A Moment On the Edge : 100 Years of Crime Stories By Women

loved and all that delicious food?

It was the first time in my life I knew what it meant to despise someone.

I hated him.

Before, when I was convicted of manslaughter, there was a lot of talk about malice aforethought and premeditated crime.

There wouldn’t be any argument this time.

I hadn’t wanted any harm to come to that policeman. But I did mean harm to come to this lawyer.

I grabbed up a letter opener from his desk and ran my finger along the blade and felt how sharp it was. I waited behind the door and when he walked through I gathered all my strength and stabbed him. Again and again and again.

Now I’m back where I want to be — in a nice place to stay.

Clever and Quick CHRISTIANNA BRAND

Many aficionados of pure, fair-play detection would echo the great critic Anthony Boucher in nominating the trio of John Dickson Carr, Ellery Queen, and Agatha Christie as their big three. But there were other writers who, if not quite as prolific, could equal those three in their devotion to and talent for devious puzzle plotting. One of these was the creator of Inspector Cockrill, Christianna Brand (1907-88).

Born Mary Christianna Milne of British parents in Malaya, Brand lived in India during her childhood. Like many writers, she held a variety of jobs in her early life, including governess, model, and dancer. Her experience working as a salesperson in a fashion house inspired her first novel, Death in High Heels (1941). Brand showed she could construct puzzles with the best of them in novels like Green for Danger (1944), memorably filmed with Alistair Sim, and Tour de Force (1955). By her own account, she was equally scrupulous about polishing her style and deploying her clues, seeking to bamboozle the reader while observing absolute fair play. At various times in her career, she departed from pure detection to produce a speculation on the Marie Celeste mystery (The Honey Harlot [1978]), children’s books (Danger Unlimited [1948] and a three-book series beginning with Nurse Matilda [1964]), a fact-crime account (Heaven Knows Who [1960]), and pseudonymous mainstream novels, but crime fiction remained her main interest.

A beloved figure at mystery conventions late in her life, she is remembered in the field for her personality as much as for her writing.

In introducing her short-story collection Buffet for Unwelcome Guests (1983), Robert E. Briney recalls her speaking style: “The topics and anecdotes varied, though some of them had to be reprised by popular demand. (The story of Dorothy L. Sayers and the blood in the stairwell has become a word-of- mouth classic.) But the audience reaction was always the same. Listeners were delighted by the sharp verbal portraits; they listened intently whenever a serious note was introduced; they anticipated exactly as much of a story’s trend as they were intended to, and responded with appreciative chagrin when the punchline turned out to be other than what they had been induced to expect. In fact, they reacted much as readers of Christianna Brand’s fiction have been doing for some forty years.”

In the short-story form, Brand specialized less in pure detection than in the twist-upon-twist double-or- triple-cross crime story of which “Clever and Quick” is a prime example.

You had to keep up appearances; so the apartment was very showy, everything phony right down to the massive brass fender in front of the electric fire. But keeping up appearances was one thing and keeping up the payments was another; and with the theater as it was these days, both of them had been “resting” for a long, long time. So the fact was that they really ought to let Trudi go.

Trudi was the au pair girl and for different reasons neither one wanted her to go.

They were having a row about it now, standing in front of the fireplace. They had a row on an average of once an hour these days — nag, nag, bloody nag. Colette was driving Raymond out of his mind. And now this thing about Trudi. If he secretly (somehow) made up Trudi’s pay? He suggested, “Try offering her a bit less for the work.”

“You try offering her a bit less — for the pleasure,” said Colette. It touched him as ever on the raw. “Are you suggesting—?”

“Raymond, that girl thinks of nothing but money and you know it.”

Yes, he knew it, and with the knowledge his heart grew chill. If a time came when he could no longer give Trudi presents — He was mad about her — a little sharp-eyed, shrew-faced mittel-European — and yet here he was, caught, crazy for her, helpless in the grip of her greedy little claws. He, Raymond Gray, who all his life had been, on stage and off, irresistible to women, now caught in the toils of a woman himself. If I were slipping a bit, he said to himself, if my profile were going, if my hair and my teeth weren’t so perfect as once they were — but he was wearing marvelously well. Why, even that drooling old monster in the opposite apartment—

She was not a monster, though she was a big woman and, having once been something of an athlete, now found all the fine muscle running to flabby white fat. But drooling? She was disgusting, she thought, out of her mind — a fat, ugly, aging widow, sitting here drooling over a has-been matinee idol not much more than half my age.

But, as he was caught and helpless, so was she — caught and helpless, sitting there like a silly schoolgirl, yearning only to pop out to her balcony and see if, through his window, she could catch a glimpse of him. From her room she could not see into his; the apartments were not in fact opposite each other but across a corner, at the same level.

But she dared not venture forth. The plane trees in the street just below were in full pollination and if she so much as poked out her nose, her allergy would blow up sky high. And even just passing in the corridor, going up and down the elevator, he mustn’t see her with streaming red eyes and nose.

She spent a good deal of time in the corridors and the elevator.

“Oh, Raymond,” she would cry, “fancy running into you again!”

She had long ago scraped up an acquaintance and it was Raymond, Colette, and Rosa between them now. They were not unwilling — her place was rich in champagne cocktails and dry martinis, with lots of caviar on little triangles of toast. She was loaded.

Colette said so now “Can’t you wangle something out of the old bitch over there? She’s loaded, and if you’d so much as kiss her hand she’d chop it off and give it to you, diamond rings and all.”

Her hand was like a frog’s back, all speckled with the greeny-brown patches of aging skin. “All the same, I’ll tell you something,”

he said. “If you were out of the way, damn nagging so-and-so that you are, she’d make me a ruddy millionaire, I swear she would.”

“Yes and where would your precious Trudi be then? Because,”

said Colette nastily, “I don’t think dear Rosa would put up with very much of that little load of fancy tripe.”

“Don’t you call Trudi names!” he shouted.

“I’ll call her what she is. I’m entitled to that much, surely?”

She had a vile mind, a vile mind and a foul mouth to express what was in it. It flashed across him in a moment of hazy light, red-streaked, that once he had loved her — never dreaming that behind the facade lay this creature of venom and dirt, never dreaming that one day he would stand here with upraised hand, would lunge forward and strike out at her, would have it in his mind to silence her forever.

But his hand did not touch her. She stepped back and away from him, tripped over the rug on the polished floor before the fireplace, fell heavily, almost violently throwing herself back and out of his reach. A brief shriek, arms flailing, a sickening scrunch as the base of her skull hit the rounded knob of the heavy brass fender. And