WW2 and the Golden Age Transcript

Caroline: The high point of golden age detective fiction occurred between the First and Second World Wars. That's a generally accepted fact. Of course, when Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and co were writing and publishing in the 1930s, they didn't know they were part of a literary movement that would be called a "golden age". But decades later, when critics looked back on this extraordinary moment in crime fiction, that's what the interwar period would come to be known as.

In the same way, the beginning of the Second World War is widely considered to be the end of this golden age. Not least because two of the genre's most prominent advocates, Dorothy L. Sayers and Anthony Berkeley, stopped writing crime fiction at the end of the 1930s. By the time the war ended in 1945, the world had utterly changed. Country houses, neat solutions, and minute class distinctions were things of the past. Stories, like life, became messier and more obviously impacted by trauma.

But. But. There are exceptions to every rule, including this one. The golden age of detective fiction had ended, supposedly, in 1939. Strictly, this isn't a form of crime writing that survived the Second World War, let alone reckoned with all of its complexities. And yet one of the best examples of a classic impossible crime whodunnit was published in 1944 and relies on the everyday details of the war for every aspect of its plot. How can that be?

To find out, let's take a closer look at Green for Danger by Christianna Brand.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Before we get into it, a warning: Shedunnit production assistant Leandra Griffith and I are going to discuss this book with full spoilers. Please listen responsibly!

This was a reread for me, I think possibly the third or even fourth time I've read this book. Initially read it for pleasure way back when, and then I've read it a couple of times at least in the course of doing Shedunnit, not least when I did that big episode about all of Christianna Brand's books last year.

I think that was last year. Time is a flat circle. How about you though, Leandra? I think this might have been your first time.

Leandra: It was my first time. So it's not my first time with the author, but it was my first time with Green for Danger, and I mean, I need an excuse to read this, because I've had my copy sitting on my shelf for far too long, and I keep staring at it, thinking, "When am I going to read this?"

So thankfully, Shedunnit Book Club forced me to read it, and I had a great time. But previously, I had read a short story, "Dear Mr. Editor...". I think that was my first experience with her, and then again, thanks to Shedunnit Book Club, I think it was about two years ago now did we read Death of Jezebel? So that was my first long form work with her, and then just this summer, I read Tour de Force, wanting a little bit more experience.

And it's been really interesting to kind of compare the various experiences. I do think she has some light tones to her work. Usually there are some humourous moments or sharp characters with tongue in cheek dialogue, but it also can be quite dark. I feel as though we have some descriptions of gore and just characters being quite violent when they want to murder someone.

Caroline: Yes, I think that's an accurate summing up of Christianna Brand. She has a real knack for a funny line or a turn of phrase. There's one in this book, actually, that I wrote down, a description of a minor character who barely appears again. She says, "He reminded one of a bottle with the cork driven in too far. One longed to get hold of his head and pull it out sharply so as to give him a bit more neck." Which when speaking of a sort of military gentleman, I think we can all immediately picture what that looks like because of the cut of a uniform and maybe the close haircut, et cetera, and it's very funny.

But at the same time, as you say, this book features quite a detailed description of an operation, some really scary stuff around bombing and being trapped in rubble, some quite scary poisoning and misuse of hospital drugs, and some really evil undertones, and that's definitely been present in the other books by her I've read.

I think I said in the, the ranking episode that London Particular, also known as Fog of Doubt, is my favorite of her books, and that has a death in it that it's one of those rare ones that kind of transcends the temporariness of a murder mystery in the sense that you feel genuinely quite emotionally moved and even wounded by that death in that book.

So yeah, she does have this real gift, I think, for marrying dark and light.

Leandra: Yes, because some of the humour, in the moment, you think, "Oh, that's a funny description" or "Oh, we all have been there." I think one of the... it might be the same man that was described as the cork being pulled to give more neck.

He was the man in charge, right? And they were saying how there's a new person in charge every so often, and the first thing they wanna do is spruce up the place, do some kind of big change. And what he did was repaint all of the bins, and that's just kind of this funny, silly admin thing that is not important at all.

You're just thinking, "Okay, great. Busy work, whatever." But weirdly, that funny moment does end up being quite important to the plot, and so she does have a good way of almost distracting you with the humour or distracting you with the dark moments, even with the possibility of being buried alive. That was quite a dark concept in how these characters keep morphia on them in case that happens, and then, you know, they can at least relieve themselves of pain while waiting to hopefully be saved.

