Rural Legends

"You must believe me. It was a horseman, a dead one. Head less!"

- Ichabod Crane (Sleepy Hollow, 1999)

The dog days of summer are not renowned for creating an atmosphere ideal for reading a Christmas mystery, even if the canicule has its off-days, but the humidity, outbursts of summer rains and lack of snow did nothing to diminish Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris (1936), a tale of Yuletide, folk lore, Morris dancing and ghostly murder, set in the rustic countryside of rural Oxfordshire. 

Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, whose ophidian features insinuates a kinship with the swarm of fossils wrenched from the numerous layers of the Earth strata, descends on Oxfordshire to spend the holiday at the pig farm of her nephew, Carey Lestrange, and we're forthwith served with a plethora of characters and events that testify to her gift as a novelist and born storyteller. But this is, after all, a detective story and Mitchell assigned the role of the inaugural corpse to Edmund Fossder, a country-lawyer with masynogistic tendencies and a feeble heart, who, according to village gossip, received a note challenging him to keep a tryst with one of the local ghosts, a headless horseman known as the Sandford Ghost, which becomes more than a rumor when Fossder is found dead on a towpath next to a river.

Evidence picked up at the scene indicates a pursuer was on Fossder's heels, before sinking to the ground with a stopped heart in his chest, but the police has no interest in cordoning off the area and turning it into a crime scene. They're satisfied that it may have been a prank gone awry. An incredulous Mrs. Bradley begins her own investigation, sort of assisted by Carey, and disentangles one of Mitchell's knottiest problems – eventually leading up to a second murder, that of the curmudgeonly Simith, who was gored to death by a savage boar with the legend of the Shotover Boar roaming in the background. As I said, it's a very a tricky and knotty problem with lots of shenanigans and restless suspects abound, and that makes it even trickier to properly describe the plot without giving anything away.

The plot buzzes like a beehive with characters constantly sneaking about the place, theories being expounded and snooping around for clues without becoming a mere puzzle. Mitchell's sketches characters with the eye of an artist and this amusing lot, populating the Oxfordshire countryside, definitely compliments the landscape, which, I always felt in her stories, have the descriptive quality of a fairy-tale. Then again, how else can you define the mental image that Mitchell conjured up of Mrs. Bradley, the benevolent witch from children's fables turned detective, covered only by her underwear, taking-off cross-country like Roadrunner in order to get help for her nephew, who's holed up in a secret passage, or a line suggesting that "out there, in the quiet and the dark, a ghost seemed germane to the landscape, not alien—a possibility, not an old wives' tale"... Mitchell had a touch similar to John Dickson Carr to naturally blend a seemingly peaceful environment with the presence of local legends and ghosts, except that Carr's a nightmarish while Mitchell's are fairytales in which the Grim Reaper as he goes about his daily business, but the presence of Mrs. Bradley always gives them a benevolent touch. I think this is why Mitchell couldn’t read any of Carr's books.   

But where Mitchell really excelled here was in plotting, which can be an Achilles' heel that acts up from time to time in her books, and the busy and cluttered plot had me worried for a while, but a few sweeps with a witches' broom neatly cleaned it up – and that makes reading Mitchell even more enjoyable than it already is. Like a stronger than usually plotted Rex Stout novel. In short, I enjoyed this book, but advise readers who are new to the series to begin somewhere else like the imaginative Come Away, Death (1937) or the excellent St. Peter's Finger (1938). 

Other books I have reviewed by Gladys Mitchell:

St. Peter's Finger (1938)

Merlin's Furlong (1953)

Ask a Policeman (1933; together with the Detection Club)

Oh, there was a short scene in the Detection Club and Mrs. Bradley is an honorary member! :)

A Sanctuary for Sinners

"The light itself, Mrs. Bradley thought, looked friendly. The high walls and the gaunt, stark church threatened those without, yet gave an impression of guarding those within. But all dark deeds seemed possible--she had noticed it before--in tall buildings seen by moonlight."

- Gladys Mitchell's St. Peter's Finger (1938)

St. Peter's Finger (1938) has been cited by P.D. James and Philip Larkin as one of Gladys Mitchell's most noteworthy contributions to the genre, which was also her own opinion of the book, and this review will probably end up resonating with the echo of those sentiments.

It's very likely that Gladys Mitchell found in her sister, a Dominican nun, an untapped reservoir of inspiration and knowledge, from which sprung this story, and this also had a profound effect on her writing – as few of her flaws were able to secure a spot between the covers of this book. 

