The Wooden Overcoat
A comedy of manners and the odd dead body.
London is full of clubs. The Garrick, for example, caters to those with theatrical inclinations, the Athenaeum to eggheads. But the Asterisk may have the strictest membership regulations: Acquitted murderers only.
Happily, Benjamin Cann fits the brief. Sure, he strangled Rachel Bolger with a length of pongee silk, but the jury thought different, so while Benji's old landlord may not want him back, the Asterisk gang – suave Clifford Flush (pushed ladies off trains), Mitteleuropean sexpot Lilli Cluj (crushed her husband with a bumper-car), et al. – offers a warm welcome. Benji doesn't love the thought of sharing digs with people more than usually inclined to poison the sherry, but the motherly Mrs. Barratt (dosed Mr. B with ground glass) is delighted. So nice to have fresh blood. And it will be such fun to watch him meet the neighbours!
Pamela Branch was 'the funniest lady you ever knew', according to well-known mystery writer Christianna Brand. Born in 1920 on her father's tea plantation in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), she was educated in England and dabbled in both art and acting before returning to Asia – first to her family in Ceylon and then on to India; for three years her home was a houseboat in Kashmir. She trekked in the Himalayas, trained racehorses, learned falconry, and became fluent in Urdu. Could there be better training for a mystery writer? Back in England for...five minutes(?), she married barrister Newton Branch, and the two moved to Cyprus, where they lived in a 12th-century monastery on the edge of a cliff. He wrote adventure stories, she wrote The Wooden Overcoat (1951), and then they moved on again. She produced her remaining three novels in Ireland, France, and London, respectively. Why, oh why, weren't there more?Branch died of cancer in 1967. Death, it seems, had the last laugh.
