London Particular (1952)

My review:

Brand’s personal favourite, and one in which the setting is her life, her home.  It is thus tempting to see the house-owner, the competent and likeable Mrs. Matildas Evans, as Brand herself.  Brand’s characterisation is excellent: everyone is likeable and recognisable, and we can trace the web of affection and love between the seven suspects.  One of the interesting things about Brand is that, unlike other authors, whose characters are either strangers or enemies, her characters are friends—the victim is an outsider, an outcast—a death that does not seem to matter—but the second murder brings it much closer to home.  Because of the web of affection, the killer’s identity is genuinely moving—the ending of this one is bleak and despairing, the reader genuinely sorry—and we can accept that the suspects draw up dummy cases against themselves to protect others.

The setting for the first half is a comfortable upper middle-class (professional) household in London suburbia on a night of dense fog (hence the Dickensian title).  Murder is done, and Cockrill, a friend of the family, is called in, just as two arrests are carried out.  The whole culminates in a glorious courtroom drama, a brilliant mixture of drama and fair-play clueing, and a nicely-managed contrast between the pleased excitement of the public, and the tension of the sympathetic suspects—whom we have come to view as our personal friends.  Brand plays devilishly fair with the clues, and the least likely suspect is as surprising as he should be.  As good as Carr or Christie.

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