By Kohinoor Dasgupta
British writer Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983) wrote 66 mysteries featuring Mrs. Bradley, an alienist and a Consultant to the Home Office.
Very long ago, I read a short story by Miss Mitchell called 'The Case of a Hundred Cats’. It was curious and clever, like its featured detective, Mrs. Bradley.
Miss Gladys Mitchell, whose day job was teaching, published the first book of the series, Speedy Death, in 1929. The last three were published posthumously. No Winding Sheet (1984, #65) went to press shortly before her death.
Nowadays only "diehard fans” are apparently reading Miss Mitchell. I don't know about that. I am not one. I am an occasional reader of Miss Mitchell. There was a time, however, when I did desperately wish to read the lot. Call it “collector’s mania”!
This mania (not for books to read, but to possess valuable objets d’art), in Noonday and Night (1977, #51), led to somebody’s undoing, leading Mrs. Bradley (Dame Beatrice then) to reflect: "The most acquisitive instinct, like most other instincts, shows a side of man’s baser nature. One should not wish to accumulate.” A bit later, she adds: "One should work with one’s hands. When our coach tour is over, I think I shall carve a few love-spoons.”
Miss Mitchell, in an interview that may be found on the lovely https://www.gladysmitchell.com/, expressed dismay over the fact that Mrs. Bradley/Dame Beatrice was not universally liked! She acknowledged that some folks were leery about Mrs. Bradley's amazing physical fitness.
Mrs. Bradley was about fifty-five years old in 1929, and she grew no older than seventyish during fifty years. A skinny and petite woman, she was, in a way, a Marvel-ous super heroine, never losing physical strength, extraordinary agility and sharp reflexes. What’s wrong with that, grumbled Miss Mitchell, who assured the interviewer that she did not attribute to Mrs. Bradley any act of agility or endurance that she (Miss Mitchell) herself could not manage at a similar age. I do not doubt her at all.
Being taken along by the energetic and ever-thoughtful Mrs. Bradley on her treks and climbs, through moorland and spinneys, and by streams and lochs and rivers, is a rare treat. As such, long before commercial tourism took off democratically, Miss Mitchell explored, for her readers, many parts of England and Scotland unknown to outsiders.
Together with Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, who appeared in 1927, Mrs. Bradley challenges ageism and gender bias. Miss Marple had a first-rate mind, even if she was not as athletic as Mrs. Bradley. Mrs. Bradley is an urbane doctor (Psychiatry) who has been everywhere, including Greenland and South India. Her strategic knitting, unlike Miss Marple's, never produces a recognizable article of clothing. She is the coolest of elderly aunts, and an indulgent grandma to Derek Lestrange. She is as comfortable in her skin in solitude as she is in the embrace of family, near and extended. She is generous, resourceful, and well-connected. Her chauffeur George, inspired by her, attends University Extension lectures and learns about ecclesiastical architecture and psychology. Like her, he reads modern poetry. Mrs Bradley is a free woman, a female Sherlock without the opium habit, and able to play Ave Maria on the cello. She is also a sardonic and infuriating nerd, who tends to keep her thoughts to herself or set us problems when we’re dying to be spoon-fed and are trying our best to keep up. "Oh, not any red herrings, please!” begs Laura, her assistant, in Noonday and Night. On many an occasion, we do not agree with Mrs. Bradley's opinions or decisions. Often, we don’t understand her. We aren’t meant to, really. As she tells Dish in Come Away, Death (1937, # 8): “The more I know, the more I can hide.”
Mrs. Bradley recognizes mental illness in many people who seem okay. Even the plainly unhinged may be saved (for example, Sir Rudri in Come Away, Death). Miss Mitchell’s own wicked sane mind found enough twists and turns in human psychology to plot 66 detective novels. There is an enormous cast of characters in them, from "touched" to evil, from witchy to bewitched, from nymphomaniac to kleptomaniac, from fetishist to hobbyist, from kindly to saintly. Superstition, rural legends and devil-worship provide opportunity and cover for garden-variety crime such as smuggling, insurance fraud and blackmail. (Mrs. Bradley regards blackmail as worse than murder. As for "devilment", she has this to say in The Worsted Viper (1943, #15): “Witchcraft was still a term of sinister significance, even though its power derived more from psychology than from materialisation of Satan and his ministers. The exploitation of subconscious fears in a victim could be devilment itself.”)
Wit and comedy enliven the series. A few books, with a country squire or a peer and their assorted kin and friends, might seem like P.G. Wodehouse plus crime. Nest of Vipers (1979, #55) doesn’t even have such a group, yet the letter that Chilian Piper writes to Dame Beatrice when the police have arrested him for murder could be the work of one of Wodehouse’s fatuous but guileless young men. Happily, Miss Mitchell mostly gave up Wodehousing quite early in the series and gave us her own funny voice.