Caroline: Yes, that thing with the repainting of the bins is very smart. I don't think I even picked up on that maybe my first or even second read through the book because it's that subtle. But I think it's a great way of addressing the challenge that all golden age murder mystery writers have. Of I need to show my workings, but simultaneously not have anyone see that I've done so.

And some writers do it by omission, or by misdirection, or by covering it up with elaborate character work. Christianna Brand sometimes does it with humour, and I think that can be brilliant. That can be really clever. Anthony Berkeley has a bit of that in his books as well, that same sort of dark edge of is this funny? Is this scary? I'm not sure. Maybe both.

Leandra: Yeah, and just on the topic of love notes, I really do also like how Christianna Brand does distract you. I think she has you assuming different things about characters, and because of that assumption, you almost write them off. For instance, when we are talking about the character Esther, she is quite sad for most of the book when it comes to her trying to still cope and grapple with the fact that her mother had died.

And then we see this light at the end of the tunnel. She has fallen in love with this man. They're talking about the future. Even before that, when she first meets him, there's this line that I still think about where he says, "Oh, it's a shame that she doesn't like beer." And he doesn't say this aloud, but he thinks to himself, "Because you're going to be surrounded by it for quite some time, for quite a bit of time in the future," thinking, oh, we will have this future together. We'll be married.

And I was jumping ahead, thinking of the future for these two characters, for Esther, and I feel like that was almost a bit of a distracting technique as well because I'm just writing her off, thinking she has this future already, that it's a bit of foreshadowing, when in reality it's not foreshadowing, it's just hopeful thinking because we know that Esther has a very different future in mind.

Caroline: Absolutely, yes. I think something that Christianna Brand does supremely well in this book, which is sadly not so present in all of her books, I think she drifted away from this as we got further from the detective fiction of the interwar years. It's technically so tight. Nothing gets mentioned in this book that doesn't then come back later and have deeper significance.

Nothing's left hanging. Everything is perfectly wound up at the end. And even, as we'll come onto, even when something does not resolve in exactly the way that you think it might, it still has a resolution of sorts. The author still gives it that little final touch, even if it's a surprise to you.

So, yes, I think this is a supreme example of a murder mystery almost... I think of it as working like a piece of clockwork, where if you disassemble it and take all of the different cogs and gears and rods out, and then put it back together, you have to use every single piece for it to work the way it's intended.

There's no spare machinery. There's nothing wasted. So I think it's a great technical triumph in that way There are novels that are a technical triumph that then fall down for me on the human element, where you find the characters two-dimensional or long-winded or boring, or the setting flat, or it's just too complicated and you can't get your head around it.

I find some of the work of John Dickson Carr falls into that category for me, for instance. He was great at puzzles. I don't think he was quite so great at making you care about the people involved in the puzzles. But in this book, Brand does that supremely well, and one of the ways I think she achieves it is by keeping her circle of suspectsvery small. Even though this hospital is, we are led to believe it's vast, its structure gets described to us and it's like a great wheel with spokes and wards around the edge, and it's got a whole underground complex so it can carry on working during air raids.

It's a really big place. We really only know about eight people in the whole course of this book, and one of them dies quite soon in. What did you make of that, having the sense of great bustle going on and then only really having these seven or eight faces that you actually know?

Leandra: That's really a good point because it is a rich setting.

It's very active. We have the mentioning of other patients, of other side characters, like Cheese and Chalk, and really characters who aren't that important, but at its heart are these seven characters and the victim, and of course, we have another victim in Sister Bates, and we are just circling around them, and it does feel as though their environment is growing ever more tight as the book goes on because they start to be under watch.

They can't go anywhere without an officer keeping an eye on them, even when it's to get up for a glass of water in the middle of the night, and so it does feel as though she has this funnel effect where as we zero in on these six characters now, their own environment becomes tighter and tighter, and it helps us keep focused as well and not get distracted with everything else going on.

And I also think that the characters are strengthened by their ties to each other. They're very involved with each other when it comes to relationships, when it comes to emotions, and because they have this very tight circle, that also helps us narrow down as well. Obviously, I think that we do have our circle of friends, our circle of coworkers that we tend to hang out with.

