mystery novelists in the late 1960’s. She died in on March 11, 1988, in the arms of her husband of fifty years, Roland Lewis.

Analysis

An author who, like Christianna Brand, has achieved a reputation for the ability to surprise her readers faces a difficult task. Her readers, once forewarned, will be expecting deception and hence will be on their guard. Nevertheless, Brand managed to pull off one surprise after another in each of her most famous mysteries. In her stress on bafflement, she was hardly original, but the seemingly impossible culprits she produced made her achievement in this area virtually unequaled.

There is much more to Brand than surprise. There is almost always in her work a romance, an idealistic love affair whose sexual elements are minimal. In her work, heroines at once fall in love with the man whom they will eventually marry, although only after overcoming numerous obstacles. Remarkably, in Brand’s novels this approach to romance is carried to such lengths that it does not seem at all cloying or stereotypical. Rather, it is yet another manifestation of her unusually pronounced sense of humor.

Brand, whatever one may think of her, is certainly no unalloyed optimist. Often, her characters must realize a bitter truth about close friends. In Green for Danger, for example, the overriding ambition of many of the nurses makes them petty and nasty. In Brand’s view of things, even “ordinary” people may harbor serious failings. Her murderers are not obvious villains but characters undistinguishable from anyone else in the novel, until their bitter secret is exposed.

Here, the element of romance often reappears, although this time more somberly. The murderer’s secret usually involves either a disgruntled lover or someone whose ambition consumes all ordinary restraint. The motives of ambition and unrequited love, like the heroine’s experience of falling in love, operate in an absolute fashion. Idealism and an awareness of evil thus work to balance each other, making Brand’s stories less unrealistic than a first encounter with one of her romantic heroines would lead one to suspect. All of this, further, is overlaid with a veneer of humor, making up in high spirits for what it lacks in sophistication.

Green for Danger

As just presented, the characteristics of Brand’s novels hardly seem a program for success. She managed, however, to put all the diverse pieces together in an effective way, as a closer look at Green for Danger illustrates. In this work, sometimes regarded as her best, a patient in a military hospital for bombing victims dies on the operating table. At first, his death hardly attracts notice, being regarded as an accident (by some mischance, the man’s anesthetic had been contaminated). It soon develops, however, that more than accident is involved. Testimony of several student nurses who were present at the scene shows indisputably that foul play has occurred. The murderer can only have been one of the seven people present in the operating room theater, but not even the ingenious probing of Inspector Cockrill suffices to reveal the culprit. Still, the inspector is far from giving up.

Cockrill devises a characteristically subtle plan to trap the murderer into attempting another killing during surgery. His plan almost backfires, as the culprit possesses an ingenuity that, however twisted by malign ambition, almost matches that of Cockrill himself.

When the method of the murderer at last is revealed, even the experienced mystery reader will be forced to gasp in astonishment. Although dominant in Green for Danger, this element of surprise does not stand alone. A young nurse who has aroused suspicion is the person responsible for bringing Cockrill into the case. She is in love with a young doctor; although her romantic feelings do not receive detailed attention, they are unmistakably present. Although the reader will hardly take this nurse seriously as a suspect, since otherwise the romance would face utter ruin, this fact provides little or no aid in stealing a march on Cockrill.

Romance and murder are a familiar combination; to join humor with them is not so common. Brand does so by means of amusing descriptions of the petty rivalries and disputes among the nurses and other members of the hospital staff. The points that induce them to quarrel generally are quite minor: For example, someone has taken over another’s locker space, or wishes to listen to a radio program that another dislikes. These irritations soon flare up into severe disputes, which, however humorously depicted, serve to remind the reader of Brand’s belief that murderous rage lies close at hand to more everyday feelings.

Brand’s contention was based on personal experience. Before her marriage, she felt an enormous dislike for one of her fellow workers. This animosity, she conjectured, was of the sort that might easily lead to murder. It was this experience that colored her development of the motivation of her murderers and added a starkly realistic touch to her romantic and humorous tendencies.

London Particular

For a lesser author, the old combination of traits Brand’s novel presented might seem difficult to repeat—but not for Brand. In London Particular (1952; also known as Fog of Doubt), she again startles the reader. This time she does so by withholding until the last line of the book the method of the murderer in gaining access to a house he seemingly had no opportunity to reach. After one has read this last line, one realizes that Brand had in fact given away the essential clue to the case in the book’s first paragraph. So subtly presented is the vital fact, however, that almost every reader will pass it by without a second glance.

In this book, Brand’s strong interest in romance comes to the fore. The characters’ various romantic attachments receive detailed attention; the many rivalries and jealousies present among the main characters serve to distract the reader from solving the case. Again characteristically for Brand, true love eventually triumphs, and the culprit is the victim of an uncontrollable and unrequited passion for another of the principal characters.

