The Longer Bodies (1930) by Gladys Mitchell

The last time Gladys Mitchell and Mrs. Bradley graced this blog was in 2017, greatly enjoying The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935), Laurels Are Poison (1943), Groaning Spinney (1950) and The Echoing Strangers (1953), but around that time, the number of reprints and translations began to serious mushroom – which distracted my attention away from the Great Gladys. Well, that and an inexplicable, all-consuming obsession with locked room mysteries. So the titles I had intended to go through in 2018 slipped down the big pile, but recently had the urge to return to the detective fantasies of Mitchell.

Nick Fuller kindly reviewed those to-be-read novels like Brazen Tongue (1940), Here Comes a Chopper (1946), Death of a Delft Blue (1964) and The Greenstone Griffins (1983) in the comments of The Devil at Saxon Wall review. The long standing recommendation that recently came back to my attention is that of the third Mrs. Bradley novel.

The Longer Bodies (1930) has been described as one of Mitchell's most orthodox, conventionally-structured detective novels and essentially a parody of the English country house mystery with nods to S.S. van Dine's The Canary Murder Case (1927) and The Greene Murder Case (1928). However, you have to keep mind descriptions and terms like orthodox and conventionally-structured always comes with a huge asterisk when discussing Mitchell's zestful mysteries. Even at her most traditional, Mitchell's detective fiction stands in a class of their own and seldom lose their vitality or surrealistic qualities. I've not read Mitchell's reputed humdrum and routine affair Winking at the Brim (1974), but where else except in "a Gladys Mitchell novel would the heroine be winked at, or the murderer eaten, by the Loch Ness monster." So with that out of the way, let's take a look at The Longer Bodies.

Great-aunt Matilda Puddequet, "a cranky old girl of ninety," is reputed to be enormously wealthy with "a tradition in the family that she was extraordinarily mean" and a willingness to impart unasked-for advice – causing a separation with her nephew, Godfrey Yeomond. It only took about thirty-two years and Godfrey becoming a prosperous man for Great-aunt Puddequet to forget her quarrel. So invited herself to have a look at his children. During their reunion, they attend an international athletics match, between Sweden and England, which leaves Great-aunt Puddequet unimpressed with the results of the English team. So devices a plan to leave her entire fortune to the grandnephew who's first to represent England in an aesthetics field event. And to this end, she had turned ten thousand square yards around her home into a training camp.

A rough pasturage had been dug up, leveled, drained to rise a sports ground with a oval running track, a long jump pit and places for the high jump and the pole vault. Great-aunt Puddequet invited three branches of the family to come to Longer to train and compete for a shot at inheriting half a million pounds. Not everyone is looking forward to acting like "a monkey on a stick for the sake of her rotten cash," but everyone goes and participate in the games. Mitchell's detective stories and characters always seem to be bursting with health, energy and vitality as they never seem to be able to sit down for long. The characters in a Mitchell novels constantly move around with purpose like burying, exhuming and reburying bodies or stamping up and down the spiral staircase of a lighthouse. This is reflected in the busy, often convoluted way in which Mitchell's murderers produce and desposes of their corpses.

It does not take very long, before the Puddequet Family Games are interrupted by murder, but the victim is a villager. Jacob Hobson, "a drunken lout," is found in a nearby lake tied to the statue of a mermaid. Only the long-suffering Mrs. Hobson has plenty of motive and no alibi, but neither has she a traceable accomplish who could have helped with the physical demanding dumping of the body. So what's going on? More than one character remarked that the case is all wrong ("it ought to be all to do with the old lady's money, and it isn't") with the baffled Inspector Bloxham remarking, "what the deuce anybody can make out of the murder of a drunk by somebody who couldn't even have known he was coming to the house, and the murder of the young man who ought to have set to and murdered all the other claimants, passes my understanding." That second murder finally brings Mrs. Bradley into the story.

I can see why Mitchell decided to wait until the halfway mark, because I began to look forward to the inevitable meeting between Mrs. Bradley and Great-aunt Puddequet, two formidable characters, following the first couple of chapters. Mrs. Bradley is one of the most striking and unique characters from this period of the genre. A descendant of witches who looks like a benevolent crocodile or shoebill trying to pass for an elderly lady with her black, birdlike eyes, yellow claws and loudly cackling or screeching with "eldritch glee" – who sometimes condones and even commits murder herself. A unique and unforgettable detective character. Mrs. Bradley is in fine form during her third outing as she immediately understands the significance of the body being tied to the statue ("...when I set eyes on the statue of the little mermaid that half the truth dawned on me"), while the plodding Bloxham concentrates on the alibis and lack of motives. A very done combination of Mrs. Bradley psycho-analytical methods and Bloxham's painstaking police routine, which nicely worked towards Bloxham's false-solution and Mrs. Bradley presenting him with a written confession from the murderer.

A marvelous play on the usually disappointing written confession and an even better parody of the detective story ("...only in fiction that the motive is worthy of the crime"), but the solution to the tangled problem is another demonstration why Gladys Mitchell is an acquired taste. Mitchell's novels have always taken place in a caricature of the real world with its own set of bizarre rules and slightly cracked logic. So whether they work, or not, as detective story depends on how far the reader is willing to go along with it, which needs some consistency and convincing. I think Mitchell pulled it off here and called Michael Innes' What Happened At Hazelwood (1946) to mind. Both are deliberately improbable in order to spoof the country house mystery with a plot ticking according to its own internal mad logic and should be taken on their own terms in order to appreciate what they tried to accomplish, but can see why it's not going to be everyone's liking.

However, if you want to see the traditional country house mystery getting strapped down to a bath chair, raced around a track field in the dead of night before getting chucked into a lake, The Longer Bodies has you covered.