Cat And Mouse

A review of Cat and Mouse by Christianna Brand – 250620

Described as a melodrama and a thriller, I found Brand’s Cat and Mouse, originally published in 1950 and reissued as part of the British Library Crime Classics series, a bit of a difficult one to get into. In fact, after the first chapter I put it down, read something else, and then decided to give it a second chance. It was worth the perseverance, I think, but more than a tad melodramatic for my taste.

Part of my problem, I think, was its initial setting, the offices of a women’s magazine, Girls Together, where two of the hacks discuss a series of letters sent to the mag’s agony aunt, Miss Friendly-Wise, by a correspondent from Wales, Amista, who gives details of her personal life and her feelings for Carlyon. Due a holiday, Tinka Jones, the personification of Miss Friendly-Wise in human form, decides to go down to South Wales and look Amista up. The set up just did not get my juices flowing.

 However, once Tinka gets to Wales, the story gets more interesting. Carlyon, with whom Tinka immediately falls in love, denies the existence of Amista and seems to resent the intrusion of this stranger into his remote sanctuary. The longer she stays on the scene, the more disturbing information Tinka unearths while at the same time being dogged by a strange man in a brown suit who claims he is a policeman, one of Brand’s series sleuths, Inspector Chucky, but whom she suspects to be a fellow journalist.  

You could easily get a full house in a game of melodrama bingo as Brand throws in almost every trope for good measure. A remote house which is only accessible by boat because the river is in  spate, a desperate bid for freedom in which the heroine dislocates her ankle, a ghostly visitation, the use of drugs to keep Tinka quiet and a captive, a horribly disfigured woman who is kept out of sight and prevented from using a mirror lest she sees the extent of her injuries.

Add to all of this the presence of a serial killer and a mountain precipice which claims at least three victims and a life and death struggle only resolved, at least partially so, by the timely appearance of Chucky and you have more than enough to go on with. After a painfully slow start the book picks up pace to become almost breathless at its conclusion. The mystery is the identity of Amiska and her fate and as we discover more about her we learn of more grisly and disturbing facts.

Brand does a good job in hiding the identity of the mastermind behind all of the events with lots of twists and turns which send the reader’s thoughts in one direction and then another. Perhaps the disappointment is that the solution is not as left field as this reader might have hoped.

There are three leitmotifs running through the story. Tinka is a mouse, being played with by the main three residents of the house, Carlyon, Mrs Love, and Dai Jones, who are personified as cats, although, of course, the Siamese cat rarely plays with its victim before the kill. Love should be like a chocolate box, where the contents are more important then the wrapping and love at first sight is like a rainbow, a moment of brilliance which rapidly fades. And for lovers of ring composition, of whom I am one, the book satisfyingly starts and ends in the offices of Girls Together.

Not the strongest of the Brand books that I have read, it is a bold variation on the usual murder mystery story.