Murder and romance in a military hospital: on Green for Danger

Continuing with capsule reviews of Golden Age crime fiction. Yesterday I finished Christianna Brand’s 1944 military-hospital mystery Green for Danger (it was made into a popular film too, starring Trevor Howard and Alastair Sim among others). This is a solid, well-crafted whodunit – which is impressive when you consider that there are only six serious suspects, all doctors and nurses involved in a pre-surgery procedure that goes very wrong. (And that’s followed by a second death, which is much more clearly a murder.) So here is a small pool of characters, and some of the book’s humour comes from the way in which they sit around chatting with each other (often in the stiff-upper-lip British way) about which of them might be guilty.

I can see Green for Danger not working for some readers, especially crime-writing fans who want regular, fast-paced thrills. Much of this narrative, and especially the first 40-50 pages where the characters are being established, has a romantic-soap-opera-ish quality to it: being about the sometimes-complicated interrelationships between these men and women (two of whom are officially engaged to each other, but there’s much other flirtation going on) – and while some of this is important to the mystery, it can make the book meander in places.

But on the whole, I liked it very much. There are a couple of good, well-placed red herrings, and some fine sociological detailing of wartime England - about life in a time and place where flippant or hedonistic behaviour can become a way of dealing with unpredictable horrors. This isn’t quite a M*A*S*H* or Catch-22 as army-hospital dark comedies go, but it is irreverent in its way. And strangely moving at times. (Also you learn a decent amount about operating-theatre procedures of the era.)