Christianna Brand
This is a highly enjoyable book, especially considering it is the author’s first attempt at a crime novel (1941). I loved the way Christianna Brand (1907-88) employed a setting that she knew well from her early job in the West End of London, using retail as the launch pad for the story, just as Dorothy L Sayers had earlier used her experience of an advertising agency to such good effect in Murder Must Advertise (1933).
I really felt as though I was ‘there’ in the snazzy dress shop and knew the characters well – an absolute must for a good novel. It also meant that one cared more about the person who was murdered and the suspects left behind. It was obviously a woman author writing about the sort of women she knew well, and you could tell.
The only issues for me from the word go were in the nature of spoilers. First was the fact that I had already read a later book of Brand’s (Tour de Force, 1955) in which one of the main characters makes a reappearance, which of course meant that it was highly unlikely they were the murderer in this story, unless the person concerned was to escape conviction and pop up on a foreign island to kill again. So I counted that character out straightaway. I had also unfortunately read a spoiler at some point in the past which had said how Brand used a particularly mean co-worker from her own retail experience as a murderer in her first novel. So it was a shame to instantly be able to identify the culprit!
Which should have spoiled it for me. But it didn’t.
I soon felt so engrossed in the story and engaged with the characters that I was quite willing to suspend my disbelief and go on the merry-go-round of all the available suspects in their many interviews and adventures concerning the poisoning by oxalic acid of Miss Doon one lunchtime. The fact that the girls were eating rabbit curry was both a sign of wartime deprivation but also a handy way to disguise the taste of a poison.
Perhaps my enjoyment was also partly due to the main detective, Inspector Charlesworth, and his sidekick Sergeant Bedd, who were very entertaining characters. The only disadvantage was that when Brand introduced the two policeman and gave their physical description, she wrote it in such a way that I got them the wrong way round!
“Sergeant Bedd met him [Charlesworth] outside and they stood together on the steps of the mortuary, poring over the notes, a tall, fair, smiling young man and a grizzled, thick-set middle-aged one. Charlesworth’s eyes are an honest and friendly grey; but Bedd’s are as blue as the summer skies, set deeply in his square, brown face.” (p40)
See what I mean? With her mentioning Bedd first, you expect his description to be first.
This was particularly confusing when Charlesworth began to fall in love with Victoria David, a salesgirl at the shop and the wife of an artist, and I was visualising an unattractive middle-aged man in the role instead of the attractive young one. But I got them sorted out about half way through the book, so then the Inspector’s vulnerability to a lovely young woman seemed more of a pleasing characteristic than a creepy one! I do think, however that the police should have been quicker in checking other local chemists concerning their recent sales of oxalic acid, and to ponder much earlier the idea of whether Miss Gregory, in all the mix up over the lunches, could have been the original intended victim.
I think the word ‘merry-go-round’ is an appropriate one for the way we were ‘played’ as an audience – now suspecting one of the workers at the dress shop ‘Christophe et Cie’, and now another. This was especially the case because the camaraderie of the women who worked there – the shielding of each other, the unwillingness the think badly of their friends, the many secret ways they had supported each other in the past – all of this meant that there were many layers of deception and guilt. I must admit, I did find the endless discussion of where the oxalic acid crystals had got to rather wearing at times. And the possible motivation for the murder – the prospect of a promotion to run a shop in Deauville, combined with the complication of past and present relationships with the repellent boss Bevan – meant that the police were led astray multiple times in their calculations. In fact, suspicion was piled on each character so many times that I began to wonder if it was to be another ‘Orient Express’ scenario in which everyone did it!
The ending is indeed a bit Poirot-esque as Charlesworth again takes us through each of the possible suspects, this time as a way, a rather macabre way, of teasing Victoria. It’s then quite a relief to have a final page that shows the Inspector some time later has recovered from his crush and is still friends with both Victoria and her husband the ‘Bobby Dazzler’. But after a case involving such an exhausting number of beautiful women, he declares to his boss: “‘Honestly, sir, I don’t care if I never set eyes on another girl for the rest of my life!’“ (p253)
I would give this book 4.5 out of 5 stars. A great first novel!
(All page numbers are from the British Library Crime Classics edition of 2025.)