Here are a few samples of her own brand of humor:
"And what’s more,” Marie Hopkinson continued, "one doesn’t feel the same here [in Greece] about these things – murder, and being suspected of it, and regarding it as something belonging to the Sunday papers, and so on. One remembers all the old stories – one sees things as Homer saw them, and as Aeschylus and Euripides and darling Aristophanes saw them – and they seem – death seems trivial compared with – I don’t know how to put it – great things looming, and slaves’ lives meaning nothing, and fate hovering – great wings, great mountains and great, clean sweeping skies.” (Come Away, Death)
Mrs. Fluke is "eighty-one next harvest and fully possessed”. (The Devil at Saxon Wall)
"It’s happened,” said Mrs Coutts. (The Saltmarsh Murders)
Aubrey Harringay: "Doesn’t your pater care about the theatre? Moral scruple and whatnot?”
"Father hasn’t any morals. He’s a clergyman,” said Felicity [Broome]. (The Mystery of a Butcher Shop)
"Everybody comes to see us now we live near the sea.” Mrs. Waller (St. Peter’s Finger)
Mrs. Bradley. "That night-gown has a long and curious tale.”
Ronald Stallard: "I thought only shirts had tails.” (Brazen Tongue)
"Lady Selina, returning hungry after an exhaustive inspection of the local Knitting for the Navy Association, ate a share of the haddock with gusto.” (Brazen Tongue)
Mrs. Bradley: "I think we are expected to applaud the successful conclusion of the hand-shaking.” (Brazen Tongue)
"… it was disgusting and humiliating, she found, that food should offer such solace.” (Hangman’s Curfew)
"In the morning,” said Jenny, giving Deborah her candle, "you’ll be able to see the pigs and the babies.” (Laurels Are Poison)
"Rather too much coloratura about the tabasco, though. And the alignment of the epigastric. Somewhat concentric, don’t you think?” Laura to a wayside painter who was dabbing water on a finished oil painting. (My Father Sleeps)
"Yes, I am afraid that Eldris is abnormal. He has lived thirty-five years surrounded by nothing but bananas,” Miss Carmody explained with great simplicity. (Death and the Maiden)
Mrs. Bradley: "…I liked Rebekah. There is always something to be said for those who call a spade a damned shovel.”(Death of a Delft Blue)
With an alienist detective, the question of identity is, naturally, a recurring theme of the mysteries. Criminals find it profitable to assume identities. A mask is useful in several ways, ranging from avoiding detection to committing insurance fraud, to wrongfully claiming inheritance. In the very first Bradley book, a cross-dresser is found murdered. (Edgar Wallace had written up a cross-dresser even before, in 1926, in The Square Emerald). An eerie and rather sad book about the difficulty of separating identities is The Echoing Strangers (1952, # 25). By doctoring an artist's signature, a man means to pass off the former's work as his own, in another book that I shall not name.
We might feel, when the plot thickens, that we are ourselves coming unglued with the psychology and the shenanigans. The solutions, when they come, often in the very last pages, and after many, many speculations and encounters with red herrings, will addle our little brains. (Wait, why was that skeleton re-articulated [Laurels Are Poison, 1942, #14]? Why did someone move Colnbrook’s body from Richardson’s tent and put Bunt’s body there [Adders on the Heath, 1963, # 36]??) Miss Mitchell does expect a lot of her murderers, and many times everything works in spite of that, as in Death and the Maiden (1947, # 20) and The Whispering Knights (1980 # 58).
Miss Mitchell is past mistress at concocting a surreal ambience. Come Away, Death, with bone-chilling happenings at Eleusis, Epidaurus, Mycenae and Athens, and that other headless-corpse mystery, Here Comes A Chopper, are both part dream and part nightmare.
And there is no one quite like Miss Mitchell when it comes to writing the opening pages of a detective fiction classic. One of my favorite starts is that of The Devil at Saxon Wall 1935, #6. It’s crisp and masterful. I like the rest of this atmospheric and frightening book too, though it is nothing like the beginning.
Not only the ideas of the books, but even the quotations with which most of the chapters begin, broaden the experience of reading. The quotations may pall on one too! The editor’s note at the beginning of Hangman’s Curfew (1941, #12) hinted at fatigue with Border Ballads, but then, that book additionally hinged on an acrostic that had to be decoded using several lines of Sir Walter Scot’s ballads! Too much!) Usually, though, the quotations are interesting and certainly show Miss Mitchell's deep love of reading. There was no internet or Google. She did the hard work of browsing and finding in libraries. The chapters of The Worsted Viper, a book featuring a serial killer who stages murders, a staple of thrillers today, have quotations only from Alice in Wonderland.
This one is from Watson’s Choice 1955, # 28:
I must
Not trust
Here to any:
Bereav’d,
Deceiv’d
By so many.
