This
post is a rare confluence of my personal reading habits and some notable
publishing news (that's my excuse for its length, anyway, which is even more excessive
than my norm!). Typically I'm oblivious to publishing news—though I did intend to post on the ridiculousness
of the news stories (using that phrase loosely) a few weeks ago about the
“discovery” of Stella Gibbons’ two unpublished novels—you know, the ones
that her biographer described in depth in his bio of Gibbons…in the 1990s? One source even described them as “lost”
manuscripts, which could hardly have been the case unless her heirs had simply forgotten
which drawer they'd tucked them away in!
What next? Breaking news coverage
of radio listeners terrorized by a broadcast of “War of the Worlds”? But I digress (and overindulge in
sarcasm).
Ahem. As I was saying, rarely am I on the cutting
edge of publishing news. Typically, I
either miss it altogether or else I only cotton on to it six months after
everyone else considers it old hat, by which time blogging about it would seem
a bit passé.
 |
| The Great Gladys |
But
eureka! As it happens, my comfort
reading of the past couple of weeks has not only been greatly entertaining, but
has led me to a fairly timely discovery.
I am a
sporadic mystery addict. Usually—as,
perhaps, with most addictions—my mystery habit recurs at times of stress or
general malaise. At such times, there is
something about life-and-death situations and their clear resolution, combined
with the unique attention to everyday life that the genre requires and the
compelling, page-turning style that it ideally offers, that provides some odd kind
of solace.
Undoubtedly,
the writer I have turned to more than any other for this kind of solace (and indeed
often just for pure mindless entertainment) is Agatha Christie. I started to read her in my teens and I’ve
now read all but one of her novels (oh, why why why must Passenger to
Frankfurt be so impermeably dull?!) and most of her stories, as well as her
wonderful autobiography. Many of her
novels I’ve read multiple times (and I’ll confess right off that I can almost
never remember whodunnit, except in the case of her most iconic plots like Murder on the Orient Express or The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Sometimes I can even remember how the murder was done (as in the
ludicrously daft plot of Murder in
Mesopotamia), but still I can only rarely recall who committed it or why.
Apart
from Dame Agatha, my mystery reading of choice has included Josephine Tey,
Dorothy Sayers, Margery Allingham (though I need to read more of all three), and even such male writers (believe it or
not) as Cyril Hare and Edmund Crispin.
I’ve had the occasional lark with Dorothy Gilman’s Mrs. Pollifax,
a few laughs with M. C. Beaton here and there, and a long love affair with the
coziest of all modern mystery writers, Hazel Holt, whose Mrs. Malory books have
often proven irresistible after a stressful day (or week, or month).
But in
the past couple of weeks, as we have coped with the sudden loss of one of
Andy’s brothers, I happened, when feeling tired and sad and anything but
inspired, to pick up a Gladys Mitchell novel and fall effortlessly and
irretrievably into its pages. Then I
read another. And another. And yet another. (A rare occurrence for me, since I'm a reader
who tends to flit hummingbird-like from one author to another.) And I’ve absolutely fallen under her spell.
I’ve
read a handful of Mitchell novels over the past few years, and I’ve always
enjoyed them—particularly the eccentric, rather daft early novels like The Saltmarsh Murders and When Last I Died, which were reprinted a
couple of years ago by Vintage UK along with several other of her best-known
works. But somehow I never became
addicted to Dame Gladys as I have always been to Dame Agatha. But that may now have changed.
 |
My own cheesy paperback of Spotted
Hemlock; who on earth is the woman
in the photo supposed to be?!?! Certainly
not Dame Beatrice! |
Gladys
Mitchell—referred to by no less a figure than Philip Larkin as “the great
Gladys”—wrote 66 mystery novels under her own
name, all featuring the gloriously strange forensic psychiatrist Beatrice Adela
Lestrange Bradley (in later novels she becomes Dame Beatrice, surely a
deserved, if fictional, honor).
Intriguingly, Mitchell also wrote five historical adventure novels under
the pseudonym Stephen Hockaby in the 1930s, as well as six more mysteries under the pseudonym Malcolm Torrie in the late 1960s and early 1970s, none of
which seem to have ever been reprinted.
And finally, she wrote nine novels for children, mostly mysteries for
younger readers, but also including On
Your Marks, a girls’ career novel dealing with Mitchell’s own area of
expertise, physical education—which, happily, was reprinted by Greyladies last
year, and a copy of which, even more happily, is in my hot little hands.