The three women especially, they all live together, and so it ensures that we aren't getting distracted by these side characters that they all know and hang out with. In fact, they've kind of isolated themselves as well because I believe the three women, specifically the VADs, are known for not eating in the mess. 

They eat in their own apartment, and so it seems as though they've isolated themselves as well, and it makes sense for the plot. It makes sense for, you know, what Christianna Brand has provided us, but it also keeps us focused and not feeling as though we've been introduced to a million characters. How do we keep track of what's going on at this military hospital?

Caroline: Yes, exactly, and that question of the women living the way they do in this little cottage in the grounds and choosing to go to the extra inconvenience of carrying their food from the mess there and reheating it, I think that speaks to something else that's really interesting about this book, which is what she makes of the wartime setting because the reason the women do that is because they're trying to create some semblance of a home life in this gigantic institution.

They don't want to eat in this huge smelly mess that stinks of cabbage with hundreds of other people in this very sort of institutional way. They want some semblance of feeling that they've got a place that's just theirs that they can go back to where they get some choice about what and when they eat, rather than having everything decided for them.

Because you do get that sense of in wartime you lose agency. Everyone is working towards this bigger goal, and you just have to go where you're sent and when you're sent and do what you're told. And just carving out a little bit of personal autonomy and agency can help you keep going with that. And I found that quite touching, the little descriptions of domestic details about how they take it in turns to leave a shilling in the meter, another detail that then becomes sinister later on.

If one of them's on a night shift, they'll sort of leave a hot water bottle in her bed waiting for when she gets back. All those little things just humanize what is otherwise clearly a horrifying situation because the wartime stuff is horrifying in this book, perhaps more so than some of the other books we've read. I think this is the fourth we've read this year that has significant World War II stuff in it, and it's got some of the most chilling elements in it.

The, you know, descriptions of how Esther's mother, who is a bit of a hypochondriac, I talked about her in the episode about hypochondria last year, how she's always been terrified that she's going to be buried in an air raid, and then that is what happens to her, and they have to stop digging because it's no longer safe for the rescue workers, and she dies, which is awful.

Two other characters also get sort of temporarily buried under wreckage in the bombing. There's a, a long descriptive scene where there's an air raid going on in the present tense, and characters are kind of dashing around, trying to get into shelters and so on. So it does feel much more active maybe in the way it doesn't quite in some of the other books where it's either described in the past tense or, like in Murder by Matchlight by E.C.R. Lorac, everyone's a lot more accustomed to it and immured to it. It doesn't feel quite like bombs are gonna drop on my head any minute now which is how it feels in Green for Danger.

Leandra: That's exactly what I was going to bring up next, because there is this juxtaposition when you have characters who are part of the military hospital, who are there day in and day out, and they are interacting with those who aren't used to these types of experiences because I think it's Inspector Cockrill.

Cocky is speaking with, it might have been Woody, and him saying, "Ugh, women, you know, you're so..." He was saying something to the effect where they're not as strong, or they're a bit emotional, that they can't handle this type of stress, and there's this really nice monologue, I believe, in Woody's head about how these women actually are quite strong, the fact that they are just walking about their business as there are potential air raids and bombings and guns, and she says, "Yeah, you're right. We can't handle ourselves, can we?" And yet they are completely calm. Or there was also that scene in which the women are being looked after by this other officer, and they are hearing gunshots, and the woman says, "Ooh, that was a close one." And they're thinking, "No, that's not a bomb. That's actually gunfire."

And she keeps saying, "Oh, it's another close one. Oh, it's a bomb." And they recognize by hearing alone what type of, you know, situation they're in, but this person who isn't used to it is immediately assuming it's bombs. And so you're seeing the differences in reactions and how these women, these VADs, are pretty much desensitized.

They're afraid, but they've also learned to just view it as a normal day-to-day experience. 

Caroline: Yeah, that's, I think, one of the most interesting things about reading fiction like this that was written so soon or even during the war, and draws directly on the author's experience of living through it, because you do get details like that, that I think would be hard for someone who wasn't there to imagine.

Things can become so normalized to them, and that they can even use humour to deflect and to manage that kind of thing in a way that, you know, if you just popped up 15 years later with that idea would seem monstrous, the idea that you were laughing about something so serious. But actually, at the time, it was how people were and how they coped.

