Green for Danger

This book was published in 1946, at the end of the 2nd World War, by a writer who had been a model, a dancer, a shop assistant, and a governess, as well as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse in a rural hospital, which is where this wartime story is set.

For me, it’s the ultimate "closed circle" whodunnit, where an ever-decreasing group of suspects is trapped together, in this case surrounded by wounded and dying soldiers. It’s brilliantly claustrophobic, and you know it has to be one of the main characters, however unlikely that seems. The solution and the perpetrator… show more.

I came to this murder mystery having fallen in love with the wonderful 1946 British film adaptation starring Alistair Sim and Trevor Howard, only to find that the book was as good, if not better.

As a crime fiction writer myself, I admire Brand’s perfect plotting, using a small cast of characters in a semi-enclosed setting, as well as her highly unusual but completely believable method of murder. She evokes the wartime hospital setting so well that I felt myself to be in the little Army hospital in the Home Counties during the Second World War.

Her characters are people… show more.

Brand’s Green for Danger is another closed group mystery, this time the suspects are the medical staff at a small, rural military hospital. Medical and hospital staff live there, so outsiders are very few.  It’s World War Two in England, during the blitz. Bombs are dropping, lights are going off and on, and it’s during an operation that a person is murdered. Later in the story, a nurse is killed. I liked being plunged into the hospital community, getting to know them, and seeing what their lives are like during the war. I liked the feeling of remoteness to this… show more.