Published in 1955, this is another crime story by Christianna Brand, whose Heads You Lose I enjoyed at the end of last year. That one was Inspector Cockrill's first outing; this one is his last (and Brand's eighth mystery novel).

In Tour de Force, he's with a tour group on a Mediterranean holiday, and our murder scenario is similar to that of a country-house mystery, in the sense that only a few people could have committed the crime, and they were all within sight of the inspector during the key time period.


Everything laid out nicely...

Reason for reading? Well, it's set on an island (fictional) that's vaguely off the Italian coast, and has some sort of Spanish heritage... So I thought it would be a bit of a nostalge after our own recent Mediterranean sojourn.

Actually, the island setting became my biggest turn-off... Named San Juan de Pirata, it epitomizes "abroad" for travel-hating Brits. It's run by some tin-pot despot, and when the murder is committed, he's much much more enthusiastic about safeguarding the tourism industry by arresting somebody -- anybody -- than about finding the actual culprit. Add to that a shambolic police force that's too busy smuggling to do any real law-enforcement, and you've got every nervous British traveller's nightmare.

It's satire. I get that. And the inadequacy of the police is a key plot point. Evidence is treated in a cavalier fashion, and no-one seems to have heard of forensics, so things can remain tantalizingly unelucidated until Cockie (as he's known) brings home the bacon.

But I'm sensitive to cheap shots at small islands. So there.


The somewhat unsubtle cover of my Internet Archive copy

On the other hand, Brand is terribly funny, and offers us a nice take-down of several contemporary phenomena.

The women's magazine, for example, with its wild do-it-yourself fashion ideas, including the "madly gay 'Billingsgate' stole" ("'Beg a length of net from your fisherman friend down at Frinton,' commanded the caption, 'wash out excess tar, stitch gay white bobbles round the edge and wear thrown carelessly over your shoulder with an outsize straw hat'"). Louvaine Barker, aka Louli, has been inspired by this do-it-yourself creativity, and made a stole out of a red chenille tablecloth...

The most sustained riff, however, plays on organized tour groups, one of which forms the backdrop to the story.

Near the beginning, one character looks over at "the Jollies and the Vulgars, at the Experienced Travellers (loudly demanding Bitter Campari and Risotto Milanese) and the Inexperienced Travellers, nervously eyeing their plates and hoping there wouldn't be all that nasty garlic". We have "refined ones looking down upon the jolly ones and hoping they wouldn't whip out funny hats and shame them at the advertised 'first-class hotels'...; robust ones who drank water out of taps and confounded the experienced ones by not going down with bouts of dysentery, [and] anxious ones who refused all shellfish, raw fruit and unbottled beverages and went down with dysentery before they had even started... That very night in their terraced hotel at Rapallo, already you could see the party sorting itself out, forming into groups: the Vulgars and the Jollies getting together over Americanos, the Timids being taken over by the Seasoned Travellers..., the Hearties calling loudly for lo nachurelle and assuring each other that a smattering of French would take you all over the world."

When a new courier appears (the old courier being caught up in the murder investigation), he is quickly besieged: "It was pitiful to see the interested smile switched on, the listening ear inclined to recitals of Mrs A's pleasure in this afternoon's excursion, Mrs B's dissatisfaction with it, Mrs C's loss of a bracelet of exclusively sentimental value and her evident confidence that he would rush off forthwith and comb the unsavoury streets of Barrequitas for it."

It's very amusing, although sometimes I felt I'd had enough of the British Abroad (even Louli picks the tentacles out of her paella, just like the ladies on our Benidorm trip all those years ago; and Cockie proves to be a terrible traveller). On a less comic note, Brand is also very lucid about the anonymity of travel, and all the things people can hide in such ephemeral circumstances...


Memories of our own Mediterranean paradise. Emphatically NOT San Juan de Pirata

We also have an interesting crop of characters: The aforementioned Miss Barker, a novelist; Mr Cecil, in the couture industry, and effeminate in the stylized way of 1950s novels; Leo Rodd, whose concert pianist career hit the buffers when he lost an arm, and whose darkly handsome misery makes him a magnet for the ladies; Helen Rodd, his long-suffering wife; Miss Trapp, whose only personal advantage seems to be her Park Lane address; Fernando Gomez, tour leader and adventurer, setting an unlikely cap at Miss Trapp; and Vanda Lane, secretive, suspiciously observant, and prone, it seems, to a spot of emotional blackmail.

La Lane is the one who turns up murdered, laid out ceremonially on a four-poster bed on top of Louli's tablecloth stole.

I very soon identified something questionable about the person who is eventually identified as the perp. But that's as far as I got. I was nowhere near second-guessing the extraordinary series of missteps, volte-faces, and faux reveals that Brand walks us through with all the vivacious confidence of a tour guide. One blogger calls it "one of Brand's trickiest mysteries", and another says it's a "stunner", which manages to pull off a fine finale while still sticking to the rules of "fair play" (ie, the reader is given all the information necessary to solve the puzzle).

It's definitely a product of its time, with its "pretty air-hostess", and its little swipes at Mr Cecil, and its complacent reference to a minor sexual assault. But Brand has a wonderful turn of phrase: We're shown someone standing "with her bright head in a Tiggiwinkle of curling-pins"; and another "wrapped in striped towelling like an angel on horseback, a very thin prune in a very large rasher of streaky bacon". The battered carriages wait at the hotel doorway, "the horses, with their long sad faces beneath shabby straw sun hats, looking as though at any moment they would catch up trugs and secateurs and wander off into the gardens remarking that the oleanders were far better two or three days ago if only one had been there then..."

If it hadn't been for the pseudo-exotic setting, I'd have enjoyed this 100 per cent. Even so, it was still a good, engaging, and often very funny read.