GLADYS MITCHELL:
WHY PEOPLE SHOULD READ HER DETECTIVE STORIES

Part I

by Nicholas Fuller

If challenged to name my favourite writer, whether of detective stories or not, I would immediately choose Gladys Mitchell. Who, I hear you ask, she? (Those who know me, and my obsession with the writer, will appeal to the Deity between gritted teeth – their own, of course, not the Deity's – and loudly demand to know why I admire this obscure, some would say unreadable, writer, and why I can't read, say, Elizabeth George or Martha Grimes like everyone else does.)

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell, to give her full name, was born in Cowley, Oxfordshire, in 1901, was a schoolteacher for most of her life, and died on the 27 th July 1983 (exactly eighteen days after my birth, thus making her the only ‘Golden Age' writer whose life coincided with mine, however briefly). In those eighty-two years, she managed to write some eighty-six books: eight novels for children, six (almost impossible to find) historical novels as Stephen Hockaby, six detective stories under the pseudonym of Malcolm Torrie – and, the work for which she is best remembered, the sixty-six detective novels under her own name, all of which have as detective the indomitable Mrs. (later Dame) Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.

Mrs. Bradley is psychiatric consultant to the Home Office – and, some would say, bats in the b. herself.

Mrs. Bradley did not relieve his mind by picking up a very beautiful frog, caressing it gently with her forefinger, and cackling loudly, and with a horrid echo from the vault.

Although fifty-seven on her first appearance ( Speedy Death , 1929), she is by no means a sweet old woman like Miss Marple. She is unattractive, with “saurian” features which remind people of

a deadly serpent basking in the sun or…an alligator smiling gently while birds removed animal irritants from its armoured frame.

(Unsurprisingly, her secretary, Laura Menzies (later Gavin), nicknames her ‘Mrs. Croc'.) Despite her want of beauty, she has her admirers. When young, she was

a black-haired, brilliant-eyed siren, ugly, vivacious, unfashionably thin and small, but possessing an attractiveness which, although entirely divorced from physical beauty, exercised a kind of electric current upon most of those who came in contact with her.

By her (at least two, and, according to later books, three) husbands, she has two sons, the barrister Ferdinand Lestrange and another son who practises medicine in India, and numerous relatives, the most important of whom is her pig-breeding nephew Carey Lestrange.

She has committed at least one murder (for which she was tried and acquitted); has remarkably bad taste in clothes; and has a number of “extraordinary pothouse accomplishments”, as her secretary, Laura Menzies (later Gavin), explains.

“She could make an iron bar squeal by gripping it, and she can throw knives like people in a circus, and fire a revolver from her skirt pocket.”

“You must have a lovely job,” said Catherine with gentle irony. Laura grinned, and looked suddenly like her brother.

“It suits me, anyway,” she said.

An ancestress of hers, Mary Toadflax, was tried for witchcraft during the reign of James I,

but was let off by the favour of the presiding magistrate, whose paramour she was said to be when the devil was occupied elsewhere and her incubus not in the mood.

Mrs. Bradley carries on this noble tradition, and is identified by two witches, Mrs. Fluke of Saxon Wall and Mrs. Leckie of Spey, as a fellow spirit. She does not, of course, believe in witchcraft itself, but rather in its power over the weak and credulous – a technique she employs in several books, notably in The Worsted Viper (1943).

Yet, for all her eccentricities, one never has any doubt about Mrs. Bradley's credentials. She often appears odd because the other characters – and, indeed, the reader – are not as quick on the uptake, and so what appears perfectly obvious to her seems wayward behaviour to us. It is rare that she is not in control of a situation. As one of her nephews remarks, she

will lay down her cards and scoop the pool, you'll see. She always does. She weaves the web, and, in the end, the flies walk into it.

Moreover, she is ageless, wise and compassionate, and tolerant of human foibles from adultery to pornography smuggling to murder itself. The only crimes she cannot forgive are blackmail and rape, which she sees as worse than murder, because of the consequences for the victim.

***

What should one expect from a Mitchell novel? I use the term “novel” advisedly, because, as Philip Larkin wrote, “I shall read them as novels. They ought to be known as such.” In fact, considered purely as detective stories, Mitchell's work is often uneven. They are a far cry from the clockwork precision of a Carr or a Christie, and still less the obsessive compulsive alibi checking of Crofts. This is not to say that Mitchell was not a good detective writer. Many of her books are superbly plotted, with unusual clues (the Mikado's nose in Death at the Opera , the weed-killer in Brazen Tongue ) and solutions which make the reader want to kick himself ( The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, The Saltmarsh Murders, Dance to Your Daddy ). The detection, however, and still less the mystery (the murderer is often revealed halfway through, or, less happily, in several of the later books is arbitrary), are not the most important things. Mitchell is more interested in atmosphere, in place, in people, and in “sheer unbridled imagination” – in those things which make a book truly worth reading, for its own sake, rather than for a problem.

Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, in their introduction to When Last I Died , described Mitchell's work as complex and untoward.

Unlike more conventional authors in the genre, she never encourages us to believe the world we inhabit is straightforward and orderly, or that only those who deserve it meet with sticky ends – one of her achievements, indeed, is to subvert quite a few of our assumptions about detective fiction, while gratifying our craving for the special satisfactions of the genre. At their best, her books display to the full the characteristic she cultivated beyond all others: productive idiosyncrasy.

“Productive idiosyncrasy” is evident in both the form of the novels ( The Rising of the Moon , for instance, is told from the perspective of a thirteen-year-old boy, and Sunset over Soho comes remarkably close to magical realism) and their subject matter (naiads in the water meadows of Winchester, a coven of witches in a Cornwall boarding-house, a private school for the delinquent offspring of the very rich). She travelled widely, both in Britain and the Mediterranean, and many of her books involve real locations, including her native Oxfordshire, haunted buildings in Norfolk , the Western Highlands of Scotland , and the small isle of Lundy – perfect for the armchair traveller. The murders are often decidedly peculiar, and used to blackly comic effect; witness her second book, The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929), where the victim is dismembered and hung up like a string of sausages.

Her books are extraordinarily vital, with the immediacy of Dickens or Chesterton: her worlds so evocatively described and so detailed that they have a life beyond the page, from the pagan backwater of Saxon Wall to the Ripper-haunted town of Brentford; and vivid and believable characters, whether they are everyday types like the teachers and writers who are the protagonists of many books to the more untoward characters like the antique seller Mrs. Cockerton, the homicidal squire Sir Adrian Caux (who cheats at cricket – a game he plays against the inmates of an asylum) and his two identical androgynous twin grandsons, and the lotus-eater of the Canaries, Mr. Peterhouse (“Sodom and Gomorrah couldn't hold a candle to that man's mind, and, if they did, it would explode”). As one would expect from one who hails Wodehouse as “our greatest living author”, Mitchell's books are [often “exceptionally stylish and high-spirited…, with strong comic overtones” / “genuinely comic detective fiction with serious undertones”] (Craig and Cadogan again). The early books satirise genre conventions (the guilty detective, the weak motive many murderers have, the Christiean English village murder). In later ones, Mrs. Bradley and her high-spirited secretary Laura are a very effective and witty double act, and many books have digressions worth reading for their own sake. Who, for instance, would be deprived of chauffeur George's decision to change his name in The Dancing Druids , or Mrs. Bradley's recommendation that a patient obsessed with blood and poetry should become a butcher.

It would sublimate your preoccupation with blood, and the rhythm of chopping the meat would exorcise this bogey of iambics. I have listened to many butchers chopping meat; not one chopped it to the metre of a Shakespearean sonnet.

***

I stumbled upon Mitchell in 1998, when I was fifteen. Having read most of Doyle, Christie, Chesterton, Marsh, Allingham and Sayers since the age of ten, in late 1997 I came across a copy of The Problem of the Green Capsule by John Dickson Carr, an author whose name was vaguely familiar, and which turned out to be utterly brilliant. More, Carr had written an essay called “The Grandest Game in the World”, which put the whole of detective fiction into perspective, and recommended lots of writers whom I'd never heard of: Anthony Berkeley, HC Bailey, JJ Connington, R Austin Freeman, John Rhode, Ellery Queen…

One of those writers was Edmund Crispin, and it was through Crispin that I first heard of Mitchell. In Holy Disorders (1945), there is a clerical bookshelf which contains books by “John Dickson Carr, Nicholas Blake, Margery Allingham, and Gladys Mitchell”. I was familiar with three of those names, having read forty-three books by Carr and thirteen by Blake in 1998 alone. The fourth was unfamiliar – but the company was recommendation enough. I went to the library, and consulted the St James Guide to Crime and Mystery Writers , which had a glowing appraisal by Michele Slung, commenting on her imagination and love of the supernatural and untoward, and concluding that “Miss Mitchell is significant, most of all, because she is sui generis”. Fortunately, that library branch had several books by Mitchell: The Nodding Canaries (1961) , Adders on the Heath (1963) , Skeleton Island (1967) , The Whispering Knights (1980) – and Death at the Opera (1934).

It is lucky that I did not read the first four for some time. Two of them are among Mitchell's worst, one of them is mediocre, and Knights , although an atmospheric account of a megalithic pilgrimage, is weak as a detective story. Opera , on the other hand, was wonderful in every way: interesting setting (progressive co-educational school's performance of The Mikado , during which the Arithmetic Mistress supposed to play Katisha is drowned), superb characterisation (both of the teachers, who are obviously drawn from life, and of a ‘Brides-in-the-Bath' Smith-type killer), excellent detection by Mrs. Bradley (the solution is reached from two different angles, the psychological and the material), and a completely surprising solution (least-likely murderer, and a motive which is both deliberately ludicrous and yet wholly in keeping with the murderer's psychology).

