Susan Green

Christianna Brand (1907-1988) published steadily for most of her writing life, from her debut novel Death in High Heels in 1941 to her last short stories for detective magazines like Ellery Queen’s in the early 1980’s. Her output spanned  detective fiction – including 7 in the Inspector Cockrill series – mysteries, romances and children’s books. She was a prolific short story writer for magazines, anthologies and collections; she published under her own and five different pen names. Nothing if not versatile! But she seems to be mostly forgotten today, except for her Nurse Matilda books, which served as the source material for Emma Thompson’s Nanny McPhee.

Heads You Lose (1941) was her first Inspector Cockrill book. It’s classic British crime. English house party, country estate, a cast of family, friends and servants, heavy snow and two particularly gruesome murders. As you might expect from the punning title, they are decapitations.

Stephen Pendock is the handsome, middle-aged squire of Pigeonsford, and an attentive, much-liked host. His house guests are an old friend, Lady Hart, with her twin granddaughters Francesca and Venetia as well as Henry Gold (Venetia’s husband) and another young man, now in the army, called James Nicholl. He’s been a frequent visitor to the neighbourhood since his youth. A village neighbour, Grace Morland, moons around the house yearning after Pendock, and her niece, actress Pippi Le May, pops up from London and visits the big house as well. I counted at least nine servants. Trotty, Miss Morland’s maid, and Bunsen, Pendock’s butler, are the most prominent.

Brand clearly enjoyed the puzzle aspect of the murder story. On the face of it, both  murders seem impossible. Several perpetrators are suggested; a possible scenario is proposed, investigated and discarded before the murderer is found. On this first outing, Inspector Cockrill seems undeveloped as a character, and it is the upper-class and privileged of Pigeonford who are most fully drawn.

Which could be a bit of a hitch for current day readers. The twins, Francesca and Venetia, are a couple of very spoiled young ladies whose Nanny should have put in the naughty corner more often. I think they are meant to be charming. But, for example, their insistence that their pampered dog be allowed into the inquest seems simply rude and their tangled emotions are sheer self-indulgence. I kept thinking, for God’s sake, people have been killed here. And there’s a war on!

In comparison to the Patricia Wentworth novels, these two books were more individual and better written – but less satisfactory. That’s because tone is wildly uneven; I kept being jerked out of the narrative by my strong reactions to Brand’s treatment of several of the characters. They are the outsiders, of course. The spinster Miss Morland is unmercifully pilloried for her failure to attract the man she loves; Pippi le May’s actressy glamour is cheap and not quite clean; we’re never allowed to forget that Henry Gold, Venetia’s husband, is a Jew and ‘not one of us’; the servants are inferiors to be patronised or laughed at.  I suppose if you are an insider, it’s OK. If not – it’s cruel.

I found the same issue – cruelty –  with Cat and Mouse.
It is a claustrophobic psychological thriller set in rural Wales. Journalist Tinka Jones arrives to visit one of her magazine’s advice-column correspondents – known only as ‘Amista’ –  a young Welsh girl. Letter after letter, like a serial story, Amista has told of her life on an isolated hilltop with her guardian, Carlyon, and his two servants. She details her daily life, the beautiful Welsh hills and valleys, her growing love for Carlyon, their sudden romance, his proposal of marriage, her great happiness… When the letters stop, Tinka is curious.

She finds a lonely and gloomy house, a Heathcliff-like owner, two servants and the news that no-one has ever heard of Amista. But if she doesn’t exist, how did she know so much about the house, the staff and Mr Carlyon? Why is the policeman, Mr Chucky (yes, really) keeping watch? When she is forced to stay the night, Tinka realises that there is another inhabitant. It is Mrs Carlyon. Is she Amista?  But the young woman has been in a car accident and is now terribly scarred, disabled, unable to speak. A dramatic scenario for a tense, creepy thriller. but…

…it was just so disturbing to read Brand’s descriptions of disfigurement. She uses the language of disgust; ‘monstrous ruin’, ‘muffled animal bleatings’, ‘an unrecognisable mask of a woman’, ‘incoherent gobblings and gruntings’, ‘a poor, shuffling, bowed creature’ with ‘pig-like eyes’. Tinka tries to act towards Mrs Carlyon with compassion but because the revulsion is so visceral, it’s tough reading. With other characters, too, there’s the same disdain for the lonely spinster, the vulgar and cheerful nurse, the uneducated Welsh servant.

