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! :)

Maid to Kill

"This world would be in darkness without a sense of duty."
- Fuu (Samurai Champloo)

I struck up an acquaintance with Frances Crane a few months ago, when the inestimable Rue Morgue Press reissued The Pink Umbrella (1943), but I didn't exactly fell head-over-heels with the book. The detectives, Pat and Jean Abbott, the quintessential mystery solving husband-and-wife team that were all the rage back in the 1940s, were fun enough and the fluid, carelessly loose style of story telling had its attractions – but as an exercise in logical deductions and spotting fair-play clues the plot left a lot to be desired. But everyone has their off-days and I set my sights on the next title in the series, The Applegreen Cat (1943), which was slated to be release anytime soon – and received praise from Anthony Boucher!

The Pink Umbrella was the first story in which the Abbott's came onstage as a married couple, but with Pat enlisting in the marines and ready to be shipped off to war in a matter of days their separation is imminent – and the limited time they had together was interrupted by a one or two inconvenient murders. This would lead you to expect that the succeeding book entails a solo case for Jean Abbott, while her husband is overseas fighting the good cause, but they've worked out a clever scheme to be together during these trying days as they are now both stationed in wartime Brittain – Pat as a military intelligence author with the U.S. marines and Jean as a secretary with the Land-Lease Program.

Upon their arrival, Jean diligently toiled at weaving a social network around them and landed herself an invitation for two at the home of Stephen and Cynthia Heyward, fellow compatriots with their own business in London, who are throwing a weekend house party at their estate for family and friends.

Great move, Mrs. Abbott! A self-confessed murder magnate sets foot on English soil and her first course of action is obtaining an invitation to a sleep-over party at an old Tudor mansion – filled to the roof with people who harbor their fair share of secrets and hidden motives. So, of course, it's ludicrous to presume that under these circumstances a mere murder would interrupt a quiet country weekend with tea and tennis on the lawn. Not one murder, anyway. They're in England, after all, and murder in triplicate is the usual recipe over there. Ask Tom Barnaby.

The body of the first person to spoil a perfectly fine weekend is turns up when the Heyward's son, Kip, who's a R.A.F. Squadron leader home on leave, takes his punt for a midnight row on the lake when he bumps into another boat near the waterside – and its gruesome cargo comprises of the cooled-off remains of a murdered woman and a dart, jammed between her shoulder blades, that was purloined from the mansions play room, whose wooden handle is adorned with a penciled image of the titular applegreen cat. At first, it's presumed that the victim is Lorna Erickson, an alluring brunette with a tendency to capture the eyes of men and a knack for antagonizing their women, since she is the most likely candidate of the party to get her neck wrung, but the body turns out to be that the housemaid. The murderer appears to have dispatched the wrong victim to the great hereafter, however, before long the head maid takes a swig from a morphine-laced drink and succumbs to one heck of a hangover – which leaves the Heyward household in a tight spot: where do you find competent replacements with the servant problem what it is?

Yeah, this is not a detective story that takes itself too seriously, in defiance of the fact that events in this book have a dark undercurrent, leaving an entire stack of cadaver's before reaching the final page, but instead tends to be chatty with scenes that make the book somewhat of a comedy of manners. There's a clash of cultures, taking place in the background of the story, between the American inhabitants of the old mansion and the local police inspector – who's a bit nonplussed by the care-free attitude of his suspects in the face of a murder investigation (canceling their tennis matches never crossed their minds for even a single moment), while he receives disapproving frowns for his classism. 

These bits-and-pieces of satirical social commentary are clearly remnants of the ambitions she once had for her literary career, but had to settle on penning detective stories instead and I can't help but think if her style wasn't better suited for the type of novels she wanted to write. But as I pointed out in my previous review, we won from the lost suffered by mainstream literature and even though she wasn't one of the neatest plotters in the game – her books have a joyful exuberance about them that is very infectious.  

In conclusion, The Applegreen Cat is a fairly minor story, but also an out-and-out improvement on the preceding novel, The Pink Umbrella, with tighter writing, a firmer grasp on the plot and some clever touches that I felt was lacking in their previous investigation. Pat and Jean Abbott still have a long way to go before they're on equal footing with Jeff and Haila Troy or Jane and Dagobert Brown, but they're off to a good restart with this book.

Oh, and my sincere apologies for the awful punning title!

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!

Frances Crane, the Many Colored Death

The motley-colored titles that Frances Crane gave to her detective novels always conjured up a mental image of a careless and cheerful woman, who wrote jovial and lighthearted whodunits, but that picture was a bit disturbed after reading a short summary of her life. I somewhat fell in love with her when I read how she was thrown out of Germany for openly mocking and criticizing the new Nazi regime, but was also a bit saddened to learn of the tragedies that plagued her family and that she had more lofty ambitions in mind with her literary career. On a brighter sight, the mystery genre gained from the lost suffered by mainstream literature – selfish though that thought might be.

The Pink Umbrella (1943) is my first encounter with Pat and Jean Abbott, a husband and wife sleuthing team that were all the rage at the time, and was the fourth book in the series but the first one in which they were married. Unfortunately, their honeymoon leaves a lot to be desired. Pat had just enlisted in the Marines and will be shipped off to war within a few days, which doesn't leave much time at all to enjoy each other's company in a blacked-out New York City, where they don't know a soul. Or at least, that's what they thought.

They bump into an old acquaintance of Pat's, Ellen Bland, now living in America, with her archetypical dysfunctional family and assorted cohorts, after fleeing occupied Europe. Murder ensues! But contrary to time-honored tradition, it's not one of her family members, like her nasty, controlling ex-husband Louise or their 16-year-old son, Dick, who already knows how to hit the bottle, who meets a sticky end, but their sour-faced and ill-mannered housekeeper. It's an understatement to say that the old crone had an unattractive personality, however, caving her head in seems like a drastic measure to terminate her employment when a pink slip would've sufficed. Pat and Jean lend their invaluable help to New York's finest in uncovering a ruthless murderer.

Crane wrote a fluid story, almost in a careless manner and a loose style, that gives the story a touch of gaiety that's very becoming of this particular type of mysteries, but the plot left me under whelmed. The clues are not liberally thrown about and the motive for the second murders borders on cheating – making it very difficult for the reader to have an equal shot at arriving at the same conclusion as Pat did. His explanation also relayed too much on shaky amateur psychology (saying that this person was the only one with the personality of a cold blooded murderer). I really wanted to like this book, and did like some of it, but as a detective story it left me frigid.

However, if you're one of those detective fans who enjoy reading mysteries for their characters, without paying too much attention to the clues and plot, you'll probably enjoy tagging along with Pat and Jean. Otherwise, I recommend taking a look at the books by Kelley Roos and Delano Ames.

Oh, and kudos to anyone who spots the (obvious) reference to my favorite book. Here's a hint: it's not a mystery. Good luck!