Christianna Brand

“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

“Death of Jezebel has been unavailable at a sensible cost for decades. People have been talking about it, but not able to find it. Now it’s available as a mass market paperback, which is great in itself. It’s a very interesting story. It’s complex, it’s labyrinthine. It’s set at a pageant post-Second World War. Apparently, that was a big thing at that time, which I didn’t realize before I read the book. It’s got multiple solutions and is very ingenious. It’s also a closed circle mystery, because she gives you a cast of characters at the beginning and says that one of those people is the killer. You’ve also got a fair idea of why. It’s quite tightly written, but she manages to juggle the suspects around in a very ingenious way.” Read more...

The Best Golden Age Mysteries

Martin Edwards, Literary Scholar

“In classic summer holiday mystery fashion, a murder is committed among the resort group that he’s in, and the interesting twist is that Inspector Cockrill is initially the suspect when the local police start investigating the crime. He’s right there, he has the means and the motive—so part of the reason that he jacks in his holiday and starts investigating is because he needs to prove that he didn’t do it. Then, of course, it becomes an interesting investigation in its own right.” Read more...

The Best Summer Mysteries

Caroline Crampton, Memoirist