Tour de Force

Green for Danger stresses surprise, London Particular, romance. A third novel, Tour de Force (1955), emphasizes the final element in Brand’s tripartite formula: humor. The story is set on an imaginary island in the Mediterranean, near a resort where a number of English tourists have gone for vacation. Among them is the now-retired Cockrill, as well as his sister, Henrietta. A murder quickly arouses the local gendarmerie to feverish but ineffective activity. Their burlesque of genuine detection, consisting of an attempt to pin the blame on one tourist after another until each possibility is disproved, does not even exempt Cockrill. His efforts to solve the case are foiled at every turn by police bumbling.

Firmly behind the police is the local despot, who threatens the tourists with dire penalties unless he at once receives a confession. The dungeon on the island is evidently of medieval vintage, and the petty satrap whose word is law on the island regards this prison as a major attraction of his regime.

Here, for once, surprise, though certainly present, does not have its customary spectacular character. Instead, the reader receives a series of lesser shocks, as one person after another seems without a doubt to be guilty, only to be replaced by yet another certain criminal. Cockrill eventually discloses the truth with his usual panache.

Buffet for Unwelcome Guests

Brand’s short stories further developed some of the techniques of her novels. In several stories in the collection Buffet for Unwelcome Guests: The Best Short Mysteries of Christianna Brand (1983), Inspector Cockrill figures in inverted plots. Here the reader knows the identity of the criminal, and the interest lies in following the efforts of the detective to discover him. This technique poses a severe test to a writer such as Brand who values suspense. Can there be surprises in a story in which the identity of the criminal is given to the reader at the outset? Brand believed that there could, and one can see from the popularity of her stories that many readers agreed with her. One of these, “The Hornets’ Nest,” won first prize in a contest sponsored by Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Brand’s style does not have the innovative qualities of her plots. It is, however, a serviceable instrument, both clear and vigorous. She tends to emphasize, more than most detective story authors, long descriptive passages of scenery. In her depiction of the imaginary island in Tour de Force, she captures with great skill the atmosphere of several Mediterranean islands favored by British tourists. A reason for the popularity of Green for Danger lies in its stylistically apt portrayal of the loneliness of women whose husbands and boyfriends had gone to fight in World War II. Here she once more relied on personal experience, for her own husband was away on military service for much of the war.

Another feature of Brand’s style was characteristic of the writers of her generation, though not of younger authors. In writing of love, she had no interest in depicting sexual encounters in detail, or even in acknowledging their existence. Sex, along with obscene language, is absent from her books; these could only interfere with the unreal but captivating atmosphere she endeavored to portray.

The Honey Harlot

To this generalization there is, however, a significant exception. The Honey Harlot (1978) is a novel of sexual obsession; here, the approach to love differs quite sharply from that of her more famous mysteries. Her characteristic work does not lie in this direction, and this novel was not followed by one of similar type.

To sum up, Brand carried some of the elements of the classic British detective story—in particular surprise, romance, and humor—to extremes. In doing so, she established a secure place for herself as an important contributor to the mystery field.

Principal Series Character:

• Inspector Cockrill is in the Sherlock Holmes tradition of detectives who have almost supernatural powers but who disclose little about their methods of reasoning until the case is over. The elderly Cockrill’s outward manner is crusty, but he is kind and has a paternal affection for young women. A perceptive judge of character, he sympathizes with human weakness, though he is indefatigable in his search for truth.

Bibliography

Barnard, Robert. “The Slightly Mad, Mad World of Christianna Brand.” The Armchair Detective 19, no. 3 (Summer, 1986): 238-243. Discusses the off-kilter nature of Brand’s stories and characters and their importance to her overall work.

Brand, Christianna. “Inspector Cockrill.” In The Great Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. Brand’s own description of her most famous and successful character.

Briney, Robert E. “The World of Christianna Brand.” In Buffet for Unwelcome Guests: The Best Short Mysteries of Christianna Brand, edited by Francis M. Nevins, Jr., and Martin H. Greenberg. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. An examination of the internal logic and character of the world generated by Brand’s fiction, as well as the relationship between that world and the mysteries, detectives, and murderers that inhabit it.

Klein, Kathleen Gregory, ed. Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. Contains an essay that examines the life and writings of Brand.

Malmgren, Carl D. Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2001. Discusses Brand’s London Particular. Bibliographic references and index.

Penzler, Otto. “In Memoriam, 1907-1988.” The Armchair Detective 21, no. 3 (Summer, 1998): 228-230. An obituary and appreciation of Brand, detailing her place in the history of British detective fiction.

Penzler, Otto. “The Works of Christianna Brand.” In Green for Danger. Topanga, Calif.: Boulevard, 1978. An overview of the author’s work, provided as a foreword to an edition of her most famous and most popular detective novel.

Rowland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Discusses several of Brand’s colleagues. A good source on the conventions of the genre and the context of Brand’s contributions to it. Bibliographic references and index.

Symons, Julian, ed. The Hundred Best Crime Stories. London: The Sunday Times, 1959. Places Brand as the author of one of the hundred best crime stories of all time.