Green for Danger

"This is another Golden Age mystery. As you say, it’s 1944, so it’s the height of the Second World War and it’s set in an English country field hospital. It’s fairly unique in that respect: it’s one of the only mystery novels I can think of that features that particular setting. 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. Unfortunately, she wasn’t as prolific as those authors. 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. We know from the beginning that our culprit is one of these people. At the same time, she’s defying us to work out which one it is. To me, that epitomises the intellectual challenge that I love so much. It was also made into a great film in 1946, with Alastair Sim as the detective. That’s also well worth seeking out."