Death in High Heels - Christianna Brand

Read Christianna Brand's 1941 debut, Death in High Heels, which I found myself comparing unfavorably to her Inspector Cockrill novels until about halfway through, when I realized I was comparing it to the wrong Brand novel entirely: the detective, Charlesworth, is basically a genderbent version of Cat and Mouse's Katinka Jones, down to chasing more red herrings than you can shake a fishpole at - at one point he is fully convinced that ( spoilers )

- and falling madly in love with one of the suspects. Having adjusted my expectations accordingly, I thoroughly enjoyed the roller coaster of plot twists, fake-outs, implausible coincidences, and overhearing of wildly suspicious conversations that were clearly actually innocuous or Brand wouldn't have included them, that made up the rest of the book. Is it good? Absolutely not. The characters are thinly sketched and one of them is a walking homophobic stereotype who's the butt of jokes that are not so much offensive as exhausting throughout the entire book; the actual mystery kind of gets lost in the sauce of all of the twists and turns. Is it fun? I thought so!