I read crime novels to relax (yes, I know; it’s not quite right, is it?) a more conventional writer might be a better bet. I’m on to Ngaio Marsh next.

What you see when you see a blank page is very much what you hear when you hear white noise; it’s the early shifting into gear of something not ready to happen – an echo of what you feel when you walk past sights the eyes are blind to: bus queues, whitewashed shopfronts, adverts pasted to lamp posts, or a four-storey block on Aldersgate Street in the London borough of Finsbury; where the premises gracing the pavement include a Chinese restaurant with ever-lowered shutters and a faded menu taped to its window; a down-at-heel newsagent’s where pallets of off-brand cola cans block the aisles; and, between the two, a weathered black door with a dusty milk bottle welded to its step, and an air of neglect suggesting that it never opens, never closes.

Mick Herron’s readers know immediately where they are; outside Slough House, home to Jackson Lamb and his crew of MI5’s duds and failures. They are known as the ‘slow horses’, and widely regarded in the secret service as a pack of bumbling, incompetent clowns. But they are Lamb’s clowns. Anyone who messes with them, messes with him, too. And for an overweight, out-of-condition, flatulent, nicotine-dependent, down-at-heel functioning alcoholic, he does a good job of dealing out retribution.

All the books are based on this premise, but so far, it hasn’t got stale.
In this instalment, the loathsome former politician Peter Judd – who must be modelled on Boris Johnson – and First Desk ice-queen Diana Taverner are duelling yet again. The action unspools from one small detail, a missing book in River Cartwright’s grandfather’s library. And that’s all I’m saying. No spoilers.

My older brother, who loaned me this one, tells me he rates Herron A+ – up there with John le Carre – because the writing, the characterisation, the dialogue, the setting, the back-stories, the plots all dovetail together seamlessly. No hitches or hiccups in the reading experience. Perfect examples of their kind. And with a kind of cliff-hanger at the end, there’s the extra pleasure in knowing that there are more Slow Horses to come.

I’m heading into 2026 with my usual summer fare – crime novels. There’s something about a hot day and a murder…they just go together. A bit like a G&T.

I thought I’d do a little review of lesser known – today, at any rate – British female crime writers of the ‘Golden Age’ of detective fiction. The ‘Queens of Crime’ are usually given as Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Margery Allingham. But there were other prolific and popular writers and one of them, Patricia Wentworth, had her own elderly spinster detective. Maud Silver is a creation to rival Miss Marple, and I’ve just read four of them.

The Grey Mask was the first Miss Silver book and a riot of pulp fiction crime cliches – but perhaps they were new at the time. The book certainly whipped along, with a long-suffering heroine (didn’t she know that no one likes a martyr?), a masked criminal mastermind, a brooding hero – jilted by the heroine – just returned from several years exploring jungles, deserts and assorted uncivilised places and a supporting cast of dodgy servants. There was an idiotic but gorgeous heiress, a Bertie Wooster-ish best friend and a series of coincidences, lucky escapes and (spoiler) a thrilling last-minute rescue. I guessed the identity of Grey Mask early on, but it didn’t spoil the fun of following the twists and turns. Then there was the cool and professional way Miss Silver unravelled the whole plot.

Maud Silver is an elderly maiden lady, with a deceptively mild manner. A good listener, kindly, sympathetic, deeply principled and religious, a lover of Tennyson and Victoriana – but she differs from Miss Marple in that she is no amateur. Miss Silver is a businesswoman who runs her own detective agency. It operates by word-of-mouth and among the aristocracy and genteel middle class, she’s legendary for getting people out of scrapes and retrieving stolen letters and jewellery.