Meticulous plotting is conjugated with characterization as sharp as a flint and the backdrop is a convincingly drawn convent. The tranquility of the convent, in spite of the turmoil, also has its effect on the personality of Mrs. Bradley, whose demeanor resembles more that of a pet python, subdued after being put under local anesthesia by a vet, rather than that of a benevolent crocodile who just had lunch and unleashes shrieking noises not heard since the days when pterodactyls ruled the skies above us, but her methods are nonetheless successful – even though she's not entirely in control of what goes on most of the time.

The presence of Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley at the convent, which is alluded to by the locality as Saint Peter's Fingers, in reference of the steady flicker of light that burns in the church tower that once warned passing ships before it was released of that duty by a newly erected lighthouse, has very little to do with a spiritual crisis or to recuperate from a breakdown, but with a plea from her son, the barrister Ferdinand Lestrange, to look into the death of a 13-year-old girl. One of the students at the convent, Ursula Doyle, was found submerged in one of the bathtubs in the guesthouse, but the cause of death turns out to be carbon monoxide poisoning and since the boiler was not defect, the coroner's jury settled on a verdict of suicide.

But Mrs. Bradley finds that the verdict is, within the confines of the convent, is not thought of as gospel and that few of the nuns believe that the girl committed the cardinal sin of suicide, but an unfortunate accident seems equally unlikely and the possibility of murder as undesirable as the standing verdict of suicide.

Nevertheless, a murderer is what Mrs. Bradley is looking for and with her probing into an inheritance and religious mania, which are skulking in the background, it's inevitable that the viper at the bosom of the convent will uncoil and strike again – and this is where the excellent characterization comes into play. There's plenty of plot to sink your teeth in, but at heart this is a character-driven detective story and this is reflected in the nuns, whose uniformly attire failed to conceal the fact that they were all endowed with a personality of their own, and the eventual revelation of what really happened in the bathroom of the guesthouse.

The murderer is well characterized and the motive is grounded in the psychological make-up of this person, making the solution feel like an inevitability, but I also have to give Mitchell props for the false and more conventional, plot-driven solution that could've closed the book on this case with equal satisfaction as the eventual conclusion. But even the solutions, good though they are on their own, are improved and elevated by the characters who populate the convent. 

I also loved the fact that Mrs. Bradley, after finally getting a grip on the case, slowly turns into her old self again and startles some of the nuns with sudden, frightening cackles and has to restrain herself from poking one of them between the ribs with a yellow claw – and to top it all off the finally is set during a fiery sequence with the Grim Reaper looking them dead in the eyes. However, this harrowing, but excellent, scene also provided me with the one point of criticism that I can fire at this story and that is that the nuns are a lot less sympathetic in the face of an immediate crisis, preferring to take their sweet time to don their habits and pray instead of immediately taking action to safe their students from being burned to death, but that's just a personal annotation to this scene.

St. Peter's Finger is an excellent and outstanding novel of detection, inhabited with convincingly drawn characters placed in what I imagine to be is a realistic setting and saturated with memorable scenes, which makes it hard to argue with those who rank this book among Mitchell's best work. Gladys Mitchell may be an acquired taste, but once you've cultivated an appreciation for the unique flavor of her brand of detective stories you get enjoy something really special – even when her approach is sober and subdued in tone like is the case with this story. But it's this restraint that Mitchell shows that just might make this book the perfect introduction to readers who are new to her work instead of starting off with her other earlier, more imaginative and sometimes highly unconventional mysteries. 

Definitely recommended to both fans and newcomers!  

Swapping Sleuths

"However, there is, as you have shown, a friendly readiness amongst the members of the Detection Club to help the weaker brethren, so I have written to one or two of our friends to ask them to tell me what, in the opinion of their sleuths, the solution is."

- Milward Kennedy.

There are moments when I wish there was a grain of truth in the popular surmise that human beings are endowed with an immortal soul. I have a practical reason for this longing: to have a bargaining chip when summoning Old Scratch to negotiate a business deal. Because getting an opportunity to travel through a tear in the time-space continuum to meet a bunch of detective writers from the previous century, while cheaply buying first editions and solicitation autographs, is totally worth the hazards of eternal damnation. But the joke would undoubtedly be on me, as I would freeze-up like a shy schoolgirl who's just been approached by her first crush.   

Me: * shoves a copy of The Hollow Man and a pen in John Dickson Carr's face *

JDC: Do you want me to sign this for you?

Me: * nods *

JDC: What's your name?

Me: J-John...

JDC: Ah, a fellow John. Nice to meet you, John! What's your surname?

Me: D-D-Dickson…

JDC: Huh?

Me: D-Dickson Carr!

JDC: Your name is also John Dickson Carr?

