Ghosts from the Library by Tony Medawar

Author:Tony Medawar [Medawar, Tony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-07-14T17:00:00+00:00

CHRISTIANNA BRAND

Mary Christianna Milne was born on 17 December 1907 in Malaya where her father was working as a tea planter. She lost her mother at an early age and was brought by her father to England, where she was schooled at a convent in Berkshire. At the age of seventeen she was effectively abandoned by her father and drifted in and out of various jobs before meeting a young surgeon called Roland Lewis, whom she would go on to marry in 1936, somewhat to his amazement. One of her many jobs around this time was a spell selling kitchen appliances, which brought the future prize-winning crime writer into contact with a woman so loathsome that she was memorialized as the victim in Death in High Heels (1941). This was the first of many mystery novels published by Mary Lewis as ‘Christianna Brand’, a soubriquet that combined her grandmother’s ‘catch-penny’ surname with the first name of her beloved mother.

Brand’s second novel was written during the London Blitz and for this mystery, Heads You Lose (1941), Brand created Inspector Cockrill of the Kent police. ‘Cockie’ was based on her beloved father-in-law and the book sold well. Her third book, Green for Danger (1944), was an even greater success and was filmed with the great character actor Alastair Sim playing Cockrill. A further five novels appeared before, for family reasons, Brand abandoned detective fiction for twenty long years. But, a writer to her soul, Brand did not abandon writing altogether, working on film scripts and producing more short stories and a series of novellas for women’s magazines, as well as playing an active part in the Detection Club and the Crime Writers’ Association. Between 1964 and 1974 she also a trio of children’s books featuring the redoubtable Nurse Matilda, latterly known as Nanny McPhee in a pair of films written by and starring Dame Emma Thompson. She also published novels under several other pseudonyms. She made a welcome return to writing detective fiction in the late 1970s, but her health was poor and she died on 11 March 1988 while working on ‘Death on the Day’, a final case for her best-known detective, Inspector ‘Cockie’ Cockrill.

‘The Witch’ was first published in Woman’s Journal in August 1962.

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