I enjoyed all of the  Miss Silvers I read – Grey Mask (1928), Spotlight (1947), The Ivory Dagger (1950) and The Gazebo (1955) – for their intricate plots, claustrophobic atmosphere, mild romances and perhaps above all their vintage English-ness. ‘Cosies’, they’d be called today – but in the last of these, Wentworth’s depiction of a selfish, manipulative mother and put-upon daughter was almost painful. I suppose it almost goes without saying that the reader will encounter in passing the racism, xenophobia, snobbishness, narrow-mindedness, class prejudice and sexism of the era. Wentworth and Miss Silver enjoyed a long career; the last in the series was written in 1961.

Patricia Wentworth was the pen name of Dora Amy Elles (1878-1961). She was the daughter of an Indian army general, Sir Edmond Elles, and Lady Elles. She grew up in India and was then educated in England. Her first husband was also an Indian army officer; when he died suddenly in 1906, she returned to England with her daughter and two step-sons. She remarried (another military man) in 1920, and dictated all her novels to her second husband.

She had instant success as a writer, though not in the crime genre, with her first novel A Marriage Under the Terror, set during the French Revolution. She wrote 32 Miss Silver novels, and over 40 other books.

I do love Kate Constable’s annual Reading Roundup – thank you, Kate! Each year I plan to be more committed to record keeping, and each year I fail. My husband has set me up with a Goodreads account so I can keep a tally, but I have read six books so far this year and haven’t opened it yet. Doesn’t augur well, does it? However I would like to track my reading through the year. I have a few hunches; comfort reading probably peaks in winter, and my appetite for crime may increase with hot weather. We shall see.

By going back over my book group and library histories, plus my posts, I have pieced together a rough Roundup. The stats are:

57 books completed.

Of the books I actually read,
32  were fiction and
25 were non-fiction.
I generally didn’t count gardening, cookery and art books if I only looked at the pictures

15 were by Australian authors
27 were by UK authors
and there were a smattering of European and Japanese authors.

I only read 2 children’s books (!!!!) this year, which I find hard to believe…

20 books were from my own library,
of which 14 were books I bought this year.

I read 6 Kindle books, usually while I was travelling, but sometimes because I couldn’t borrow the book from the library or buy it cheaply.

I finished 24 library books this year, but I borrowed a lot more. For instance, I borrowed 33 novels that I didn’t finish. A few pages was enough with some of them. Which is why libraries are so wonderful!

The gender split was 38 female and 19 male authors.

The 2025 novels that have stayed with me are Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, The Bees by Laline Paull and Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. And for non-fiction, Place of Tides by James Rebanks, Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee and Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez.

Typing one-fingered is VERY slow. My punishment for over-enthusiastic close-pruning of a wayward geranium – I pruned my fingertip.
So super-short posts until it heals.

I have read and enjoyed Bookish and Call for the Dead. And as Bugs Bunny would say, “That’s all, folks!”

...Blake left the great wen of London for the freedom of the sea.
It was as though he had been given a secret key. All the things you wish had never happened? AI and satellites playing pinball among the stars? All the ways we went wrong? Blake offered a remedy. He needed no opium, no drink or drugs or kites to attain such a suspension of doubt; he was there already, physically intoxicated by the incalculable hardship and glorious possibilities of life here on earth. He saw and felt this in his own body, incarnate in his flesh; in the planet spinning round the sun, the sea being tugged by the moon. He was an astro-priest launched into the unknown, ready to leave the shell of himself in the alien dust as the sun turned black and his spirit hurtled on.

Risingtidefallingstar (yes, all one word) from 2017 was my introduction to this writer and I was excited to see William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love. Hoare is one of those people who write wonderful – to me, anyway – often strange, slightly bewildering combinations of genres. Here he traces the legacy of artist, poet, visionary and mystic William Blake through artists, film makers, writers, eccentrics, poets, war heroes, outsiders, outlaws. He goes back to Milton, Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon, and forward to Oscar Wilde, T.E.Lawrence and Derek Jarman in an unclassifiable tapestry of English history, biography, travelogue, memoir, nature writing, religion, spirituality and more.

