TOUR DE FORCE:
The Detective
Fiction of Christianna Brand
“Miss Brand has exhibited an
ingenuity
worthy of Agatha Christie in throwing us off the scent of the real
criminal.”
– Manchester Guardian, 6th April
1945
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“Miss Christianna Brand makes a steady progress
towards a place in the citadel occupied by The Big Five Female
Who-Dun-It-ers.”
–
John Hampson, Spectator, 6th April 1945
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The works of Christianna Brand are quite
simply brilliant. Although she wrote
only eight detective stories in the 1940s and early 1950s before
retiring from
detective fiction for two decades, those stories are enough to cement
her
reputation as the best of the post-classic detective writers. Her stories all concern a closed circle of (at
most) seven people, all of whom had equal motive and opportunity. She keeps the reader darting from suspect to
suspect,
quite convinced that this time he’s
managed to solve the business – until she very neatly pulls the rug
from under
him, showing the murderer to be someone he suspected early on and then
struck
off the list. Her clueing is impeccable –
as she wrote in her introduction to London
Particular, every sentence counts either as a clue or as a red
herring –
yet so skilfully is this trick done that the reader never notices until
too
late. All in all, Brand was a mistress of
the genre.
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What's New:
These pages copyright Nicholas Lester Fuller,
2000--2010. Created 4th December 2004.