Me: * just points at JDC *

At this point he slowly, but surely, starts backing away from me as my under lip starts to quiver and Lucifer impatiently begins tugging my sleeve, like an eager child who just acquired a new toy and can't wait to get home to start playing with it, and that's how I would've squandered a divine wish that could've granted me world domination or the answers to the question of life, the universe and everything. Unfortunately, this scenario, which is definitely worth an eternity of third-degree sunburns, is just a pipe dream – and the only opportunity I will ever have at soaking up the atmosphere of a meeting of the original Detection Club, is reading their round-robin novels. Well, you have to be grateful for what you get and this week I immerged myself in their second joint-effort, Ask a Policeman (1933), but this time I will leave the introduction to the review to someone else: one of the original collaborators! 

Ms. Gladys Mitchell has the floor:

"I was engaged in only one of the collaborations, which were for the benefit of club funds. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers exchanged detectives and, of course, Anthony's manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure. Helen Simpson took over Mrs. Bradley in exchange for Sir John Saumarez. We two, I am glad to say, got along famously and it is to her that I owe, as you know, Dame Beatrice's second name, Adela."

This is an excerpt from an Question and Answer session, conducted by B.A. Pike, entitled In praise of Gladys Mitchell, and can be found in its entirely at Jason Hall's The Stone House – a website fully dedicated to the life and work of this unorthodox, alternative Queen of Crime.

The book opens with a brief exchange between the for me unfamiliar Milward Kennedy and the plotting machine known as John Rhode, in which Kennedy asks his colleague to produce a dark and murky plot for a title, Ask a Policeman, that was presented to him by his publisher – and the follow-up is a novella-length chapter recounting the shooting of Lord Comstock, an unpalatable newspaper mogul, at his country retreat. The rag king was an expert in jacking-up the circulations of his papers by viciously attacking the establishment and on the morning preceding his murder, three representatives of institutions under siege by his publications, the government, the police and the church, visited his retreat. This makes it a very sensitive and high-profile case and with the police filling in the role as one of the suspects it's decided up on, from above, to give a few notable amateurs free reign over the investigation.

This novella-length chapter demonstrates that John Rhode is undeserving of his reputation as a dullard and sleep-inducing writer. Even with such authors as Gladys Mitchell and Anthony Berkeley waiting in the wings, ready for the opportunity to seize his pen, he contributed one of the best chapters of this collaborative effort – sketching a mystifying problem with some touches of dry humor that his fellow clubmembers had a lot of fun toying around with.

Helen Simpson is the first one who gets a shot at clearing the mystifying problems that befogs the death of the hated newspaper magnate, but instead of Sir John she has Gladys Mitchell's Mrs. Bradley at her disposal – whom she promptly dispatches to the scene of the crime. I think her, and mine, solution was the most evident one as we both fingered the same person based on the significance of the police constable who was run over with a car after the killing. But the best part of this chapter is perhaps the way in which she captured the essence of the character she borrowed and how she touched upon nearly every familiar element from Mitchell's books – from the involvement of a young teenager, a niece who coincidently had a fling with the secretary of Comstock, to the diary notes at the end and a plot thread that is left dangling in the wind. Not bad if you're limited to a mere fifty pages!

Up next is Gladys Mitchell's interpretation of Helen Simpson's Sir John Saumarez, who's an acclaimed stage actor basking in the spotlights of success, however, this is my first acquaintance with the character making it impossible to judge the accuracy of Mitchell's portrayal. The solution he proposed was probably even more blindingly obvious than the previous one, but he gave away a first-rate theatrical dénouement with the best seats in the house reserved for his readers. I have to hunt down one of Simpson's detective novels featuring Sir John for an encore.

Anthony Berkeley is the only one of the quartet of crime writers who managed to upstage the instigators of this book, Milward Kennedy and John Rhode, with his marvelous and amusing rendition of Lord Peter Wimsey and his manservant Bunter. There's a delightful scene in which they discuss the appropriate attire for an appointment with an archbishop who's under suspicion of murder! And to top it all off, he comes up with a solution that points to one of the least likely suspects of the lot as the person who pulled the trigger of the gun with a deadly precision.

Dorothy Sayers' take off on Anthony Berkeley's Mr. Roger Sheringham is equally amusing, but one wishes that as much attention was bestowed on constructing a clever solution from the given clues as on exonerating the archbishop from every suspicion – who she turned into a Machiavellian schemer cleverly maneuvering the paper tycoon into one of his own traps and saving his church from further abuse. The solution is uninspired, forgettable and actually had the flip through the chapter to be reminded who the murderer was supposed to be.