Written in a passionate, lush, headlong style, the narrative goes in multiple directions and makes unexpected connections (how about William Blake, Dolly Parton and Johnny Cash?). It’s a wild ride. And so dense and intricate that I’m going to have to borrow it from the library again. And perhaps, again after that.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

My friends are still all worked up about Eva Peron, and I try to explain that the mistreatment and moving around of her body is unusual but by no means anomalous in this country (Argentina) and particularly in this cemetery (Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires). There is a real obsession with opening graves, removing bodies, relocating them, kidnapping or hiding them, which, I think, is a national characteristic. My friends are horrified when I say that, but there’s really no point in denying it.

I like cemeteries. No, I love cemeteries. There have been times in my life I’ve been obsessed with cemeteries. I usually try to find an excuse to put a cemetery scene in my books – in How Bright Are All Things Here and Verity Sparks and the Scarlet Hand, they’re pivotal – and in the mid-1980s I wrote a prize-winning short story, The Lost Children inspired not just by the famous Lost Children memorial in Daylesford cemetery but by all the little, half-forgotten graveyards I’ve explored. You can read intertwined family histories, find mining accidents, drownings, fires and other tragedies, be reminded of the high child mortality of the 19th century, and discover some extraordinary names – Saddington Plush, one of the main characters in the Verity Sparks series, I lifted from a stone in the Angaston cemetery in the Barossa. I haven’t yet found a use for Sideney (was it meant to be Sidonie?) Dumayne, but I’ve saved it up for later.

So. These are my credentials. It stands to reason that Someone Is Walking On Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys is right up my alley. Enriquez is an Argentinian journalist, novelist and short-story writer. She’s followed her passion for music and cemeteries around the world, following her favourite bands and/or visiting legendary graveyards in Italy, Spain, France, Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Peru, Germany, the USA, Cuba, the UK and even Rottnest Island, WA. It’s both amazing and fabulous, in the true sense of the words, full of ghost stories and legends and extraordinary real-life historical details. Like the totally bonkers story of what happened to Eva Peron’s corpse. I can’t do justice to it; you’ll have to read it yourself.

I loved the way she weaves these complex narratives out of monumental masonry, inscriptions and statues. The book is a hybrid of journalism, travel writing, history, memoir: she’s a generous writer, with an eye for the macabre and the poignant, alert to politics and injustice and sheer absurdity. The story of the drowned graveyard! I’ll give you a precis; when the cemetery of the small town of Villa Epecuen in Buenos Aires province was flooded, the local authorities didn’t like the look of tall monuments and the tops of mausoleums sticking up above the water. So they had workers in boats go around and smash them up. Of course, the water receded. And left behind were all these ravaged, truncated monuments, coated in salt from the floodwater.

Enriquez and her Australian husband have recently re-located to Tasmania, and I expect she will be able to find a story or two on her travels around the island.

Grave in the Chinese Section of the Castlemaine Cemetery. Photo taken circa 1967

That night, Anna told me many threads of stories. Some were about this little farmstead in Vega where she lived now, others were about strange-sounding islands across the sea. Sometimes the whole tale tumbled out of her, sometimes it would unspool slowly. Some of her stories were about ducks, some were about island life, and others were about trading. Some were about the early nineteenth century, others about the previous week, as if time passing changed nothing. It was a bewildering tangle, but Anna knew where each one belonged, like a weaver threading a loom. Unlike me, she could already see the beautifully crafted cloth. She wanted me to understand that her people were woven into the fabric of this place. She was the descendant of a family of ‘eiderdown kings’, folk who gathered and sold a rare and precious product – the feathers of the eider duck. From the north-western shores of Europe, her people had brought eiderdown to the world.

