Green for danger

Fans of the British TV series Foyle's War and of historical novels like Jennifer Ryan's The Spies of Shilling Lane (2019) should love this Golden Age thriller in the British Library's Crime Classics collection. Set in 1942 in heavily bombed Kent and published two years later, the novel has an on-the-ground reporting feel to it that adds to its bite (an author's note explains how Brand herself lived through many air raids). Postman Joseph Higgins is delivering letters to the seven doctors and nurses assigned to a hastily organized military hospital in Kent when an air raid hits the hospital, leaving the postman with a shattered thigh. Higgins dies on the operating table, and a local detective inspector conducts a routine investigation of what seems an accidental death. That assumption is overturned after one of the medical staff is found on the same operating table, stabbed twice in the chest. One operating room, seven doctors and nurses, and a baffling case hinging on the seeming impossibility of anyone getting away with murder with six other witnesses surrounding the killer make this a tantalizing puzzle. A movie version of this mystery, with the same title, appeared in 1946, written and directed by Sidney Gilliat, the screenwriter for Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Originally published in 1944, this intriguing mystery from Brand (1907--1988) swiftly sets out its premise--seven suspects, one of them a murderer--and then settles into describing their disparate lives and the reasons that have brought them together at Heron's Park Military Hospital early in WWII. When retired postman Joseph Higgins dies on the operating table during a simple surgical procedure, curmudgeonly Inspector Cockrill of the Kent Police arrives to determine whether the death was an accident or murder. Though eager to get back home before the blackout, the detective eventually concedes that Higgins met with foul play. But how, by whom, and why? The investigation carries on amid squabbles, burgeoning love affairs, and broken hearts. Brand skillfully delivers a full complement of surprises, motives, and suspects. However, what gives this classic closed-circle puzzle its fascinating patina for contemporary readers are the authentic details and insights into life in London under the blitz, which Brand experienced firsthand, as revealed in an author's note. This entry in the British Library Crime Classics series is a must for readers who like their mysteries wrapped in sobering history. (Apr.)

Murder stalks a wartime Kentish hospital in Brand's masterpiece, a welcome reprint from 1944. A year after postman Joseph Higgins delivers letters from seven citizens accepting positions at Heron's Park Military Hospital, an air raid leaves him with a broken leg, and he's brought to the hospital, where all seven of the correspondents are now working. Harley Street surgeon Gervase Eden, aging Maj. Moon, and Capt. Barnes are physicians; Jane Woods, Esther Sanson, Frederica Linley, and Sister Marion Bates are nurses. Even though Higgins' injury is straightforward, he somehow dies of asphyxia during his routine surgery. Summoned from Torrington, DI Cockrill disconcerts the staff by pointing out that since only seven people knew that Higgins had even been admitted to the hospital--the same seven whose letters he had delivered--his murderer must have been one of those seven, a pool of suspects that a second murder soon shrinks to six. Brand (1907-88) adroitly evokes the wartime atmosphere of the hospital: the stiff-upper-lip sangfroid, the black humor, the flirtations that blossom overnight into unlikely romance. Her leading characters, appealing on their own terms, double surprisingly well as intermittently guilty-looking suspects. Most impressive of all is her equal attention to the mysteries of who killed Joseph Higgins, how they managed his murder, and why they wanted him dead in the first place. Even the savviest fans of golden-age puzzles should prepare to be hornswoggled. Hands down one of the best formal detective stories ever written. It's a treat to have it back in print. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.