So you see lots of little examples of that, like people complaining about the food, and giving their fellow workers silly nicknames, and getting really het up in who's gonna wear what to the dance, and who's gonna dance with whom, and all this kind of stuff, when all the while, bombs are just freely falling upon them and they don't really have much time to think about that so much.

And yes, that scene you mentioned when they're in the air raid shelter and the policewoman is watching over them, and the three women who work in this hospital all the time just find her so annoying because she will not stop going, "Ooh, that was another one." And they're like, "I would really like to just sit in silence and possibly go to sleep."

It put me in mind actually of Agatha Christie, I think, writes in her autobiography about how she was living alone for a lot of the Second World War in a flat in London, working in a hospital during the day, and when an air raid started, she was supposed to go down to the shelter for the block, and she just stopped going because she was more afraid, she decided, of being buried alive in the shelter than she was of dying in a direct hit on the flat.

And it didn't take very long for her to just start sleeping through the air raids completely Even with all of the noise of sirens and bombs, she would just sleep through it, and obviously she was very lucky that her building was not hit. This element of this book made me think of that and how many other people must have had similar experiences, made similar decisions.

Leandra: Yeah, and you can see how it does impact the plot as well. It's not just this extra environment or setting, because even the air raids, it's interesting to think about this because Inspector Cockrill, he intended to leave. He came as a favor, looking things over, yep, don't really notice anything, you know, too out of sorts or out of place, and I think he was about to get in his car and leave, and that's when the air raid is, you know, an alarm is set, people are said to, "Okay, stay where you are, get to shelter," and he ends up deciding to stay rather than driving home because obviously there is this fear of, as he's driving, what if he ends up being hit?

And there's even, I think, a bit of, not a callback necessarily, because the two events aren't placed side by side, but later on when he is speaking with William about William's own experience, being afraid that he may be buried alive, listening to the radio as he's waiting to be rescued, and the inspector doesn't end up saying this aloud, but he is ready to start giving his own experiences and how at one point he was in his car, and if he had been 20 minutes sooner, he also may have been hit.

And so there are these kind of puzzle pieces, thanks to the war elements, that are forcing this plot, because there wouldn't have been a mystery to investigate, Inspector Cockrill would have been on his way, but now he's been forced to stay, and that's when Sister Bates is murdered, and it just ends up leading one thing after the other.

Caroline: Yeah, that's a really good point actually, that without the wartime conditions, there would be no plot, there'd be no story to tell for this book.

Because unlike some other wartime mysteries where a, what you might call a civilian crime then plays out against the background of the war and perhaps it changes the way it's investigated or covered up or whatever. Whereas this one, the first move on the board is the death of Esther's mother and the fact that Esther feels that the rescuers didn't try hard enough, that they didn't keep digging when they should have done.

Even though they stopped for safety reasons, in her grief-stricken, slightly deranged state, she cannot accept that. And so she then goes to work at this hospital with this grudge in her breast about this, and then when, again, the war causes the man she holds responsible, who was leading the rescue team, to be brought in after he's been injured in another bombing raid, to be brought into her ward, that sets the whole thing in motion, which obviously without those raids, without the war, these people would never have met, never would have happened.

They never would've been in the same place. So in that sense, this feels like a true World War II mystery rather than a mystery that happened in the early 1940s, if that makes sense.

Leandra: The more we talk about it, the more impressed I am by the plotting, by all of the details, because there are more moments that I'm remembering that are quite small, but they're also so significant.

Even, for instance, another moment that I wrote off as, oh, just, you know, war conditions, was the moment in which they're discussing how the patients are a bit more riled up, possibly because of the air raid, but they're complaining about pain, they're more uncomfortable, they're not sleeping, and you're just thinking, "Oh, well, this is typical. This makes sense." And then we realize that the morphia, the pain relief for them, has been withheld. And you're thinking, "Oh my gosh!" That's another detail that is not only part of the mystery plot, but obviously there's the fact that I was just writing this off as a part of, you know, what it's like to be at a military hospital. But in reality, that was one of the signs that something was wrong.

Caroline: Yes, it was part of the murderous plot, essentially. Speaking of the morphia and the drugs and the procedures for giving them, I want to talk a little bit about the medical side of this mystery, because for all that it's definitely a World War II mystery, it's also very definitely a medical mystery.

