Reprint of the Year: Christianna Brand

Every year, keen Golden Age fiction fans & bloggers take part in the Reprint of the Year award, where we nominate favourite books and readers vote on the best. You can read all about it in the launch post by Kate Jackson, our Queen and Social Secretary, who gets us all organized:

Reprint of the Year Award 2025 Launch Post – crossexaminingcrime

Don't forget - we're looking for reader nominations as well: you can add your own choice ot titles for the Award in the comments on Kate's post, just click on the link

This is my first nomination:

 

Death in High Heels by Christianna Brand

published 1941

 

For my money, Christianna Brand is one of the best of the Golden Age crime writers, and I think her books will live on – they are entertaining, funny, have great characters, and she is rarely dull.

Death in High Heels was her debut, and contains many of her signature features – appealing young women characters having excellent conversations, some less desirable people, a lot of class consciousness (ie snobbery) a genuine mystery, people in a group suspecting each other and protecting each other.

And those false endings ie everyone thinks it’s solved, and then… 

A feature Brand loves.

It's set in a smart dress shop in Regent St, a milieu familiar to those of us who love that sort of thing – there are models, sales girls, designers, businessmen, and customers to be teased into buying the latest thing.

Elizabeth Taylor (the novelist) had an excellent one in A Game of Hide and Seek, and they also feature frequently in the works of Noel Streatfeild/Susan Scarlet. An Australian version (a department store fashion section) is in   Women in Black by Madeleine St John.

Also the play, Nine Till Six by Aimee and Philip Stuart, entirely set in a dress shop.(We have been looking at hat shops on the blog lately, but that is obviously quite different. And of course a hat shop only sells hats, though a dress shop may sell hats as well.)

I blogged on this book before, you can find the post here with more perceptions: including that I don’t believe the story that Brand wrote it because she disliked a work colleague and this was her way of planning a fictional killing. Publicity guff.

The murder method is oxalic acid, a subject of much interest round here – it features in both these books. It is used either for cleaning hats or re-painting them. The women in the shop have lunch together, and it seems clear that someone was sprinkling toxic crystals onto a plate…

The hat cleaning was quite open: two of the young ladies nipped out to the chemists’ shop during working hours to buy the oxalic acid.  They chat to the chemist about the substance, and whether they need to sign the poison book (no). And then Victoria says this: “Can we weigh ourselves for nothing on your scales?” – which is irrelevant in plot terms, but to me is the authentic Brand touch. No-one could write that who hadn’t themself been a naturally flirty young woman chatting to a shop-owner while sneaking out from work.  

A key character is called Doon, not a name we find often, though I was disappointed when it turned out to be her last name. (She is Magda Doon, quite the monicker altogether). There is a Ruth Rendell book, her first, (1964) From Doon With Death, so I was hoping for a name that only appears in crime books. There is a real-life actress called Doon Mackichan but not many other people.

There is also a Mrs ‘Arris, the char – this name was also used by Paul Gallico for a series of books from 1958 onwards. Two of them have featured on the blog.

Death in High Heels was first published in 1941, though there is no mention of the war. You feel for the employees fighting over the chance to open a branch of the shop in Deauville, which would shortly be under German occupation…

As often the case in debut crime books, Brand included a large cast of characters and various side-issues – for example there is a séance, but you'd suspect just because she fancied writing it. Crime novelists tend to start rationing their bright ideas with later books.

It turns out there was a film made of the book, 1947, an early Hammer film: very short and full of unknown actors, it feels more like an epi of a TV detective series. You can find it on YouTube – I watched it, clocking the differences from the book: the shop has moved to Bond St, and a final clue about shoes has been added (because of the title you see). It had a credit in a style I love: Hats by Gertrude Morris of Bond St. Here is the scene in the chemists' shop:

It passed the time.

Brand’s hitrate is extraordinarily high. I don’t rate Death of Jezebel as highly as some do, but Green for Danger and the aptly-name Tour de Force would both be in my top 20 crime books.

I included Green for Danger in my list for the I newspaper of the best cosy crime novels – the piece that earned me this title

-       And I reread it for the umpteenth time, and yet again found something new and clever – the mention of changes to the Rubbish/Salvage arrangements on p23, a clue coming from nowhere.

Tour de Force, meanwhile, gives a starring role to Cecil, the fashion designer from Death in High Heels, now off on a package holiday.

Brand is one of the greats: This book is very much worthy of your vote for reprint of the year.