-- Robert Herrick, Anacreontike
And this quote was used in Here Comes a Chopper 1946, # 19:
The bubble’s cut, the look’s forgot;
The shuttle’s flung, the writing’s blot;
The thought is past, the dream is gone,
The water glides; man’s life is done.
-Simon Wastell (or Henry King) Man’s Mortality
In the wartime book Brazen Tongue (1940, #10), Miss Mitchell uses descriptions of various artistic exhibits instead of quotations, an avant-garde idea. Incidentally, she called this one “a horrid book”! I disagree. Making sensational news for career advancement is an idea that hasn’t dated at all! While reading the book, I kept wondering how far Miss Mitchell was willing to go in terms of driving a stake into a sympathetic character. She got one of my own suspects! The other, the Inspector, was blameless. This book also had a corpse with a riverweed on her person that gave information about her murder. How familiar we are with this sort of forensic detection today, thanks to Netflix! Miss Mitchell toyed with the idea in 1940, while experiencing all the disruption of normal life World War II caused in Great Britain. Speaking of a horrid book, Faintley Speaking (1954, #27), qualifies, being a childish spy thriller. But even that book has a great beginning, featuring the impecunious would-be-published novelist Mandsell, who is out in the rain after defaulting on his "supper and bed and breakfast” for six weeks.
Several of Miss. Mitchell’s books draw on her knowledge of life in schools and convents. An early work of this sort is St. Peter’s Finger (1938, #9), where a younger and less mannered Mrs. Bradley resides for a while in the convent where, in late March, she is called to discreetly investigate the death by drowning of a thirteen-year-old girl. The book is appealing to me for its meticulous detailing of the lives of the nuns who run the convent and teach there. Their work goes on well beyond instruction hours. Mother Patrick grafts fruit trees, Mother Simon-Zelotes talks to Mrs. Bradley about "negroid characteristics as a Mendelian dominant”. Mother Saint Cyprian embroiders book-bindings by lamplight. Old lay-sister Catherine’s "thoughts were lost in the wide and echoing halls of dim-lit memory”. Mrs. Bradley looks at the nuns during their Recreation Hour as they sit around a highly polished table and mend or darn by candlelight before the De Profundis bell at nine at night. A fire burns in the fireplace.
“With keen pleasure, and seated in the shadows, she watched them, aware of a faint nostalgia, aware of sadness and a most curious feeling of envy”. The nuns have something that Mrs Bardley, fortunate in every way though she is, recognizes is missing in herself.
In The Worsted Viper, written five years after St. Peter's Finger, too, Miss Mitchell suddenly peers inside Mrs. Bradley's saurian skull:
[Observing Jonathan and Deborah while the motor cruiser O’Reilly chugged along at 5 Knots, south on the river Ant for its junction with the Bure near Saint Benet’s Abbey] "Thinking of tonight,” said Mrs. Bradley, half to herself; and a feeling almost of envy came into her mind; envy of youth, its crude passions, its neglected opportunities; its self assurance; its creed that, since tomorrow never comes, it is idle to prepare for tomorrow, idle to envisage it, idle to take up arms against it or defend oneself against its threatening claims.” And, in spite of what Miss Mitchell wrote immediately after these lines to erase them, they don't get erased.
St. Peter's Finger also drops two interesting details about Mrs. Bradley’s personal life. She was homeschooled by her father and "We merely learned to read, and not to lose our tempers when we argued.” (However, there’s room for confusion here, because in other books we meet Mrs. Bradley's schoolmates Marie Hopkinson and Mabel Parkinson. And in The Devil at Saxon Wall, Mrs Bradley alleges that she went to school with the Chief Constable's mother some sixty years ago!)
Also, not barrister Sir Ferdinand Lestrange, but her son by her second marriage is the apple of Mrs. Bradley’s eye. That son is an expert on tropical disease and spends most of his time in southern India.
Convent on Styx 1975, #49 is set at Little Deepening, near Bristington. It's a different book in mood from the 1938 one. The spite of the anonymous letters overwhelms these nuns.
Several books are either set in or have vivid sketches of boys’ schools. Tom Brown’s Grave (1949, #22), Here Comes a Chopper and No Winding Sheet are examples.