It's not just a murder that happens in a hospital. The murder, at least the initial one, is very intimately entwined with the mechanics of surgery, and it takes place in an operating theater during an operation. All of the relevant people are, for one reason or another, in the room, either because they're a surgeon, they're a nurse, they're VAD who's assisting or observing, they're an anesthetist.

They're all present when the death occurs, and initially, of course, this death does unnerve the people in the room because it doesn't seem right. It doesn't tally with what they're expecting to happen. They think it's just a really unfortunate accident, or not even an accident, just that this person wasn't actually in the proper condition to have surgery. These things happen. It's awful.

And then, of course, the crime elements of it come out later. We get another murder in the same operating theater to cover up the first one. From that point on, I feel like we're in more murder mystery territory, but that initial death in the operating theater does rely on some quite detailed descriptions of what surgery involved in the early 1940s.

And of course, ultimately, to understand this book and its title, we need a proper description of the tubes and the different gases on the anesthetist's cart and all this kind of stuff. And some of it was a bit more graphic than I was remembering. There's some stuff about the surgeon's kind of demonstrating what he's doing, and he's describing what he's doing with the various internal organs and all this kind of stuff.

And I was like, "Hm, I know classic crime doesn't tend to go in for gore," and true to form, Brand doesn't describe in detail, you know, what the victims look like or anything. But we do get quite a lot of descriptions of internal organs in this book.

Leandra: Yes, I was quite surprised. It makes sense. It's not superfluous at all, but the descriptions of him moving the organs about to get a better view on whatever he was doing, I was quite surprised because you just don't expect that in Golden Age, but it's fitting, and I think it added to the tension.

And possibly Brand was thinking, "Oh, this could be another red herring. People are keeping an eye on this," not realizing that the death is going to be coming from a different thing, from the gases and what's being withheld, what's being given, and we're thinking that it's going to be something done within the cavity of the body. I'm not sure. Or, yeah, it could just be distracting us once more because we are, you know, too much focused on what is going on on the operating table and being a bit squeamish and disgusted, rather than focusing on how clean the crime actually was with simply giving him CO2 rather than anything else.

I would be interested in knowing, and we could talk to people in the club as well who are reading this for the first time, but the fact that the title is Green for a Danger, when did it become clear that, oh, it must be green for CO2?

There must be some way. Like, how did they switch the tubes? How did they switch this out? What's going on there? Because as soon as we had this really lovely demonstration between Barnes and Cockrill, I really appreciated that because obviously the inspector, he needed to understand how this all worked, but he was the perfect representative for us as the reader who don't have that type of perspective, because it helped me understand what was at play thanks to basically this lesson that Barnes was giving him.

Caroline: Yeah, that's a really well-handled bit of writing, I think, because that could become quite heavy exposition It could seem quite forced as Barnes is explaining to Major Moon, say, "Well, you see what I normally do is I connect this to this." It's like, well, he would know that. Of course, he would. He's a surgeon. He does this 100 times a day.

So having Cockrill there as the proxy for the reader being completely ignorant and a little bit annoyed that he even has to learn about any of this, I think allows that very crucial explanation to pass off without jarring. So yes, I think largely the medical stuff is well handled. She doesn't use any long words or introduce any complicated concepts, but she doesn't flinch from describing it in the way that I think people who work with that stuff as their job would think of it, it being very natural. Oh, yeah, we just cut people open, and then we sew them up again. That's our job.

Whereas to ordinary people, that's peculiar and scary. So I think it says very well. What did you make of Inspector Cockrill, who is, as you say, by accident, the principal sleuth in this mystery? Although he's not in it an enormous amount, it doesn't feel like we follow him around the hospital in the way that maybe we would follow the detective in other books.

Leandra: No, there are times when it feels as though we are actually in the head of the other characters far more than we're in his head, and it feels as though we're dealing with a mixture of a medical drama, a military drama.

Obviously, there's a lot of interpersonal relationships that are muddying the waters, and so we're really focusing on that, and then he kind of arrives on the scene. And it's interesting because it's quite early on where he says, "I know who the killer is." And he says this aloud, says, "Hey, okay, that's gonna spread like wildfire," because they're all gonna tell each other this, and he just continues to exist and slowly moving the pieces, thinking he's in control.

