London Particular
by Christianna Brand.
[Also published as Fog of Doubt,
Inspector Cockrill No 5.]
Introduced by P D James.
Pandora Women Crime Writers, Pandora Press, 1988 (1952).
‘In the long, white, firelit drawing-room, the victim bowed and smiled and reeled off his devoirs before the serious work of the evening should begin; within the radius of one fog-bound mile were these seven people, one of whom was very shortly going to murder him.’
— Chapter Four.
In the decades before the first Clean Air Act of 1956 proved pivotal, London’s notorious smogs – a combination of fogs due to the capital’s low lying situation and polluting smoke from household fires and industry – were inconvenient, unpleasant and, especially during the Great Smog of December 1952, very deadly.
Christianna Brand’s crime fiction, set in London’s Maida Vale late one November in the early 1950s, plays on one such smog providing the kind of obscurity that made murder possible, and further allowed suspects the occasion to obfuscate for what they saw as valid reasons.
But who would want to murder a middle-aged visitor from Geneva and, as a layman, how was the stranger able to gasp out in his dying breaths that he had been hit with ‘a mastoid mallet’? It will take a retired police inspector all his experience to approach the truth while severely testing his loyalty to old family friends.
Continue reading “Obscurity and obfuscation”
Calmgrove 