Pamela Branch was “the funniest lady you ever knew,” according to fellow mystery writer Christianna Brand. Brand was referring not only to her books but to Branch herself, who delighted Brand by sending her countless “postcards with smears of pretence blood on them, purporting to be from her various characters,” or “a dreadful squashed box of chocolates with very obvious pinholes into which poison had clearly been injected.” That wicked sense of humor permeated Branch’s four mysteries as well, leading contemporary reviewers to describe her first book, The Wooden Overcoat, as a “delightfully ghoulish souffle” (The Spectator) where “even the bodies manage to be ghoulishly diverting” (The Sunday Times) graced with “the gayest prose” and a “gloriously gruesome” touch (The Queen). The Spectator welcomed her second book, The Lion in the Cellar, as a “charnel-house frolic.” Nancy Spain, to whom Branch was favorably compared, called it a “masterpiece,” a blend of “the Marx Brothers, Crazy Gang and the Little Intimate Reviews.”  The Times Literary Supplement strayed from the mystery field to compare her third book, Murder Every Monday, to satirist Evelyn Waugh. Her fourth and final book, Murder’s Little Sister, was published in 1958 and was the only title to see publication in the United States. American mystery writer Carolyn Hart listed it among her five favorite mysteries of all time.  It was reissued in 1988 in England as part of Pandora’s Classic Women Crime Writers series after twenty-five years of being out of print. In spite of these extravagant reviews, Branch is rarely mentioned in any of the standard reference books devoted to the mystery genre, perhaps because her career was cut short by cancer at the age of 47.

Nor does anyone have any idea what happened to her fifth book. In 1962, her paperback publisher reported that she had begun the book in the Scottish Highlands and was finishing it in Ghana, West Africa. She would not die for another five years, so either her illness prevented her from finishing the book or she encountered a major writer’s block. Or maybe Branch or an editor didn’t feel it was up to her earlier books. No one knows because she appears to have left no estate behind. Since she died so long ago, even the literary agency which  holds her copyrights no longer knows what happened.

Why she isn’t better known among the historians of mystery fiction is perhaps even stranger. She rates an entry in the third edition  of Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers but is dropped from the fourth edition, retitled The St. James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers. Critic Gillian Rodgerson summed up Branch’s writing by saying: “The humor in Branch’s books lies in the situations, the outrageous characters and in the dialog which almost makes sense but not quite. This is life viewed through a fun-house distorting mirror where the ordinary suddenly becomes bizarre and then ordinary again.” Rodgerson admits that the situations, as in The Wooden Overcoat,  make for “a very silly book  but the writing is seamless and witty and the denouement makes it all worthwhile.” It’s a fair judgment, though Branch’s books are no more silly than those of P.G. Wodehouse or Sarah Caudwell.

Some critics were not enthralled with the idea of introducing humor into crime fiction. English critic Sutherland Scott admitted in his 1953 study of the genre, Blood in Their Ink, that writers such as Phoebe Atwood Taylor (aka Alice Tilton) and Constance and Gwenyth Little “serve up a sparkling cocktail” but he questioned if the idea of “mixing hectic humor and even more hectic homicide is entirely to be recommended.” Taylor and the Littles were American writers who were very popular in Britain. He was somewhat alarmed that British writers might follow suit in turning chills to laughs. “It is interesting to note that the most recent addition to the mix-your-murder-with-plenty-of-fun brigade is also a lady, this time a home product. If you can digest this kind of hot-pot, Pamela Branch’s The Wooden Overcoat and The Lion in the Cellar should be to your taste. Some digestive systems may tend to rebel.”

While Scott merely comes off as being more stuffy than perceptive, it has to be admitted that humor is subjective. Yet, other English writers were known to go for a laugh. There’s more than a touch of the absurd in many of the books by Edmund Crispin (The Moving Toyshop, 1946)  or Michael Innes (Appleby’s End, 1945). Branch’s humor, of course, was a bit blacker (“ghoulish” in an adjective often pops up in her reviews) that either of those two gentlemen. Though a bit more farcical and madcap, Branch may also remind some readers of Richard Hull (1896-1973) who plumbed the darker side of humor in his crime novels, most notably in TheMurder of My Aunt (1934), a book whose marvelous title can—and should—be read with two vastly different interpretations, or in My Own Murderer (1940) wherein a staid Londoner’s lifestyle changes when he comes across a murderer in his apartment and decides to hold him captive rather than turn him over to the police. Anthony Rolls’s homicidal minister in The Vicar’s Experiment (aka Clerical Error, 1932) would be perfectly at home in Branch’s world. Her brand of madcap black humor was also present in many of the British film comedies of the 1950s, especially in such Alec  Guinness vehicles as Kind Hearts and Coronets.