I think what I appreciate about it is that while he is self-assured, he is confident and a capable detective, there are quite a few moments in this book that demonstrate when he has fumbled a little bit. He has made some calculations, decided to be a bit of a risk-taker, and there was a possibility of things going really horribly wrong.

Fortunately for William, for instance, that was a bit of an experiment, William survives. He does not die. But then his assumptions in jumping around and possibly this leans on the fact that the inspector isn't knowledgeable in medical practices, it ends up being a really horrible fumble in the end because he knocked the syringe out of the... was it Major Moon's hand? So he was thinking, "Oh, I'm saving Esther's life," or, "I'm saving someone," and everyone in the room who does have medical knowledge says, "No, actually, you knocked the antidote out of his hand." And so we are seeing both the times when the inspector is top of his game, an impressive figure for them to fear, and other moments where he's just an ordinary man.

Caroline: And he's doing his best in a high-pressure situation that he doesn't have all the facts for. But I think it is interesting that he does that thing of saying early on, like, "I think I know who did it," which is both true, but also I think a way of trying to drive the murderer out into the open because he says, "I know who did it," but the unspoken thing is there, "But I can't prove it.

So far this has all been done so cleverly that I've got nothing that I could take to court, so at the moment you're getting away with it." He's trying to force some evidence that he can actually use, and that's where the risk-taking comes in. He asks for this reconstruction in the hope that it will, if not force a confession, at least produce some kind of tell or information that he can use, and of course it sort of does ultimately, but not with the result that he's expecting.

And I think that's another piece of cleverness on Bran's part because I think if it all were to go to Cockrill's plan, it wouldn't be such a sort of emotionally cathartic scene because the reader would feel too much like they were being managed, like Cockrill wasn't human, like he was some kind of greater god that was pulling all these strings, when actually the fact that he gets part of what he wants and then not all of it shows he is fallible, he is human, and that he cannot control all events.

That big climactic scene where Esther is brought out into the open as the murderer, and her various machinations are described and explained, and then she takes morphia and kills herself before she can be arrested. That's a really interesting entry, I think, in quite a long list of similar ideas in mystery fiction, where the perpetrator is allowed to take their own life rather than be subject to the regular judicial system.

In this one, there's an extra twist on thoughts about what that means for justice and civil society because the other people in the room kind of conspire in allowing her to do it. They are not taken by surprise. They know she's already taken the morphia. They know before Cockrill does, and they keep their mouths closed, and they allow it to go too far beyond the point where she could be resuscitated because they've made the collective human judgment in that moment that that's the kind of thing to do, that although she turned out to be a psychotic killer, she was also their friend and their roommate, and maybe the person they loved first, which again, just feels very flawed and human and interesting, and makes the book feel messier than something a bit more sort of clinical and clockwork.

Leandra: Yes, because even when it comes to Inspector Cockrill and his approach towards it, he knew Esther before the events of the book as well, and so he had his own personal investment. He knew her mother, and then you can see him realizing that everyone else was protecting Esther as well, for quite some time, too.

So in the moment, he accuses Major Moon of propping her up, propping Esther up, because she would have fallen way sooner, and he would have realized what was going on, but they were keeping her on her feet to protect her and assist her in taking her own life. They were obviously probing, making Inspector Cockrill talk for longer to distract him.

He even references a moment in which, this might have been right after Sister Bates dies, and he's accusing them all, one of them must be the murderer, and Esther loses her mind a little bit. She begins to laugh in this hysterical way, and he calls back to that, saying that the women, either Woody or Frederica, quickly made to protect her to, you know, have them all go back to their dorm and separate them from Inspector Cockrill so that Esther wouldn't break in front of him and maybe confess things.

And so this entire time, Cocky thought that he was trying to catch one person, and he was, but so many others were protecting her, and that was adding to the difficulty of finally getting her to her crimes or at least find proof that she's the one who's been doing this. 

Caroline: It's such an interesting take on the closed circle mystery because what we normally mean by that is closed circle of suspects, there's a limited group of people who could have committed these crimes, normally established either through physical proximity, they're all marooned on an island or in a locked tower or something, or by some kind of alibi.