And
let me point out that I did not, in fact, just mutter an incantation and become an authority on
a writer I had barely read until a couple of weeks ago. But you too can feel like an authority on
Mitchell if you consult Jason Hall’s amazing
website, which includes a cornucopia of information, book covers,
bibliographies, essays, and reviews on Mitchell’s many works. I keep getting distracted from writing this
post because there’s just so much on Jason’s site to enjoy.
Interestingly,
none of the four novels I’ve read in the past couple of weeks rank high on
Jason’s list of Mitchell’s best work.
Which—considering that I quite enjoyed all of them—may mean I will be
even more ecstatic as I continue to explore her other novels. Since Mitchell is a pretty widely-read author
and has many loyal followers online who know more about her than I do, I’m
going to make this a “recent reading” post with only general comments
about the four books I read, rather than actual reviews, and I'll follow that
with the actual bit of Mitchell-related news that I’ve just come across.
 |
Bio and younger photo from the Penguin
edition of Watson's Choice |
My
reading started with Spotted Hemlock (1958), which deals
with a body found at the girls’ agricultural school at which Dame Beatrice’s
nephew, a pig farmer, has been teaching.
The plot is gloriously strange, involving a missing student, a secret
marriage, a possibly ghostly figure riding a horse that is all too real (based
on its damage to the school’s kitchen garden), and the possibility that—despite
the body’s identification as the missing student by her own mother—the victim
might actually be someone else entirely.
Dame Beatrice travels to Scotland, southern Italy, and Northern
Ireland—seemingly random fact-finding missions that are little more than
excuses for commentary on the scenery and to keep the reader guessing
about the direction of Dame Beatrice’s thoughts. (The fact that I can never begin to follow a
logical progression of deduction and logic in Dame Beatrice's investigations is
one of the things I love about Mitchell's novels, but of course it might be an
annoyance to readers who expect to actually understand all the details of the
crimes and their solutions!)
The
girls’ school setting is an interesting one, especially since the girls here are
learning about pigs and crops and fertilizer and the like—hardly the Abbey
Girls or the Chalet School! Lyn at I
Prefer Reading recently reviewed another wonderful girls’ school mystery, Josephine
Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, and
mentioned her affinity for “closed society” mysteries—those set in schools and
convents and the like. I had never thought
to categorize them in that way, but I realized that it’s a very useful concept
and that I too—unbeknownst to myself—have long been a fan of closed society
novels of all kinds (in fact, see the fourth Mitchell title I read below).
One
thing that’s always fun about a Mitchell novels is its descriptions of
Dame Beatrice—regularly compared to crocodiles, witches, snakes, and even pterodactyls. And yet despite an appearance that takes strangers aback, I find her completely lovable in her
blithe acceptance of all sorts of human frailty and diversity, from insanity,
perversion, and violence all the way down to ordinary sex, jealousy, and fear,
and she has a charming tendency to refer to people as “my dear child,”
suggesting a nun-like serenity and compassion even in the face of a decomposed
corpse. In Spotted Hemlock, Dame Beatrice gets a memorable comparison to the
Ancient Mariner:
Basil, who had lowered his newspaper as soon as she had begun
to speak, crushed out his half-finished cigarette and looked ready to take
flight, but Dame Beatrice, emulating the Ancient Mariner, held him grounded as
though by some magic spell.
And
there’s always at least one reptile comparison:
“I certainly sympathize with your point of view,” said Dame
Beatrice, returning the grin with an alligator leer which appeared to startle
her companion.
I
found it difficult to put Spotted Hemlock
down, even with everything else that was going on in our lives, and when I
finished it I moved right on to The Death-Cap Dancers (1981), a very
late Mitchell picked up at a book sale a couple of years back. Jason and most other Mitchell fans seem to give
her late novels—which become less eccentric and more mundanely procedural—a low
ranking, but Jason also shares several other fans’ lists on his website and a
couple of them actually place Death-Cap
Dancers in their top five among Mitchell's works, which only goes to show that readers look for
and enjoy very different elements even in the work of a writer they all appreciate.
This
one is set in the realm of youth hostellers and vacation campers, and features
Dame Beatrice’s grand-niece Hermione Lestrange along with a folk-dancing troupe
that seems to be under attack from a killer who bashes victims’ heads and then
pushes a deadly mushroom into the wound.
