After feeling so enthusiastic about Christianna Brand’s first Inspector Cockrill book, I picked up Green for Danger (1944) when I was in the mood to get back to reading classics instead of contemporary procedurals. Because I found that the first book is pretty much universally regarded as the worst by other bloggers when I did a tour of posts about it, I was expecting Green for Danger to be significantly better. In that regard, I was disappointed: I don’t think this book was a huge leap forward over the first. It had many of the same problems, some new issues, and some things that bothered me more to see repeated than they did the first time around. I enjoyed it more, but mostly because of the stupendous setting and tone.
What got Better
In my warm response to Heads You Lose, I gushed about the temporal World War II setting and oh boy, was this book a treat for a history buff! From the opening pages, when the setting was announced as in an old children’s sanatorium converted to a military hospital during the Blitz, I was excited. This is so unbelievably in my wheel house of historical interests, and it did not disappoint. I loved the dread and fear that permeated a book set during a time of active warfare. I loved how the service brought together a much more diverse circle of suspects than your typical group of country house friends. I was delighted to learn more about some historical medical treatments and equipment in detail. And, most of all, I loved the details of the hospital, especially the lives and interactions of the patients (mostly men), and the lives and the complex interactions between the hospital staff. The setting, the time period, the side characters: all fantastic and fascinating. Above being a mystery, this is a wonderful historical novel full of tremendous and interesting detail about the homefront during the Blitz, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in that history. Written and published before the end of the war, this is a primary source, and it is a fascinating one.
What Didn’t Change Enough
The Detective
I wrote about how I disliked the minimal role that Inspector Cockrill, “Cocky” himself, played in the first book, and I can’t say that this was improved much in Green for Danger. He certainly spends more time on the page, and he has some rather interesting personal connections to some of the suspects in the closed circle. But I don’t have much more sense of him as a character or as a detective. He is a stinky chain smoker who is a little mean to suspects, but is he a good detective? Is he smart? Why does he do it? What are his methods? What is his philosophy of crime? Did he even solve this case, or (as I did) just narrow it down to two? Beats me! A detective doesn’t need to be heavily present on the page, detecting and narrating in plain view, for a mystery to be engaging, but in a series I want to know more about how the detective thinks so that I can put myself in their boots while considering the clues. Not everyone is as good at Christie as articulating a detective’s philosophy and framing a plot within it, but those that aren’t tend to have the detective on page, detecting, like Marsh’s Alleyn. It simply and profoundly doesn’t work for me that Brand keeps Cocky mostly off page and that his point of view remains a cypher to me after two books.
Because Cockrill isn’t detecting, that means that, like Heads, in Green a great deal of the detectorial speculation is done by the suspects themselves. In this book I found this bothered me a great deal. A theme of Heads was us-versus-them, the utter disbelief that the very rich suspects carried amongst themselves that someone in their rarefied group of lifelong friends could have committed terrible crimes. It makes sense for those characters to group together and talk through what they imagine the detective might make of the case because they trust each other and they don’t trust him! Though I still chafed at how minimally present the detective was in this detective novel, I was also willing to accept the reasons why he was off page, and why Brand delivered the detection and case-building through the eyes and minds of that particular group of suspects. It made sense and felt thematic.
This didn’t apply to the same degree in Green, where the closed circle is a group of doctors and nurses all working together in the wartime hospital, three men and three women. Some of the characters in the small group of suspects have relationships, even close ones: the three women live together and are friendly; the group contains an affianced couple; and the older surgeon and young anesthetist are from the nearby community where they worked together before the war. But except for the final pair, these characters were mostly strangers before the war brought them together in service and they don’t necessarily have much in common, particularly in their varying economic backgrounds and prospects. They haven’t the deep wells of trust, shared history, and class solidarity that bind together the group in Heads. I suppose they are trauma bonded, but the horrifying stress of war and murder doesn't necessarily bring people together, especially when they know that one of them has killed and attempted to kill and may kill again. It didn’t feel believable to me when the characters start idly chatting about how one of them must be a murderer while waiting together to be spoken to by Cockrill. I actually put the book down for about a week after this scene and read something else before I got back to it, it disappointed me and broke my immersion that much. When it happened again towards the end of the book, when the proof of murder had been found, my eyes rolled so hard. I fear this may be a characteristic of Brand’s mysteries, like Poirot gathering the suspects is a trope of Christie, and I don’t like it.
The characters
I felt the characterization of different members of the closed circle was a mixed bag in Heads. I didn’t think this was better in Green, and may have felt it slightly worse. Oh, some were still finely and deeply drawn. But I think more of the group were shallowly depicted, especially since Brand spends much of the book trying to clue out the suspect while misdirecting towards others by hiding their backgrounds and refusing any point-of-view forays into their minds. It leads to characters who spend the majority of the book as little more than tropes: the Good Anesthetist, the Sweet Old Man Doctor, the Pretty Nurse, the Inexplicably Attractive Rake Surgeon. The characters who are written more deeply are wonderful–I loved both Esther, a young spinster and adult Blitz orphan, and Woody, a comparatively older, unmarried woman with a bohemian background and implied greater sexual and social experience than her housemates. Woody is my favorite, but I think she is harmed by Brand holding back on her interiority and background to cast suspicion on her: she’s such an unusual character in contrast to the two other women (who are rather common types of stock characters) that I yearned to spend more time with her. Two out of six is pretty poor ratio, though about the same as in Heads. I think Green was ultimately more disappointing in this area than the first book because I was expecting more. Esther and Woody both have scenes where their characterization is much better than anything in Heads, but ultimately, though it had a lower ceiling, I felt the characterization in the previous book was more consistent.
What got Worse
The victims: I raved about the humane treatment of the victims in Heads, and while they weren’t bad in Green, they weren’t treated with the same degree of respect and interest. Cockrill is not a detective who looks to the psychology and life of the victims to solve crimes, to the detriment of the books. As a seasoned acolyte of Poirot, who does pay attention to such things, I didn’t think this book provided much challenge. Like Poirot, I looked to these things, and almost immediately narrowed the solution down to two.
The plot: the mystery and the reveals were very obvious. Some reveals I felt myself waiting impatiently on for the characters to catch up. In particular, the method of murder isn’t explained until 72% of the way through the audiobook, but it’s so incredibly obvious that I felt impatient and frustrated as I waited for the reveal. I'm not even sure if it was supposed to be a mystery, what with the clue in the title. Never a good sign, and if I didn’t like the setting so much, the sort of thing that can make me dislike a book. While the motive for the murder is truly interesting, certainly more than in the first book, it isn’t very mysterious.
I think the plot feels poor because, as I suggested above, Brand’s efforts at misdirection and obfuscation result in uneven characterization. Speaking for books generally, not every character needs to be drawn to the same degree of psychological realism and humanity as another! But it stands out in Brand because these six are our main characters and points of view into the story, because Cockrill is not really a protagonist, because the suspects narrate the mystery. Brand is excellent at writing characters, so it’s frustrating that her efforts to cover up a rather simple and obvious mystery resulted in under-characterization.
Conclusion
All that said, Green for Danger has an absolutely stellar denouement that played on Brand's strengths as a character writer. It's rare to have a mystery novel end up with a gut punch that is entirely unrelated to the crime, and I loved it. When Brand's character writing is good, it is very, very good! Combined with the wonderful setting, I still overall enjoyed this book and quickly recommended it. Even with my dislike of Cockrill, I'll happily keep reading the series!
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