These are the only people who aren't accounted for at the time and therefore have to be the killer. So you start out thinking that's what this is. It's only the people who were in the operating theater at the time who could have done the initial crime and then needed to do the second crime. And by the end, you think, actually, this is more like a collective crime in the manner of certain other books I won't mention so as not to spoil them for you, where every character plays a part in the crime.

And that's not quite what she's got there. Esther hadn't confided in them. She hadn't been using them as tools in her plot, but as soon as they understood that that's what had happened, they were all on her side, which is very interesting. It gives me many interesting thoughts about sort of culpability and morality, which whilst also being a really good scene and a mystery, which I know you haven't seen the film yet, but for those who have, it feels tailor-made for the screen, right?

This scene where they're all in the same room at the end, and the dramatic things happen. You know, it couldn't be better.

Leandra: Yeah, I can't wait to watch the film. I wanted to watch it prior to our recording of this, but now I have something to look forward to, so I'm very excited. And you know, I will say I'm pretty sure the film, it came out in 1946.

Am I correct?

Caroline: That's right, yeah.

Leandra: Not long after the book was written. So I feel like that speaks to how impressive this book was at the time, that they immediately were jumping in and saying, "We need to get on this and give people a film version."

Caroline: Yes, I found a little snippet when I was doing the Christianna Brand episode last year.

I think it's in one of her either later pieces of journalism or one of her later introductions that she wrote for a new edition of one of her books, where she talks about how exciting it was to have the film coming out. Apparently they did a... I suppose now we would call this a gonzo publicity campaign or a viral publicity campaign, where they just bought loads of billboards around London and had them papered green, and it just said, "Green for danger," on them.

And it did not explain why. There was no " film coming out this date" or anything. And she said how fun and satisfying it was to go around London being like, "I know what it is," and nobody else did.

Leandra: I think that's awesome. So that's gonna be on the agenda, but I also am gonna have to figure out what my next Christianna Brand is. 

I do have Fog of Doubt or London Particular on my list simply because you praised it so much, so that might have to be the next one I try eventually.

Caroline: Yes, that book is definitely from the '50s and feels much more of the '50s. It's less of a tightly constructed novel than this one, but it's very good.

One last thing to say about this book before we wrap up. What did you think of Brand's ending? This was something that I only appreciated in full, I think, on this reading, which is that I think in the hands of a different writer, Frederica would marry Dr. Barnes, and Gervaise Eden would learn the error of his philandering ways because of the horrible events, and he would realize that Woods was the woman for him, and that he should settle down with her, and that actually she'd kind of been in love with him in her quiet way all along.

That's probably what would happen if Dorothy L. Sayers wrote this book. Agatha Christie loved to pair characters off at the end, lots of other people would do that. Christianna Brand does not do that. She allows Frederica and Dr. Barnes to get married, but in their final interactions, you're shown that Frederica is still quite a selfish and self-centered person, and that's just gonna be a feature of their life from now on.

And then Eden and Woods are not a couple and are never going to be. Woods still has her unrequited love for him. He's still completely oblivious, has not mended his ways, and that's how we leave the characters, and it's bittersweet, and I think all the more impactful because it isn't perfect. What did you think?

Leandra: I think that we would call it a bit of a hot take that Christianna Brand is taking in that even with these major events, right? They witnessed not only war, they've participated in seeing people die due to war conditions, but they've seen a close friend murder people and obviously take her own life, and yet these big, huge things don't change the people that much.

It doesn't actually change them that significantly. They still are who they are. They still have the same personalities that they had at the beginning of the book when they were all strangers. If we're thinking about how the book opened with our initial victim, Higgins, going off and giving each person their mail, and we get a little bit of a snippet about them, they haven't really changed from that moment at all.

Caroline: I don't think I said I love that opening. I love the epistolary opening.

Leandra: Me too. I really like it.

Caroline: I think it's fantastic, and I think more people should do it in novels. It's such a good way of quickly introducing a lot of information about characters, giving them their own voices and styles. In about three pages, you've met all of the people that are going to be important to this book.

You know where they've come from, that they're all converging on this hospital, and then I think, doesn't she even tell us in a line that within three months, one of these people will have murdered two others kind of thing? Which is a classic Christianna Brand thing that she loves to do. She does it in several of her other books, she puts it on the list of characters at the start.