Unfortunately, Hermione’s great-aunt doesn’t make an appearance until
page 126 of a 192 novel, which almost always seems to be the hallmark of any
great mystery writer’s lesser novels. (I
always wonder, if a writer is tired of their detective—which is certainly understandable—why
not create a new one, or write a non-detective novel? There’s at least one Christie mystery—They Do It with Mirrors, perhaps?—where
Miss Marple barely appears at all, and the novel is much the weaker for her
absence. On the other hand, there are
works like Crooked House, Murder Is Easy, and of course And Then There Were None which are great
novels without any of Dame Agatha’s usual detectives at all. So why would Mitchell write a Dame Beatrice
novel and then give Dame Beatrice little more than a cameo appearance? One wonders.
But I digress again.)
For
me, The Death-Cap Dancers was
readable but eminently forgettable. Except
perhaps for the murderer’s rather memorable sudden demise at the hands, er,
snouts, of a bunch of hungry pigs…
Despite
feeling lukewarm on that one, however, I went right into Watson's Choice (1955), which, it turns out, falls
right in the middle of all the readers' lists on Jason's website. Not too good, not too bad, would seem to be
the consensus. The reviewers on
Goodreads seem to veer a bit more to the negative in their assessments, but I
actually enjoyed it a lot. It is
admittedly a rather loosy-goosy mystery (which for me is a compliment but for
most Goodreads reviewers is apparently not) beginning with a Sherlock
Holmes-themed costume party at which a prank leads to the unplanned appearance
of the Hound of the Baskervilles. No
kidding. But only some time later do a
lot of seemingly unrelated events finally result in a murder loosely connected (I'm
not sure that I quite understand, even now, exactly how) to the dog involved in the
stunt.
It’s all
as quirky, odd, and disjointed as any of the Mitchells I've read, and the
Sherlock Holmes party adds lots of interesting trivia to the mix, cleverly
providing “clues” in multiple senses of the word. Plus, we get the wonderful Dame Beatrice and
her own entertaining “Watson”—her assistant Laura, here engaged to Inspector
Gavin, who also attends the party and investigates the murder—straight through
from beginning to end. The novel makes a
hilarious mockery of detective novel stereotypes, highlighted with some
subtlety in the clues to a Holmes contest held at the party, and more
explicitly when Dame Beatrice relays a message to Laura from Inspector Gavin:
He dined here last night and thinks the Gunter case is
breaking very nicely. They are pretty sure of a conviction. Once they had
interpreted correctly the clue of the dining-club tea-cloth, everything fell
into place. Good night, dear child. Sleep well.
Ah,
yes, the dining-club tea-cloth. Of
course. Elementary, my dear Watson.
Another
particular source of enjoyment in this novel is that Dame Beatrice's wide-ranging intellect
is on full display. She analyzes a
suspect's anxieties with reference to "that humane genius Sigmund Freud," and then, too, it seems that Mitchell must have been reading the work
of Gertrude Stein while at work on Watson's
Choice, as there are at least two references to her work. Stein's most obscure, experimental, and
befuddling works were just finally being published by Yale University Press in
the 1950s, and Mitchell must have been taking an interest. Early on, she has Dame Beatrice compare a
schizophrenic patient's ravings to Stein's work (a comparison which might not seem flattering, but which I bet Stein would have loved), and later one of the suspects,
Mrs. Dance, begins a distinctly odd and distinctly Steinian riff on a fellow
suspect's nickname:
'What is more, he hates Boo with an old-fashioned Mexican
hatred that would give me nightmares if I were in Boo's shoes. Boo's shoes,'
she repeated thoughtfully. 'It sounds like one of those novels where they make
up half the words. Boo's shoes, shoes boo the crowd, boos through Boo, shoos
away coos—I mean cows—oh, dear! How silly!'
It can
be no coincidence that one of Stein's most famous (and racy, once one realizes
what it's really about) works dealt prominently with cows. And given Stein's well-known affinity for detective novels, one can't help but wonder if Mitchell's earlier work might have made occasional appearances on Stein's bedside table?
Finally, as Dame Beatrice is beginning to reveal to Laura some of what she
knows about the solution of the case, she gets distracted into this wonderfully
random, yet wholly compassionate and intelligent meditation on Sodom and
Gomorrah:
'Well, I'm dashed!' said Laura. 'What don't you know?'