Death at the Opera (1934, # 5) is partly set is an experimental coeducational day school, the Hillmaston Coeducational Day School, in posh, quiet Hillmaston. In this book, as in other early ones in the series, we hear Mrs. Bradley thinking through cases. Miss Mitchell constructs a baffling mystery with a chilling link to the seaside town of Bognor Regis. The characters are strongly etched, for example, the liberal, hobby-horse-riding headmaster Mr. Cliffordson. Love and sex, or sexual desire, outside marriage, for the young as well as for those approaching middle age, are mused on. Married love presents a contrast: History master Kemball, on the threshold of fatherhood for the third time, "was not as well-dressed as the other masters Mrs. Bradley had already interviewed and had the harassed appearance of all middle-aged men whose family responsibilities are still widening but whose salaries have already reached the maximum”. The exception is the newly married Reverend Noel Wells (of The Saltmarsh Murders (1932 #4), whom Mrs. Bradley meets again, by chance. The motive of the first murder is revealed unfeelingly at the very end. This was a time when I did not agree with Mrs. Bradley's response to a murderer. In The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1932, #2) as well, Mrs. Bradley glosses over the cover-up after the brutal deed.
Villains and crazies are tucked away in communities, rural and urban, where ordinary people live their lives.
The friendless Miss Calma Ferris, the “thoroughly inoffensive” lower-form arithmetic mistress (Death at the Opera) has nowhere to go for the Christmas holidays, having given up a jaunt for the altruistic reason of financing the school’s production of The Mikado. She settles on Bognor Regis, where she has an aunt. She tells herself:
"One would be able to return to school, and explain, if one were asked, that one had been "doing” the Sheila Kaye Smith country, or the Belloc country, or "the Puck of Pook’s Hill” country.“
Miss Phoebe, who keeps her bedroom clock twelve minutes fast in memory of the apostles (The Devil at Saxon Wall), was reading Hedda Gabler on the night of a murder at Neot House. Candles don’t come out of Housekeeping for the spinster sisters Harpers.
The farmer’s wife in Here Comes a Chopper "buys her boy’s boots off motorists” who must use the farmyard to turn round after reaching a dead end. The farm gate is opened for a shilling.
Mr Townshend, who umpires at cricket matches at Bruke (The Echoing Strangers) and is "a really nice man”, according to Mrs. Bradley, adds footnotes to his observations, orally. He is a retired schoolmaster who is now his own carpenter, joiner, and handyman. He retrieves pieces from old houses up for demolition, mantelpieces, paneling, doors, and tiles, at a low price.
The Maidstons’ foster-child Clive Topley (Adders on the Heath) is a stunning creation, a "repellent” but strangely pathetic child, more memorable to me than Hamish Gavin in this book.
Vicar Broom of The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop) is still going about pocketing small objects in Death at the Opera. He takes the "little red-enameled clock from the hall table” at the Stone House, Mrs. Bradley’s home on Wandles Parva, in Hampshire, much to the indignation of Célestine who exclaims: "He puts it into his pocket and goes to promenade himself.”
I think a reader of Miss Mitchell’s books must be patient and attentive, to enjoy her edgy creativity and her boundless curiosity about her world and the world. She or he must also truly believe that this author was not racist at all. These books were written over 50 years of the last century, and through World War II and real-time changes up to 1983. All kinds of derogatory and pejorative expressions linger in them, tropes and stereotypes used, mercifully, mostly by the characters. However, even Mrs. Bradley and Laura think nothing of using the ugly phrase "...-in-the-woodpile", even as late as 1977. I am sure that if the broad-minded Miss Mitchell didn't stop using the expression, she probably was holding up a mirror to her society. We may not understand Mrs. Bradley, but Miss Mitchell did not hide. She was a robust and irreverent humanist. She didn't sanitize her environment. Her work was inclusive, and had characters of all skin colors, including a Parsee, a Japanese, an African American and a Maltese nun. She quoted Tagore and mentioned the war contribution of Gurkhas. All the same time, you need to know that such expressions are used in the books.
In Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982, #62), which is rather a boyish yarn, Laura remembers, at the start of the book, taking her son Hamish to Castle Holdy one afternoon when he was nine. Later, Laura and Dame Beatrice drive out to Holdy Bay. Laura sees the castle keep from a distance. "It stood out, a melancholy but dignified shell, on top of the hill she remembered from years back. She returned to the car and said, before she backed it carefully on to the narrow road, "Hamish is going on for thirty now.”
"Eheu! Fugaces labuntur anni,” said Dame Beatrice, "True, but how sad! One feels with the poet:
“Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.”
Yeah, we remember a time when Laura's mother packed her suitcases!
But let's follow the passage that I just quoted for just a second:
"They drove on in silence. There were banks with their tall, summer grasses, birdsfoot trefoil, horse-shoe vetch, scabious, purple milk vetch, ragged robin and ox-eye daisies, and on the hedges, which had been left untrimmed, there was wild clematis. Blackberry bushes were in flower and, at one place, there was a copse of hazels.”
Driving on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 2016, just after finishing a Mrs. Bradley book, I caught sight of a sign for "Carteret Rahway”. I smiled. Carteret Training College, in England, is where Laura went (her mother packed her suitcase), and where she made lifelong friends, and "Carteret" keeps cropping up in the Mrs. Bradley series. I felt "the great Gladys” said hi from heaven.
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