Brand and Lorac

 Death of Jezebel – Christianna Brand

I really, really enjoyed the background to this book – the ridiculous pageant that is being set up, part of a big exhibition (it sounds something like the ldeal Home Show crossed with a Country Fair) and Brand being very amusing about the daft kitchen gadgets for sale and the out of work actors who have never ridden a horse but are only too pleased to take the work anyway, all with a second, underlying aspect -  that all this pomp and nonsense is largely driven by the desire to get back to normal after the Second World War. 

Similarly there are the semi-humorous love affairs and entanglements, and behind that the memory of a young man who came from the then British Colony of Malaya to fight in the early days of the war, and committed suicide after he found his fiancée drunk and snuggled up with another man.  

Three people had a role in the disillusionment and suicide, but up until now the young man's friends and family have been stranded during the Japanese occupation, and even if they wanted revenge they couldn't have acted. Now, the war over, there are a number of people involved in the pageant from Malaya. People who have lost not only years of their lives and any sense of security, but at least a measure of their sanity too. The death threats start coming in. 

Unfortunately I started to find the behaviour of both suspects and potential victims quite hard to take - we have multiple confessions at one point, and at least one person who has received a death threat going for a walk very late at night because she can’t sleep, and a locked room mystery that.. was fine, as they go (I’m lukewarm on locked room mysteries). 

On the other hand (again) I also really enjoyed the relationship between Inspectors Cockrill and Charlesworth. Cockrill is down from Kent for a conference, Charlesworth is the London man. The antagonism was nicely pitched – present but not so that they let it get in the way of working together.  

 

Checkmate to Murder – E C R Lorac

This by contrast is written while the war is going on. The period detail is, again, really enjoyable. I often feel you get more info from these sprinklings through the fiction of the time than you do from the history books, which repeat a lot of already known information around evacuation or gasmasks or rationing but leave out the niceties around accepting a cup of rare lapsang souchong or the actual logistics of digging a trench on London clay or the attitudes there might be to someone who left London because they were scared, and then got bombed in their ‘safe’ country cottage.

The set up is also good. Five people are having a pleasant, if low key, evening – a casserole cooked in the small kitchen/bathroom attached to the run-down studio which is all the Manatons can get. 

Bruce and Rosanne are brother and sister, both artists - and with a war on artists are not exactly in clover.   Still there is beer, and food, and they’ve got the place reasonably warm and blacked out well enough that they won’t be fined £5. They’ve got friends - Rosanne is in the kitchen when the woman who cleans next door pops in with some herring she managed to get for them, and the guests brought the beer as well as some rations for the pot. Her brother is taking a sketch for a painting, one of those guests is posing for him, and the two others playing chess.

The evening is interrupted by a special constable who has just found the old man next door murdered, and a Canadian soldier, supposedly his nephew or great nephew, standing over the body. The special doesn’t exactly get off on the right foot with the group in the studio – even the respectable middle aged chess playing civil servant – but they undertake to watch the young man while the special goes off to call for back up.

Enter MacDonald, Lorac’s series sleuth, who, like the group in the studio, starts to smell a rat...