With the British Library having cracked the decades-old problem of getting Christianna Brand republished — they’ve now put out six of her novels, with a seventh, her debut Death in High Heels (1941), to follow in November — it’s wonderful to dive into Cat and Mouse (1950) and find something decidedly uncommon that speaks of an author wanting to challenge herself after penning some of the best small-cast, twist-ending novels in the genre. The focus on an almost Gothic level of mood and suspense here puts one in mind of a similar attempt in Telefair, a.k.a. Yesterday’s Murder (1942) by Craig Rice; but Brand wins, because she also remembered to include a plot.

Of the plot, well, what to say? We start in the fashionable offices of ladies magazine Girls Together where, “[a]t intervals — a week, three days, a fortnight, as long as a month” letters are received from a young woman called Amista who is living in an isolated Welsh locale. Seeking advice over skin cream and relationships, these frequently come to the attention of the magazine’s “Miss Let’s-be-Lovely”, Katinka ‘Tinka’ Jones (“plain Catherine Jones would have made little mark in the journalist world of Fleet Street!”), who, in a manner not unfamiliar from many of Brand’s protagonists, replies to Amista’s queries with facetious advice without much of a second thought.

When the opportunity to take a holiday arises, Tinka opts for Wales, and, out of sheer curiosity, heads to Amista’s hamlet Pente Trist with the intention of calling in on the girl, only for…and here’s where we run into difficulties. See, the first surprise to beset Tinka is encountered before the end of chapter 2, mentioned on the back cover of this British Library edition, and brought up by Martin Edwards in his characteristically excellent introduction, but I think it’s better if you can avoid knowing it and so get swept up in the clutches of this book as Brand would have intended. Instead, let’s talk about the magnificent scene-setting…

[A]cross the valley — the mountain: the great, solid, splendid bulk of the mountain, heavy and grey beneath its mantle of softly, softly, ceaselessly falling rain. The mountain: glory of every Welsh mining village, brooding like a kindly god over the toil and patience and steadfast courage of the little ants seething in their anthill across the valley — watching them born and existing and dying, born and existing and dying, born and existing and dying in their inevitable rhythm: immutable, inscrutable, indomitable old mountain, inexorable as God.

…or how delighted Brand seems to be to communicate, yes, the almost Gothic horror of isolation, but also the snippets of beauty:

Dai Jones started to sing: a little, crooning tune, that swelled and soared into full-throated song, rolling out over the valley, sweet and rich and full, a ripple, a stream, a tumbling river of liquid silver notes: tossed up into the air like a fountain, thundering down the scale in a cascading torrent, shivering to a thousand fragments of whispering music dying away upon the silent air. ‘The tail of little David’s shirt is hanging out,’ sang Dai Jones Trouble in his liquid Welsh: and suddenly all the world was filled with glory…

It is the setting and the characters that really sell this, with parochial country types set in a comfortable pattern that the unfamiliar Tinka lumbers into and upsets: asking questions, putting backs up, and experiencing at times almost hallucinogenic episodes which push aspects of this into horror territory. It really is quite unlike anything else I’ve read by Brand, and its very differentness compelled it to my brain, hungry for something besides the usual genius detectives and their ilk.

Tinka is, it cannot be denied, a pain, but Brand makes her sympathetic (“[S]he knew…that her heart was still her own because no one else had asked for it…”) and writes her increasing sense of isolation and desperation well (“All her brave pity, all her longing to be of service, ebbed out through her high-heeled shoes.”). The plot, looser than Brand’s masterly handling in the likes of Death of Jezebel (1948), packs in just as many surprises and revelations, dialling everything up to about 13 on the Suspense-O-Meter even if not quite all the hits land (that final line of chapter nine was…far too confusing). It’s all brewed into a “horrible, fantastic mystery” against the backdrop of Tinka falling for the brooding Carlyon (which my brain would repeatedly insist was Carolyn) and the comfortably familiar types scuttling around and policeman Inspector Chucky popping in and out of proceedings to both serendipitous and vexing effect.

It is, in short, a delight, with a sprinkling of odd events — the drains, the rabbit snare — that might be clues and might just be hooks on which to hang the growing sense of unease. There’s a revelation late in chapter thirteen (of fifteen) that really should have occurred to everyone sooner, but then the writing is so delightful and the characters so easily recognisable (c.f. Mrs. Love “making a great parade of insomnia prior to snoring heavily through every hour of the night.”) that you start to feel as if this “fantasia of doubt and suspicion and gossip” really happened, and these people really could be blindsided into missing so many of the pointers that crop up throughout.

Upon reflection, I wish I had read this prior to Brand’s later novel The Rose in Darkness (1979) because I think it would have made me more sympathetic to the approach Brand takes there (the characters in that book are still bloody annoying, though). Like the aforementioned Rice novel, this shows an author stretching their wings into something new; if you can’t get on board with it I would completely understand, but I also think it’s something of a quiet masterpiece that deserves to be better known. As such, it makes an exemplary addition to the British Library Crime Classics range, and I hope a great many people find in it the pleasure I did.