I’d read Rebank’s previous books – A Shepherd’s Life and English Pastoral – about his experience of farming in the Lake District of the UK, and so I knew of his passionate engagement with restoring balance to British agriculture. I can understand how his years of struggle and activism had left him feeling tired and despairing; ‘I could no longer see the point in trying to mend our fields when everything around us was so broken. I once had endless reserves of hope and self-belief, but they were beginning to run out.’
He had encountered elderly ‘duck woman’ Anna and her work seven years earlier; somehow he knew that he needed to go back to see her. Place of Tides is the record of the season spent with Anna and her friend and apprentice, Ingrid, on a remote island off the coast of Norway. Since the Viking era, islanders have gathered and traded the magically light and warm down of wild eider ducks. From when they start in the bitter cold, to when the down is finally gathered  in the long flowering days of summer, the trio work to ensure the survival of this ancient tradition.

I enjoyed everything about this story; the rhythms of the work and weather and season, the evolving relationships between the two duck-women and Rebanks, the harsh island landscape of rocks, sea and sky, the gentle lessons in connection that helped heal the burnt-out Rebanks – and of course, the ducks.

I have long believed that journaling allows you to alchemize isolation into creative solitude. As it happens, reading also enacts that shift. Rather than feeling trapped and alone with your thoughts, you’re in conversation. You’ve got company.

Suleika Jouad, a writer and artist of Tunisian heritage based in the US, has kept journals for most of her life – and she found the practice a lifeline when she was diagnosed with cancer in her early 20s. In 2021, she published a best-selling memoir, Between Two Kingdoms, about her experience of illness.
During the pandemic, she created The Isolation Journals, an online journalling community, and The Book of Alchemy grew out of that project. It’s a selection of 100 journal prompts – all written by different people –  on 10 themes, such as Memory, Fear, Rebuilding, the Body. There’s an essay by Jouad about each theme, and then a short introduction by a range of contributors. Some of them are famous (Gloria Steinem, Elizabeth Gilbert, John Green, Oliver Jeffers, Ann Patchett, Salman Rushdie)  – but most of them are unfamiliar to me because they’re American.

Actually, much of The Book of Solitude is, culturally, very American. Do I need to explain myself? A little quote from Jouad might do it:

Journaling through illness gave me a productive way to engage with my new reality. Rather than shutting down or surrendering to hopelessness, I could trace the contours of what I was thinking and feeling and gain a sense of agency over it. And once I figured out how to contend with my circumstances on the page, it became possible to engage with the people around me and to speak the truth of how I really was. In turn, they began to do the same, and together we accessed new depths of intimacy and love. It taught me that if you’re in conversation with the self, you can be in conversation with the world.

Yes, there’s a lot of self-help, confessional therapy-speak here, from Jouad and her contributors. Many of them have suffered from addiction, alcoholism, illness; they’ve been in dysfunctional or co-dependent relationships or come from fractured families. Occasionally I found the language so cringe-worthy that I found myself muttering, ‘I’m too old for this shit’ as I settled down with my notebook and pen. But still, mixed in with the heavily introspective, inner-discovery/self-help/personal development stuff, there are some gems. I adored The Badder, the Better by Adrienne Raphel. The task was to simply write a (very) bad poem. Which I did. I wrote several. One of which – yes, I insist – I will share with you.

This
Is the torture of poorly-chosen words
That stick
Like toast crumbs, or those extremely large fish-oil capsules
In my throat.

This
Is the sadness of random, unbeautiful words
That fall
Like lead balloons
On my bare foot
Breaking my little toe.

This
Is the pentacle of my ambitions
Five points
Love, life, art, work and death
A little bit like a compass rose, but with one extra direction 

Pointing
Down
To the grave.

I have more poems. I’d love to share them. No?  Are you sure?
Your loss!

