Clouded Vision: FOG OF DOUBT (1952)

Originally posted June 12, 2024.

‘No darling,’ said Tedward. ‘That was a doings, very brilliant but not brilliant enough for the Yard.’

Christianna Brand’s work is a hole in my genre knowledge. She’s often pointed to as an underrated GAD author, with some unique and devious solutions. I checked out the one book of hers the library had some years back, and bounced off it for reasons of outmoded bigotry that I don’t remember the specifics of. I try to take a measured approach that (1) people are products of their society, and any author writing >50 years ago probably had at least some values that I would not agree with, but (2) that doesn’t mean it was acceptable back then, either. It can be useful to follow the throughline of tropes to modern fiction. Ultimately, though, I’m reading on my own time, and sometimes things just throw me out of the book. In any case, Fog of Doubt is one of the free mystery eBooks offered by Early Bird Books, so I took the chance to give Inspector Cockrill another shot. And, well, it was as devious as it was dated.

Fog of Doubt opens with an introduction from the author where she talks about the background of the book and the title. The name (London Particular in the original British edition) comes from the “pea-souper” fogs which were common at the time, a combination of mist and pollution both eye-searing and opaque. My dad has memories of blowing his nose in London and finding that his handkerchief had turned black from the smog, and that was 10+ years after this book was written and the air quality had improved, so you can only imagine how noxious this must have been. Nonetheless, Londoners had a certain home-team pride about the air quality which is on display here. Brand goes on to gush about how this is her personal favourite of her books, the house is based on her house, she can’t wait for you to read it, and you won’t know how the murder was done until the last sentence. It’s all rather endearing, really.

Then I actually start reading the thing, only to be slapped with the most intense case of cultural dissonance I’ve encountered in a long time. The entire first act of the book focuses on a teenage girl attempting to procure an abortion at a time when this was illegal, only to be rebuffed by everyone in her social circle. These conversations are played for broad comedy. Har har! This goes on for SEVENTY PAGES and unfortunately is all relevant information. Also during this section we get a character using the N-word in a passing reference to a minstrel show, and an ongoing comedy bit with a mother spanking her toddler for crying and fantasizing about “braining this child” one day. Look, if you read old books I think there’s a certain expectation that cultural values and publishing standards have changed over time, and a lot of mainstream genre fiction from 75 years ago has elements that are bigoted or otherwise unacceptable, but this one just has so much and it’s so central to the plot that it’s more than an aside.

In any case, I should talk a bit about what the plot is. We open with Rosie Evans and her family friend Dr. Edwin “Tedward” Edwards (Tedward?) attempting to drive back to the Evans house through the titular fog, having received a cryptic message of murder. Rosie (the aforementioned teenager) has recently come back from boarding school in Geneva In The Family Way. Tedward (TEDWARD) is her childhood doctor who is twenty years older than her and also in love with her, and she’s come to him hoping he’ll prescribe her an abortifacient, but he foists her off with a fake prescription in the hopes of tricking her long enough that she can have the baby, and oh, maybe he’ll marry her too. The medical ethics of it all. I place my head in my hands. If you’re from the reaction gif generation, please feel free to imagine Madeline Kahn saying “Flames. On the side of my face,” Prince sliding by with an askew glance, David Tennant making an exaggerated scoff, things of that nature.

Anyway, while this nonsense is happening, Rosie answers the phone to a strange caller, who says he’s been hit by a “mastoid mallet” and needs the doctor, then gives Rosie’s own address. Rosie and Tedward (Tedward…) rush off, and indeed, when they arrive, they find the body of house guest Raoul Varnet. Raoul is the ex-lover of Rosie’s sister-in-law Matilda, who was also looking after Rosie while she was at school. He was visiting to tell Matilda some important information about Rosie, but apparently never got the chance to convey it.

The police immediately zero in on Rosie’s protective older brother Thomas: did he suspect Raoul to be the man who got Rosie pregnant? Or did he suspect his wife of having an affair? Either seem like a decent motivation to cosh someone in a crime of passion. Still, something about this situation stinks. Why didn’t Matilda or Gran Evans, upstairs, hear the altercation? How did Raoul know who to phone? Why did he mention the “mastoid mallet”? Why would the killer use a mastoid mallet at all?