She's like, "On this page is the name of two murder victims and one murderer." You know, she loves to foreshadow like that. But yeah, the, the epistolary opening, so good.

Leandra: Honestly, yeah, it's one of my favorite things as well, because like you said, it allows us to meet everyone in their own environment, knowing that eventually they'll come together and that will be a cocktail for disaster for various reasons.

And yes, that not only did she warn us of a murderer, but also that they would be taking their own life. We knew that very early on, but then of course, so many things happened that you don't really consider what she told us previously, so you know, we still get the shock of various reveals. But it is quite interesting to consider that these characters, before they met each other and then after, while they stay in each other's lives, those who are still alive, they really don't change. People don't change.

And I think that another thing that I've noticed in Christianna Brand, I'm not sure how frequently it's in, maybe I just had the luck of reading these two books this same summer, but with Tour de Force and with this one, these impressive women, women who are great personalities, who are strong, they fall for men who are just not worth anything.

Caroline: Yeah, that's true.

Leandra: Like Gervase Eden, all of these people falling in love, and you can tell that Brand does this on purpose, saying that he's not a looker. He doesn't really try to gain these women's attentions. He just attracts them. He doesn't view himself as being worth it either, and yet here we are, these women are just falling for him, and something similar happens in Tour de Force, in my opinion.

And yeah, even Woody is still kind of falling for him, but kind of accepts that he's always going to, after paying her a compliment, follow it by suggesting, "We are just friends." And it's like, "Okay, sounds good, Eden." Mm-hmm.

Caroline: Yeah. I think lots of us have met men like Gervase Eden, where if you are able to step outside the weird magnetism that they have, you're like, "What do you have? What is, what do you even have going for you? I can't see anything, and yet look at this." So I think so much of this book is drawn from Brand's own experience. Obviously, her time working in a hospital, there's a precision to the details that I just don't think you could get without having experienced it all firsthand.

But I think sometimes with the characters that's true as well. All writers do this to some extent, but she definitely met a Gervase Eden. She definitely knew one, and maybe was even taken in by him for a while, and that's why he's so recognizable as a type.

Leandra: I'm not sure because I don't know too much about Christianna Brand beyond, you know, simple biographical information, what we've done in research, but I kept picturing her as Woody. I kept seeing her as the, the Woody character, and maybe that also is why she knows a Gervase Eden so well because I feel as though she has that type of experience. And she was the older, wiser, sharper character who I think had the most humourous lines, versus Frederica being the somber character who everyone loved but didn't seem to show any emotion.

For some reason they liked that she never knew how to care for someone or be warm. So that's why I feel like Woody, in my mind, is Christianna Brand as a character, but I could be completely off on that.

Caroline: Yeah. I honestly, I don't feel like I have too great a sense of her to be able to say that.

I wonder if maybe when writing it after the fact, that's who she would have wanted to be, if you know what I mean. She kind of poured the most... She gave her the best jokes because she is kind of the best character, ultimately. I think what I have heard of Christianna Brand, at least in later life, is that she was kind of formidable, quite scary, loved to gossip.

Absolutely loved to gossip. I think Martin Edwards told me that, actually, that her letters and so on are the most amazing source because she just told everybody everything, but she wasn't necessarily always reliable. And I think she was also quite physically attractive and quite aware of that, if you know what I mean.

So in that sense, maybe not so much like Woody. But yeah, I don't know. I certainly think she likes that character a lot, whether or not it was an extension of herself. But yes, so that is Green for Danger. We both enjoyed it very much, me on my fourth or fifth time of reading it Leandra for the first time.

I hope you members also enjoy reading it as much as we did. This is, of course, our previous runners-up month, so this is a book that we have almost read many, many times before, and finally she's getting her chance, so we need to make the most of it.

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This episode of Shedunnit was produced and hosted by me, Caroline Crampton. My guest was Leandra Griffith, who as well as being Shedunnit's production assistant, also makes videos about books at her Youtube channel, Leandra the TBR Zero. You can find links to all the books and sources we referenced in the episode description and at shedunnitshow.com/ww2andthegoldenage. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you'd like to hear more conversations about books like this, join the Shedunnit Book Club now at shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Leandra and I discuss make an episode like this every month discussing the book that the book club is reading.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece and production assistance came from Leandra Griffith.

Thanks for listening.

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