The final chapter is for Milward Kennedy, who is confronted with the daunting task of explaining away the solutions presented by the sleuthing foursome and wrapping up the case – and his approach to this conundrum turns the book into a parody that's very similar to Leo Bruce's Case for Three Detectives (1936) and his critical commentary on Mrs. Bradley, Sir John, Wimsey and Sheringham is hilarious! However, I still haven't decided whether I loved or hated the way in which he explained everything, but it's a perfect illustration of "the blinkin’ cussedness of things in general" at the expensive of the four brilliant amateur sleuthhounds.

In summary, Ask a Policeman is a fascinating experiment, but one that derives its interest mainly from watching a troop of famous detectives taking a stab a the same murder case and how they behave when someone else is in charge of them – while the murder at the summer retreat quickly lost its appeal by a abundance of coincidences and a lack of overall consistency. It's not the howling success that their first round-robin novel, The Floating Admiral (1931), was, but if you're a fan of any of these writers or characters the book is well worth your time – and it's one of those rare crossovers that gave me that pleasurable tingle down my spine! I love and adore crossovers and it gives me an immense pleasure knowing that Mrs. Bradley, Sheringham, Wimsey and even Sir John inhabit the same universe.  

A note of warning: avoid the recent reprint by The Resurrected Press who took gross liberties by altering the text. More details here.  

The Pin-Covered Doll and Some Voodoo Hoodoo

It's an understatement to say that Gladys Mitchell was one of the least conventional mystery writers of the 20th century, whose fondness for preternatural events, evoking magical scenes and settings, off-the-wall plotting and uncanny knack for creating believable children gives her detective stories a fairytale-like quality. This is further heightened by the presence of her series detective, the shrieking, cackling, rib-probing pterodactyl-like Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, who's not unlike an unsightly Good Witch of the North.

However, this doesn't always make her books good detective stories as fair play is often drowned in the imaginative wealth and complexity of her plots, and plot threads are sometimes left dangling in the wind. The best example of this is her often touted masterpiece, The Rising of the Moon (1945), which is narrated by a 13-year-old boy and is better read as a coming-of-age story with strong mystery elements than as a pure detective story – because the ending leaves you scratching your head in utter amazement (it's up to the individual reader to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing).

At her best, though, her books had the deceptive appearance of a conventional, British mystery novel, often complete with a charming country villages and quaint vicars, but they really are clever and delightful send-ups of the genre and brimming over with bizarre elements – such as witchcraft and chopped-up corpses (e.g. The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop, 1929). 

Merlin's Crime

Merlin's Furlong (1953) is a book from her middle-period and displays nearly all of her strength and practically none of her weaknesses, and begins in a very conventional manner when a rich and cantankerous old man invites his nephews over and starts playing around with his will. Surely an ill-advised course of action for any character in a detective story, but we won't learn immediately what happens to them as the story shifts focus from the crabby old geezer and his suffering relatives to three enterprising young men ready to embark on an adventure.

These three undergraduate students, Harrison, Waite and Piper, answer a peculiar advertisement beseeching the help of a warlock in handling a pin-covered voodoo doll. The man behind this strange request is the eccentric ex-college professor Havers, who dabbles in the black arts, and hires them to retrieve a stolen religious icon from the old man who's toying around with his legacy in his dilapidated home. Confusing? Complex? Not at all, and this is only the start of their adventurous journey.

The foursome, the three men and the professor's voodoo doll, embark on their risky venture to Merlin's Furlong, the name of the despot's home, but the region is cluttered with ancient ruins bearing that Arthurian name and they accidently end up at Merlin's Castle – coincidently the dwelling of the oddball professor who employed them to get his icon back. But when they finally arrive at their correct destination, after trampling around the country side, they don't find the item they set-out to retrieve, but the old man sprawled out on his bed with a sizable dent in his skull – and when the local police discovers the body of professor Havers in his coach-house they have a heck of a lot of explaining to do.

Enter Mrs. Bradley, whose expertise in witchcraft is much needed to unravel this dazzling complex plot that involves a pin-covered voodoo doll, a desecrated gravesite of a suicide victim who was buried twice, a secret room stuffed with artifacts, a dead cat and a live monkey, a midnight cult and a change of heirs.

Mitchell neatly ties all these plot threads together and satisfactory accounts for all of them, which makes Merlin's Furlong one of her most rewarding books. The plot perfectly exhibits her sheer, unrivalled and wild imagination, but nothing of the detective story is lost along the way – which was as nice as a surprise as the solution itself.

So if you haven't met Gladys Mitchell and Mrs. Bradley before, this is a great book to make their acquaintance and it's widely available again thanks to the wonderful people at the Rue Morgue Press. May their books grace our bookshelves for many decades to come!