The next two I read, The Worsted Viper (1943) and Watson's Choice (1955), were disappointing. St Peter's Finger, set in a convent, was superb. Three Quick and Five Dead (1968), the next one I read, I found very disappointing, because there were only three suspects to start with, and most of the victims were introduced to the reader only as corpses – not quite the Van Dinean holocaust I'd hoped for. (Yes, fifteen-year olds are bloody-minded, aren't they?) Having only managed to get a couple of chapters into the very late Death Cap Dancers (1981), one of the three Mitchells I have left to read, my high expectations of Mitchell were being dashed and disappointed. Two good ones – and three (and a half) mediocre ones. (This is, of course, what happens when you read mainly late ones, and you're a detective purist.)

The next couple I read, however, changed all that. The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) is, as Nicholas Blake pointed out, a “classic”: a village populated largely by lunatics and sexual deviants (pre-marital sex and adultery, which most writers of the period would frown at, are treated with a very modern sensibility by Mrs. Bradley, who also takes incest and the smuggling of banned books in her stride); some of Mitchell's most spirited and gleeful writing, since the narrator, the village curate, is first cousin to Bertie Wooster; Mrs. Bradley at her most vital; and a complex plot with a surprising – yet truly inevitable – murderer. I also loved The 23 rd Man (1957), which is set in the Canaries, and involves twenty-three mummified kings, brigands, experimental approaches to parenting, and several murder cases in the UK . Between August 1998 and late 1999, I read nineteen Mitchells, which ranged from the superb (The Rising of the Moon ) to the excellent ( Speedy Death , The Longer Bodies, Laurels are Poison, Late, Late in the Evening, Fault in the Structure and Here Lies Gloria Mundy) to the bad (Death of a Burrowing Mole), from all periods of her career, and which helped to put her into perspective.

It was not until the nineteenth, however, that IT happened. When I picked up Opera , I distinctly remember wondering whether this new author, Gladys Mitchell, would be “the one” – an author who would be a major influence in my life, and compared to whom all other authors would pale. With Come Away, Death (1937), I was certain. Ever so often a book comes along which is one of the most memorable reading experiences of one's life. So it was with this extraordinary work, which describes the experiences of amateur archaeologist Sir Rudri Hopkinson and his family and colleagues as they travel around Greece in an attempt to find out what the Mysteries of Eleusis actually were. The hazards and mishaps of the party are vividly depicted; the characters are believably and sympathetically drawn, particularly a number of small boys; Mrs. Bradley is at the very height of her powers; the atmosphere is menacing, with Mitchell subtly evoking the ancient, mystical aura and the dry, dusty mountains of Greece; the murder, committed very late in a long book (416 pages), is both gruesome and satisfyingly resolved; and there are a number of extraordinary scenes. There is one in particular which is spell-binding, powerful and imaginative. Sir Rudri, who has been becoming increasingly eccentric, decides to sacrifice his son and two other boys to Apollo at Mycenae . Mrs. Bradley intervenes.

“Billets of wood,” said Mrs. Bradley, clearly, in a practical, pleasant voice. “You've forgotten the olive wood, child. Don't you remember how, in the first book of the Iliad, when Odysseus takes back Chryseis to her father, the meat of the sacrifice was burnt on wood and over it the priest poured wine, whilst the young men beside him held their five-pronged forks? Where,” she continued, fixing him with bright black eyes, and speaking with greater sternness, “are your billets of wood for the altar, your wine, and your five-pronged forks? Is this the manner in which you make sacrifice to the Far-Darter Apollo, you wretched, ignorant man?”

Sir Rudri, the Viking moustache having wilted with the heat of the day, looked perplexed, uncertain and sad.

“It's true,” he said at last. “Yet why do I think of the sacrifice of children? We don't need the pronged forks for children.”

“Children?” said Mrs. Bradley. In the sunset light of the wild glen of the Atrides she stood before him like some ancient prophetess and waved her skinny arms and menaced him with her hideous, leering lips. Her black eyes, reddened, it seemed, by the last rays of the sun, the declining Apollo, held his, and he felt he could not take his gaze from hers. “Children?” The word went echoing over the hill and against the thick walls, and shouted itself to silence over the plain. “What of the young sons of Thyestes, who seduced the wife of Atreus? What of their spilt blood crying aloud for vengeance? What of the curse which descended to Agamemnon and to Orestes? Listen? Do you not hear?”

She pointed to the sculptured Lion Gate. Even the young men half-fearfully followed her thin yellow forefinger, as though they expected to see some manifestation of the ancient hatred there. But only a great bird, black against the light, perched there for half a moment before it gave a hoarse-throated, mournful cry, and flew off towards the other side of the road.

“It's gone to the tombs! It's gone to the tombs!” said Cathleen…

Having finished it, I realised that Mitchell was, unquestionably, my favourite writer. (Interestingly, I later acquired a first edition of the book, signed by Mitchell herself – which is probably my most treasured possession.)

Part II will appear in the Fall 2006 Mysterical-E