Ninety days ago, I challenged myself to follow all 100 prompts. And I’ve stuck with it. I’ve only missed one day. In spite of my occasional grumpiness with the prompts, it’s been a good discipline to write around 500 words each day. I’d lost the writing habit, and now I am itching to get back to some ‘real’ writing – which to me, means fiction.
Only ten days to go! I will then follow my very own prompts.

…in order to understand how brains get to be different, we need to pay attention to what is going (on) in the world outside those brains. We now know that our brains can change throughout our lives as a result of the different experiences we have, the different attitudes we encounter, the different lives we lead. There is definitely some kind of biological script behind the production of a human brain, but the social stage on which it appears has a powerful part to play in shaping its owner’s successes (and failures).

The ‘Lost Girls’ are the many girls and women who have lived with the burden of feeling wrong, different, out of step, excluded; who have struggled with school, employment and relationships, who have found socialising an impenetrable puzzle and crumbled under the demands of daily life. With a diagnosis of autism, they may have obtained appropriate assistance…and their experiences would have informed what form that assistance should take. As we are now discovering with so many aspects of physical and psychological health, science has assumed that the default human is male. There’s so much to get cross about here!

In this engaging book, Gina Rippon, who is an Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Neuroimaging, introduces us first to the history of autism research. For many decades, ever since the condition was first investigated in the early 20th century, it was understood that autism was a primarily male condition. The prevalence, measured in different countries and over time, seemed always to come out at around 4:1 males to females. Some scientists suggested that autism was the result of an ‘extreme male brain’, or that being female provided some kind of protective effect, theorising that females had a inbuilt evolutionary advantage; that their brains were ‘hardwired for empathy’ in the words of prominent scientist Simon Baron-Cohen.

Either way, girls and women were missing from the picture of autism. In a telling statistic, Gina Rippon tells us that when she first started looking at autism research, she found that 70% of the studies were of males only. That’s why the subtitle of her book is How Science Failed Autistic Women and the New Research That’s Changing the Story.

After looking into what she calls autism’s ‘male spotlight problem’, she explores the ways in which female voices slowly came to be heard, and the question began to be asked; are females ‘less autistic’, or are they ‘differently autistic’?
As an example, highly focused and obsessive interests are a marker of autism diagnoses. Things like trains, weather patterns, number plates, makes of planes or mathematical calculations are suggested on the diagnostic tests. But autistic girls rarely have a passion  for these things. It was an Australian-based researcher, Tony Attwood, who looked more closely at autistic girls. The topics of fascination might be boy bands or Barbies or stuffed toys, but it is the level of focus – the acquisition of an encyclopedic knowledge – that is the same. Just because Barbies and boy bands are ‘girly’, these girls were overlooked.

Another example: it is around puberty and the change from primary to secondary school that many autistic girls begin to struggle. They have developed skills and strategies to fit in – masking, camoflaging, self-monitoring, observing and learning from their peers – but these exhausting tools don’t work so well in the complex social world of adolescence. Depression, anxiety, borderline personality disorder and eating disorders tend to be diagnosed at this time rather than autism. I was fascinated to read that sensory issues tend to be more common among autistic females and this may feed into the development of problems with eating and food. Strong averse reactions to the smell, appearance, colour and texture of food, plus tendencies to rigidity in eating patterns, can give the appearance of anorexia, but the issue is not body image and the standard approaches miss the mark.

There’s so much more in this book, and I don’t think I can do justice to The Lost Girls of Autism in a short review. If you have any interest in neurodivergence, it’s a must-read.

We must find the flaws that have allowed us to lose sight of these lost girls, we must challenge the fuzzy and imprecise diagnoses, and we must confront the gender stereotypes that are distorting our quest for answers… Maybe we can (gently) deconstruct the elaborate camoflages that have allowed autistic girls to…’hide in plain sight’. We must listen to these lost girls so that autism researchers, autism therapists, autism advocates and the wider general population will have a clearer idea of what we should be looking for, what we need to explain, so that we can better understand the autistic world.
From the other side of the looking glass, by understanding female autism, we could learn about…the human race’s overpowering desire to belong’.