Detective Fiction Blog

Christianna Brand was born and brought up in Malaya. She came home to England to be educated in a convent and at the age of seventeen, her father having lost all his money, started to earn her own living.

She became in turn nursery governess, dress packer, night club receptionist, secretary, professional dancer, and model in Bond Street dress shops. She also ran a girls’ club in the slums, demonstrated gadgets at Olympia, did some unsuccessful market gardening and house decorating; she was ‘always broke and often hungry’. Her first book, Death in High Heels, was written while she was selling cookers, and was inspired, she says, by a hatred for a fellow worker.

Since then she has written eight more detective stories, of which four, including Green For Danger, have been filmed, and one non-fiction book, a study of the trial of Jessie M’Lachlan, Heaven Knows Who.
Christianna Brand is now married to a surgeon, has a daughter called Victoria, after her first heroine, and lives in a charming Regency house in London.

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