I had to google what a mastoid mallet was, and at first thought it might have been more salient knowledge at the time, but maybe not, since the book bothers to define and describe it, after a fashion:

‘Well, they’re just like miniature mallets, like little steel croquet mallets or like those things you knock pegs in with; only the handle’s much shorter by comparison. The business end’s about as big as … As big as …’ He looked about him for a comparison. ‘Well, as big as an ordinary tumbler, if a tumbler was a lot smaller than it usually is; or as big as a tin of baked beans, though why baked beans, I don’t know.’

‘Very handy for killing a man with?’ suggested Cockie.

‘So a good many ear, nose and throat surgeons have discovered,’ said Thomas dryly.

It’s a small hammer for jaw surgery, basically. (See picture.) Thomas owns one, as a doctor, part of a set of antique medical tools. Access to the murder weapon definitively limits the pool of suspects to the seven people who are most familiar with the Evans household (all of whom have large lacunae in their alibis, where they were lost in the fog or alone in the house). To the book’s credit, it is completely upfront about this. There is no trickery or attempt to hide the culprit by downplaying their role in the story; Brand tells you directly that there are exactly seven suspects (Rosie, Thomas, Matilda, Tedward, Gran, Rosie’s other regular suitor Damien Jones, and housemaid Melissa Weeks), that one of them is a second victim, and one of them is the killer. This is a very difficult thing to pull off! Motive and opportunity for each suspect is clear: seven almost-perfect cases that have one small flaw that suggest they couldn’t have done it, after all.

Here Inspector Cockrill is called in to ferret out the truth. The only other Brand I’ve finished is the 1946 film adaptation of Green for Danger, and reading this I found it uncanny the degree to which Alastair Sim is Cockrill (or vice versa). A keen, vivacious middle-aged man with prematurely white hair, chuckling and ‘hm-hm!’-ing his way through the proceedings. It’s a role that seems like it was written for him, is what I mean. Cockrill is a homicide detective but not affiliated with the London police, so he doesn’t want to investigate until he’s told that Brand’s other, younger sleuth Inspector Charlesworth is on the case:

‘Well, you must just trust the police, that’s all; they don’t make mistakes.’

‘They seem very nice,’ admitted Rosie, doubtfully. ‘There’s a young man called Charlesworth who I must say is perfect heaven…’

‘Called what?’ said Cockie.

‘Called Detective Inspector Charlesworth.’

‘Oh, well,’ said Cockie. ‘That’s different. I’ll be up this afternoon.’

The duo proceed to have a petty and slightly pathetic battle of wits as they attempt to discern the killer. Each comes up with several good explanations for how the crime could have been carried out, but they’re always stymied by some small point, and fail to prevent a second murder. Then, later in the book, a few of the suspects muddy things by nobly “confessing” to the crime with accounts of events that the reader probably came up with, if they happened to suspect that person. There’s a trial, and a race to get the real murderer to confess before the verdict is handed down. But among six pretty good explanations, there is only one perfect explanation, and when the truth is delivered in Fog of Doubt‘s final line, it is simple, devious, and incontrovertible.

Overall, this was a deeply frustrating read. On a technical level, the book is well-written; Brand has a good ear for dialogue and it’s often very funny. And as far as the mechanical construction of the mystery—send the damn book to Geneva, because it’s a Swiss watch. Like I said, there are multiple near-perfect cases presented. This is a textbook-worthy example of how to use motive as evidence in a mystery story: it’s not just about the character’s temperament, but a precise question of what information they had access to and when they learned it relative to the murder.

But there’s no getting away from the fact that this is a book about how evil it is for women to have lots of sex. Scope that tagline on the vintage cover up there—it’s more salacious, but semantically no different than the content of the text. Being a slut is worse than being a murderer. If Fog of Doubt had been written in the modern day, it’s not just that pollution fog that would be impossible: the plot flat-out could not have happened if Rosie lived in a society where abortion was legal. That meta-knowledge made her treatment in the book pretty depressing. Did the book satisfy? As a mystery, yeah. As a case study in how mid-century Britain was a toxic dystopia that I am extremely thankful not to live in, yeah. But as a story where I was emotionally invested in the characters, it was tough pill to swallow.