More Short Crime Fiction Reviews.

The Crooked Wreath - Christianna Brand

Like Green for Danger (reviewed here) The Crooked Wreath was written and set during World War Two, although the setting is a large country house and extended family rather than a hospital. The family set up is intriguing. The kind of situation that should be ripe for a good murder mystery and all sorts of conflict, and yet - rather cleverly - that's not what we get. 

For example the Patriarch has married his mistress - or rather the woman who was his mistress while his wife was alive, but his grown up children and grandchildren seem quite well adjusted and accepting of their stepmother. He alone seems to be the fly in the ointment - one of those tiresome ancestors in books who keep changing their wills as their relatives fall in and out of favour. 

But in this case nobody's playing along, perhaps largely because most of them have war work and have come for a good rest, and because with far more serious things going on in the wider world they can't take the old man's ego too seriously, but mostly it seems because they all quite like each other and have no interest in playing favourites. 

And yet there is an affair being played out, even if the protagonists are trying to keep the thing low key and the old man dies in the act of making a new will.. 

Unfortunately, after a really strong story, the last five pages went on too long - at least one twist too many for my taste, the most obvious deus ex machina, and as for Inspector Cockrill's last conversation with the family, that could have gone so, so wrong.. 

Appleby's End - Michael Innes

Innes is, as I've noted before, a variable writer, but I don't think this one's meant to be believable. From the names to the place to the weather to the incidents to the resolution of the mystery, the whole thing has the texture of a dream, where Inspector Appleby tries hard to be prosaic but in the end just has to go with it and accept the insane logic of a looking glass world. 

On that basis, if the reader can do the same, it works very well.

Best of all my copy came in a nice red 1951 hardback (The Gollancz Detective Omnibus) that also includes The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin (a similarly mad tale) and D L Sayers' Unnatural Death, all for the princely sum of £2.

 (From Walden Books, the bookshop pictured in my last post. It's on Harmood St in Camden.)