Some months ago, I was complaining about being tired and depressed, and Simon suggested that I stop "doom scrolling" in bed, and read a "real book" for a change. While I had binged on many John le Carré George Smiley books and found them all very satisfying, I was moving through the le Carrés in chronological order and was getting to the point where the political events concerned became too relevant to current events. As a result, the books became less "distractions" and instead "long immersions" into really depressing subjects. So, I gave up reading books and went back to my doom scrolling on my phone until the wee hours. Then two things happened almost simultaneously: we watched Green for Danger, the movie, and an Instagram popped up in my "feed" that celebrated the arrival of a new British Library Crime Classic in the poster's (snail) mailbox. The post included an image of the book and I was entranced: Who got books with such great covers popping into their mailboxes without having to order them? People who subscribed to the British Libary Crime Classics book club and so were sent a newly minted book every month, that's who. (There is an equivalent British Libray Class Sci Fi club.)
ANYWAY: I purchased a copy of Resorting to Danger (which I'll review in the future) and Simon bought me Green for Danger to add to my rapidly growing collection of books from this publisher. I was particular excited to read Green for Danger as I liked the story and I wanted to see if the movie was making a bad book good or if the book could stand on its own. And my conclusion is that, yes, very much so, the book is a wonder. In her day, Christianna Brand was just as famous as Agatha Christie, though I had never heard of her. Her books sold by the millions and she her name was on everyone's lips--every English person's lips, that is. She was writing at the height of the "English Cozy Detective Murder Mystery" craze that gripped England from just after WWI until the late 1950s. WHY people in England wanted to read tens of millions of relatively bloodless murder mysteries, I have no idea. But they did and there are absolutely treasure troves of the things, kicking around, out of print, that this publishing company is slowly bringing back into print with fantastic covers.
As to Green for Danger: I won't summarize the plot as Simon did so in the movie review and the movie sticks very closely tho the book (insofar as a novel can be turned into a 90-odd minute movie.) But there are three things about Brand's writing that really stand out, and make her novels very worth the time it takes to read them:
(1) The book was written in 1944 and provides a very vivid feel for a moment in time that is long gone. Not only does she take the time to describe the way people live (how they make tea, what sorts of clothes they wear, what foods are available during wartime, and how hospitals are run--including very specific descriptions of nursing schedules and surgery procedures).
(2) The women out number the men and are way more interesting than the men. There are only three men: the detective and two doctors. (There are other men--patients, and a mailman--but they are extremely peripheral.) The women are in no way interchangeable and each very much has their own voice. Also, two obviously have sexual desires, have sex and are unashamed of having--and liking--sex. (Neither are married.) One doctor is constantly pestering one nurse to marry him and she allows him to paw her because she doesn't mind the sex it sometimes leads to, but she has NO interest in marrying him. She has agreed to be engaged to him,and even wears an engagement ring that he gave her, but she has no intention of actually going through with marriage. At one point, he asks (petulantly), "Does my ring mean nothing to you?" (This was after he caught her making out with another, much older and more financially and emotionally secure, doctor.) "Not really," she says, and she takes it off and gives it back to him--NOT the response he was hoping for. And she isn't a bitch or a vixon but the protagonist who really is better off without the guy! The conversations between the women when there are no men around--which are plentiful-- are also frank and wholly plausible.
(3) The women's bodies are described the way WOMEN think about women's bodies: one woman laments her leg hair needing constant attention that she hadn't time for (she decides to give up shaving rather than waste time shaving that she could spend sleeping); another has a bra strap popping loose all the time because wartime underwear elastic is crap--she, too, finds attending to these small annoyances tedious and eventually decides it isn't worth caring about. The internal dialogs of the women are also amazingly modern--no, better than modern because it is STILL the case that female character inner dialog never sound genuine or "real" but instead read as if authors--male and female--have never bothered to wonder or find out how women think to themselves about themselves.
Finally, as to the "mystery" part of the murder mystery: Brand is masterful at creating so-called
"locked room" murder mysteries. They aren't literally in a room but she sets them up so there is a very small number of people who could have "done it" (so far, of her books that I have read, it's been 5-7 people--this one has 5) and yet (a) none of them seem to possibly have been able to have "done it" though (b) all of them really, really wanted the murdered person dead. That, too, is a nice feature of her books: the world is better off without the dead people and no one pretends to be cut up about their loss. And, blessedly, none of the murders are "sex crimes" so I don't have to suffer an endless pile of young girls being found naked in dumpsters with bits cut off as trophies. (Yeesh, when did that trend start and, more importantly, when will it STOP???)
As Simon mentioned in his review of the movie, Alistair Sim is a perfect person to play Inspector Cockrill, a rural police inspector who is shlubby, clumsy, clever, sardonic and cynical--so, obviously, he rubs everyone wrong and because they desperately want to get away from him they blurt out things that they shouldn't. (He also sneaks around and pops up in places no one expects--another tedious feature that flusters his suspects.) He's a regular in Brand's books and, very cleverly, she paired him up with his polar opposite, a London CID Detective named Charlesworth in a few of her novels, so we get the yin/yang effect. THEN, even more cleverly, she had Charlesworth feature in his own stories. Brand obviously knew how to appeal to all stripes of readers.
No comments:
Post a Comment