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 it just might have been that she made a good marriage at last and no longer needed to publish to make ends meet. No one knows for sure because she appears to have left no estate behind. Since she died so long ago, even the literary agency which holds her copyrights doesn't know 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. Looking back on her career from a vantage point of fifty years and an era in which humor and homicide have truly come into their own, one could argue that Branch rates as perhaps the premier farceur in a now overcrowded field.

In her own time, there were a few contemporary reviewers who 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. Scott 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." It's an odd judgment, given that Scott called another, somewhat earlier English female farceur, Nancy Spain, one of the genre's emerging talents.

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) than 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 The Murder 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 clergyman 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 odd brand of gallows humor. Of course, one has to remember that the early 1950s were 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 early 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.

She was born Pamela Byatt in 1920 on her parent's isolated tea estate in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka). Her earliest memory is of helping her father 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 some 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.

Or so she claims. Alice Woudhuysen, a close friend who met Pamela in 1950, said Pam never referred to these adventures. "I did think at that time though that Pam and Newton (her first husband) were both inclined to live in a fantasy world and their tales were somewhat embellished to make an amusing story." Pamela met and married Newton Branch following her return to England. The two of them moved to Cyprus where they 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 possibly a number of boys' books. During this period, they also lived in a small fisherman's cottage in Ireland where she worked on Lion in the Cellar. Back in England, Newton worked as a staff writer for Adprint, a publishing firm, and edited This Britain, a collection of essays by various hands written to celebrate the 1951 Festival of Britain. The son of a distinguished judge, Newton qualified as a barrister but never practiced law and lived much of his life in the shadow of his more accomplished father and wife. Writing, according to Alice Woudhuysen, did not come easily to him. "He was not as focused as Pamela, who must actually have worked very hard at her writing but talked very little about it. She may possibly have played down her role as a writer in order not to seem to complete with Newton." Pamela is said to have collaborated with him on film scripts but there is no record that any of them ever were filmed, although Newton was employed by the British Institute of Film Censors. Newton complained about having to sit through innumerable second-rate films but endured it because he and Pamela needed the extra income. The name "N. Branch" appeared on many a movie screen.

Although the two of them gave off the impression of what Alice Woudhuysen described as a "devil-may-care affluence," money was obviously tight. "In 1950 Pam and Newton were living in a gloomy mews flat in Elvaston Place, Kensington. London was still a depressing city after the war, flats were hard to find, rents were high, food was still rationed and life was rather tough and bleak, especially in the winter," Alice Woudhuysen recalled a half century later. "We were always cold as few people had central heating and the smog made even the daytime seem bleak." Branch vividly recreates that period in Lion in the Cellar.

The Branches were able to get the flat in Kensington on the cheap because Newton claimed that a previous occupant had gassed himself in the tiny kitchen. Although these flats, carved out of old stables and carriage houses, were apparently much in demand by Bohemians, many were far from pleasant places in which to live. "The sitting room was a long, narrow room with no windows, only a skylight which let in a dismal, yellowish glow," according to Alice Woudhuysen. "I think there was a sort of curtained-off alcove for a double bed. There was also a small dining room with rather heavy, dark furniture where Pamela wrote her books."

The Branches drove about London in an old taxi cab, often accompanied by a young boxer dog named Culley. Alice Woudhuysen said Culley was very affectionate "but slobbered dreadfully" and was known occasionally to have a glass of beer with his owners at a local pub. Later, the taxi cab was replaced by an old tradesman's van in which the Branches installed a mattress for overnight trips. She and Newton continued to travel extensively. Pamela was apparently able to write anywhere. Murder Every Monday, her third book, was written in various parts of England, France and the Channel Islands. It was dedicated to Christianna Brand to whom she had once expressed amazement at having readers write her asking for her castoff clothing. These requests so amused Pamela that she has one of the characters in Murder Every Monday, a romance novelist, repeat the story.

Her last published book, Murder's Little Sister (1958), was written in that mews flat in Kensington. This was a very tense period in her life. By 1954, the strain on the Branches' marriage was beginning to show. Pamela dropped hints to Alice that she was "finding Newton very difficult" to live with. She suggested that he was drinking a great deal at this point and had lost much of his motivation to write. Pamela went from merely helping to possibly actually writing his stuff for him. Friends were not surprised when they parted and eventually divorced a year or so after the release of Murder's Little Sister. Newton remarried but the old troubles continued to haunt him and this marriage apparently soon failed as well. He died sometime in the 1970s.

Pamela also remarried, to Wing Commander James Edward Stuart-Lyon, and her final years were apparently lived in relative comfort. With the exception of the rumored fifth novel and a play based on Murder Every Monday, written in collaboration with Philip Dale and performed at the Civic Theatre in Chelmsford in October 1964, Branch's career as a professional writer appears to have ended. Ironically, it was during this period that several of her books, originally published by Robert Hale in hardcover, were reissued by Penguin in paperback.

Friends described her as a very glamorous woman. "Beautiful, marvellous Pamela, with eyelashes like bent hairpins," is how Christianna Brand remembered her. Alice Woudhuysen, six years Pamela's junior, was in awe of her. "She seemed incredibly glamorous and sophisticated. She wore a lot of makeup, painting her lips in an astonishing Cupid's Bow above their natural line and she had masses of tawny, blond hair. She was slim and elegant in a casually dressed way and to me she appeared rather dauntingly self-possessed and confident but I soon discovered that she was also very warmhearted, amusing and likable and when she related that she had been voted the most popular girl in her school, I readily believed her."

While the Branches were still together and living in Kensington, Pamela's mother was taken ill and died in great pain. Thoughts of that period were no doubt in Pamela's mind when her own health took a turn for the worse in the mid-1960s. But that marvelous sense of humor which permeated her books didn't desert her.

"No, I can't come tomorrow, darling," she 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. The woman whose books were perfect specimens of gallows humor couldn't resist making a joke in what well may have been her darkest days.

Tom & Enid Schantz
November 2005
Revised March 2006

Editors' Note:
We would like to thank Barry Pike, Alice Woudhuysen and H.R. Woudhuysen for their invaluable contributions to this introduction.