Green for Danger

“Christianna Brand was a superb Golden Age author. Hers is a name that deserves to be mentioned alongside Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh…She wrote only a handful of mysteries, but Green for Danger represents her at her very best. It’s not a locked-room mystery. It doesn’t feature a physical impossibility, but it does feature a perfect, closed circle of suspects. This is set up from the very first page of the novel. We begin with a postman doing his rounds. What Christianna Brand does, which is so audacious, is she itemises the handful of letters that are in his bag, which are the correspondence of our key players in the mystery – the doctors and nurses at the field hospital. She then boldly states that one of these people is a murderer, so we know that from the handful of six or so characters to whom we’ve been introduced at that point, one of them is the murderer. It flies in the face of that Golden Age mystery cliché of having the least likely suspect – somebody who has played a minor role in the narrative – suddenly taking on new significance.” Read more...

The Best Locked-Room or Puzzle Mysteries

Tom Mead, Thriller and Crime Writer