Green for Danger

  ‘'For a moment she felt the earth shudder and rick beneath her, for a moment the guns thundered in her ears, and the drone of the bombers was torn by the shriek of a falling bomb...Six months of it. Six months of it, day and night, almost incessantly - and in all that time she had not known the meaning of fear; had not seen in the faces about her, the faces of middle-aged women or young girls, a shadow of panic or failure or endurance-at-an-end. One felt it, of course, some people had a queasy sensation when the sirens wailed; some people's tummies turned over at the sound of a falling bomb; most of them would go through life with a humiliating tendency to fling themselves flat on their faces at any loud noise; but that was all. They were all much too busy and tired to be afraid.''
1943, Kent. The air raids carried out by the Nazi monsters are in full swing, yet in Heron's Park military hospital, Death is lurking in every corner, acquiring various facades, vehemently fought by the doctors and nurses who have dedicated their lives to their profession and the Cause. But who would have thought that a postman would die on the operating table while in a low - risk surgery? One death follows another and the seven suspects seem to have little motive to commit such acts. Yet, one person among them is undoubtedly a murderer.
Or are they?
Needless to say, I must reveal nothing that could be considered a ‘spoiler'. What I can say is that Christianna Brand's novel isn't just a marvellous mystery but a poignant and moving literary creation as a whole. Brand's observations in her Author's Note concerning the readers' assumptions (and stupidity...) are brilliant. The atmosphere is tense, the tentacles of the war seem to be everywhere, the cost the civilians had to pay because of one man's madness is tangible and unbearable. The dialogue, the characterisation, the claustrophobic setting, the deathly threats, the personal demons that each character has to face create a work that will have you on the edge of your seats. Ultimately, it doesn't matter who the murderer is. The war remains the one and only perpetrator.
One of the finest mysteries in the British Library Crime Classics family.

‘'The apples were young and green upon the boughs and all the air was sweet with the scent of a dying summer day. They walked in silence through the country lane, and in the rich fields, the rabbits sat up to watch them, rubbing black noses on little, furry paws. The last soft rays of the sun gleamed on the whitened stems of the trees, and foxglove and ragged robin caught at them as they passed, as though to hold them for a moment longer in the mafic of a Kentish twilight.''
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