Death in High Heels (1941) by Christianna Brand

Under the penname of “Christianna Brand,” Mary Christianna Lewis wrote the Nurse Matilda novels, which were later turned into the Nanny McPhee movies. This is probably the series for which she was most known for. But among mystery fans, her name is spoken of with awe. She’s produced some of the best novels in the genre, like Green for Danger. She’s also written some of the hardest to get hold of. For many years, any review of her books, no matter how favorable, came with the caveat of “If you can find a cheap copy.”

That all changed in 2013, when Open Road Media released most of her work as ebooks, bringing her fiction into the hands of fanatics and casuals alike. I truly believe that the advent of ebooks play an important role in what TomCat has dubbed the “Renaissance Era” of mystery fiction. Nowadays, the British Library has reissued quiet a few of her books as well, forever ending that bleak era when no one could really read Brand. I’ve been meaning to really sit down with her work for some time but haven’t really done so outside of some of her short fiction. I read the Crippen and Landru collection The Spotted Cat yeaaaaaaars ago, but frankly I didn’t get on with it. I wasn’t looking for inverted mysteries, which most of those are, and I didn’t click with her writing style. But now, the time has come for me to really engage with her work. And so, we come to her first novel, Death in High Heels. 

The book is set at Christophe et Cie, a high-end dress shop. Life at the shop is bustling. There’s always clothing to sell, to make, to model. Not to mention some internal politicking over who will be chosen by the boss to go to another branch. On one particular day, Rachel, one of the employees, comes in with a dirty hat. A couple of the girls go across the street to the chemist to get some oxalic acid to clean it, which apparently you could just get without having to sign for it. Ah, the good old days. Anyway, the crystals get spilled on the shop floor, but they’re to be cleaned up and no one thinks anymore on it.

One of the store’s employees dies that night of oxalic acid poisoning. It was slipped into her lunch.

The death is investigated by Inspector Charlesworth. At first, he’s nervous about this whole assignment (he's frightened of all the women) and believes that it’s a waste of time, but his sergeant insists that this isn’t an accident or a suicide, but a murder. He’s soon proven right, as there’s plenty of poison unaccounted for, as well as no way that the victim could have gotten a hold of it. Can Inspector Charlesworth overcome his inner romantic and get to the truth?

Death in High Heels is a solid book all around. The mystery is pretty engaging, with plenty of employees running around. Charlesworth and his sergeant even whip up a handy chart of motive and opportunity. When could someone have gotten the poison? Charlesworth notes that it’s impossible for the death to be premeditated, since buying the poison wasn’t planned at all, but that doesn’t get him far. There are plenty of motives flying about too. There are workplace rivalries and petty grudges against the victim to sort through. The boss is a notorious womanizer who might have wanted to bump off a pesky lover. Even the charlady isn’t above suspicion: the victim once accused her of stealing a brooch.

The characters are well done, a monstrous regiment of women. There’s real life in them, and they’re quite vivid. Possibly this is because they might have been pulled from life; Brand wrote the book to vent about an disliked coworker. This isn’t in the same as “distinguishable” though. Almost all of them are dress shop employees, and while they certainly have different personalities, they’re all kind of sameish in the moment. Even very late in the book I had trouble telling them apart. This is, I will admit, mostly on me. I saw some reviewers say that Inspector Charlesworth is bland, and kinda, but I admit I liked him. His barely concealed romanticism is quite charming. Brand has him mooning over a married woman with a perfectly pleasant husband for most of the book, and it’s a testament to her writing skill that he doesn’t come off as a skeevy weirdo for it. Really, Brand has a lot of nuance to her characters. Even the murderer gets some compassion at the end.

Which makes her waspishness all the more jarring. This is best on display with the main designer at Christophe et Cie, Mr. Cecil. On the one hand, it’s interesting to see an openly gay character in a book from this time period. On the other, words like “Oedipus complex” and “Freud” get thrown around about him. He’s treated as a melodramatic sad sack by the other characters. And his nickname is “Cissie.” So, you know, there are layers here.

Similar to Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, it’s fascinating to see the recurring fascinations and motifs Brand would return to throughout her career. The closed circle of suspects. The obsessive focus on the exact actions of the suspects, down to when someone picked up a cup. The parade of false solutions. The really, really weird nicknames. Brand isn’t as refined as she will be—one of those false solutions, for example, is dismissed with, “Well, she had a sister who was barely hinted at,”—but the groundwork is there. The nicknames never get better though.

The solution is quite good. The central clue that tips Charlesworth off is delivered very late, but Brand establishes that you could have known the solution sooner. Some of Charlesworth’s logic hinges on the exact layout of the store though, and I admit I couldn’t picture it. Again, this might have been on me. I read this as an ebook on my laptop, and I’m thinking that Brand demands a little more focus than that.

But overall, I liked this book. There’s a lot of energy and fun to it, and it’s neat to see Brand before she really mastered her craft. While I suspect that her later books are better if all you want are the highlights of her career, you’d be missing out if you skipped this one, either as a Brand fan or as a lover of golden age mysteries. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: crossexaminingcrime, Clothes in Books, Mystery*File (Curt Evans), The Invisible Event, Beneath the Stains of Time, Ah, Sweet Mystery, The Grandest Game in the World, In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel, Complete Disregard for Spoilers (contains spoilers).