While these British films fared well in the U.S. during this period,  American publishers didn’t believe that readers on this side of the Atlantic would embrace Branch’s books. Of course, one has to remember that the early 1950s was seeing a change in direction among publishers, who were pulling away from the traditional mystery so popular before World War II and replacing it with action thrillers by the likes of Mickey Spillane and John D. MacDonald. The 1970s and 1980s saw a rebirth of the comic traditional mystery. The blackest of these were the biting satirical novels of English writer Robert Barnard, whose Death of an Old Goat (1974) and Death by Sheer Torture (1981) remind one of a less frenetic Branch. Even closer in tone to Branch are the recent “subversively funny” (New York Times) novels of another English writer, Ruth Dudley Edwards.

Biographical material on Branch is sketchy at best and is mainly derived from the short biographies found on the Robert Hale hardcover and Penguin paperback editions of her books. She was born in 1920 on her parent’s isolated tea estate in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Her earliest memory is of helping her father attempt to persuade an elephant to swallow a homemade aspirin the size of a croquet ball. The elephant did not oblige.

She was educated at various schools along the south coast of England and then went to Paris to study art. She quickly tired of painting the traditional still lifes of “guitars, grapes and Chianti bottles” and returned to England where she studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for a year, once performing in a modern-dress version of Hamlet wearing a mackintosh and gumboots. This flirtation with an acting career led many researchers to confuse her with the actress Pamela Branch, best known for playing one of the nuns in the Sidney Poitier film Lilies of the Field.

After she left the RADA, she returned to Ceylon and then moved on to explore nearby India, starting in the north and gradually working her way south. For three years her home base was a houseboat in Kashmir. She trekked across the Himalayas by horse, living out of a tent during the summer months, and went skiing in the winter. She learned to hunt with guns and falcons, once shooting a black bear. During this period she also learned Urdu, with a special emphasis on the racier words in that language, painted several murals, and trained two racehorses.

Returning to England, she met and married barrister Newton Branch and moved to Cyprus where the two of them lived in a twelfth century Greek monastery poised precariously on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea. Both tried their hand at writing, Pamela producing The Wooden Overcoat, Newton a number of boys’ books. Pamela is said to have collaborated with him on film scripts but there is no record that any of them ever were filmed, although one biography listed Newton’s profession at the time as that of a “film censor.” Branch did collaborate with Philip Dale to produce a stage version of her third novel, Murder Every Monday, which was performed in Chelmsford in 1964. She and Newton continued to travel extensively. She wrote The Lion in the Cellar in a fisherman’s cottage in Ireland, and Murder Every Monday in various parts of England, France and the Channel Islands. Her last published book, Murder’s Little Sister, was written in a mews flat (converted stables much coveted by English bohemians of the period) in Kensington.

Friends described her as a very glamorous woman. “Beautiful, marvellous Pamela, with eyelashes like bent hairpins,” is how Christianna Brand remembered her. Brand herself often had financial problems, which for a while forced her to set aside her writing career for more profitable endeavors. Pamela appeared to have had all the money she needed. “No, I can’t come tomorrow, darling,” she once said to Christianna. “We’re flying to Geneva.” Pamela paused, then added, “My husband wants to buy a watch.” That was in 1967. Brand never spoke to her again. Shortly afterwards, Pamela died of cancer.

British mystery fiction authority Barry Pike, with whom Brand shared her memories of Branch, suggests that this exchange shows that Branch was quite well off. While that may be true, it also shows that Branch was still able to make a joke in what may well have been her darkest days. Her life may have been a short one but there is little doubt that it was a full one.

Tom & Enid Schantz
November 2005