'Exactly what went on in the Cities of the Plain, child. Even allowing
for all the sources and idiosyncrasies of human behaviour which modern
psychology has laid bare, it is difficult to conceive of a state of things so
far removed from normal conduct that the cities had to be destroyed in so
uncompromising a fashion. One thinks of post-1918 Hamburg; one thinks of the
port of Suez; one thinks unutterable thoughts; and, after that, imagination boggles,
as the master of the comic novel has said.'
Perhaps
someday I'll share my own thoughts on the Cities of the Plain, but meanwhile this has to be one of my favorite Mitchell quotes to date...
After having so much fun with Watson's Choice, I recalled that had just lucked into a used copy of the now out-of-print Greyladies
edition of Convent on Styx (1975), and so I dived right in. This is another late Mitchell but one which,
for my taste, is much, much stronger than The Death-Cap Dancers. To prove that there's an exception to every rule, in this novel, too, Dame Beatrice doesn't appear until nearly the
halfway point, but here I found that a strength. (I know, I'm being inconsistent, but after
all, Emerson did say that foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little
minds, and even a middlebrow hates having hobgoblins dancing around in his
little mind!)
Dame Beatrice's absence early on works here because what we get
in that time is a wonderful picture of ordinary life in the convent at which
the murder will (eventually) occur—the little bitternesses, annoyances,
pleasures, and joys of this particular "closed society." This seems to be the real focus of the novel,
and I found it completely fascinating.
No wonder Greyladies chose it as the one Mitchell mystery they would
reprint (so far, at least). As a sample,
the narrative starts entertainingly but also poignantly with the somewhat embittered
Sister Wolstan:
Sister Wolstan had no real quarrel with her lot. Long enough
ago she had renounced the world (although one still had to live in it), the
flesh (although one still had to eat, drink, sleep and wash), and the devil
(although Sister Wolstan sometimes thought that it must be easier to oust him
from a reformatory than from a convent) and she was prepared to be humble and
meek, offering her meekness and her humility (and the rheumatism that had begun
to trouble her) upon the same altar on which so many years ago she had laid her
vows of poverty and chastity and her vow of obedience to her superiors.
Then
there is Sister Hilary, who "[i]n her unregenerate days … had led protest
marches, obstructed the police and had stood out for women's rights in a
militant, aggressive, troublemaking manner that had resulted in a most
disagreeable blaze of newspaper publicity and a threat of dismissal from her teaching
post." Most of the nuns are
presented with similar vividness, and the result is a portrait of convent life so
compelling that I almost regretted the murder and resulting investigation when
it finally occurred. The mystery itself
is rather run-of-the-mill, and the solution distinctly uninspired, so
those looking for a thrilling page-turner might want to look elsewhere. But as for myself, I have a feeling Convent on Styx will be one of my most frequent
Mitchell re-reads.
We
also get one of the best descriptions of the ageless Dame Beatrice (who, much like
Hercule Poirot, began her literary life elderly and remained timelessly old for
nearly sixty years thereafter) that I've yet come across:
Fennell saw a formidable old lady who could be anything between
seventy and ninety, small and thin, with sharp black eyes which he was
convinced would miss nothing and, having summed up what they saw, would regard
it with resignation and amusement. Apart from her costume, which was of a
particularly villainous shade of green topped off by a purple silk shirt-blouse,
other noticeable features were her yellow, claw-like hands, her shrewd, beaky
little mouth and the unnerving cackle with which she received his lighter
remarks.
How
could anyone not love such a figure?
Alas,
it seems that despite Mitchell's continuing popularity among a passionate group
of fans, all too many readers have been able to resist Dame Beatrice's witchy charms. The result being that until the
last few years most of her novels had lapsed out of print and been allowed to
languish.
But
that has now begun to change.
Rue Morgue Press began
the effort by reprinting a dozen or so of Mitchell's works. Then a couple of years ago Vintage UK published
a few more in snazzy new editions, and they've added
even more to their list in the past few months, so that they've now made available almost thirty titles in all.
And
finally, as I've poked around in the past week or two to see what other Mitchells
I might be able to find, I discovered that Thomas & Mercer,
an imprint of Amazon Publishing (who knew?), appears to be making many, many more Mitchells
available in e-book format. In fact,
though I haven't taken the time to check for every single title, it appears that by the end of
April, virtually all of Mitchell's Dame Beatrice novels will be available, and
(so far, at least) at the bargain price of $3.99 each. This includes numerous titles—such as the
World War II-era Sunset Over Soho and
Brazen Tongue—that have become scarce
or downright nonexistent.
And
all of this seems to have been a relatively recent development, as most of these e-books have appeared on Amazon just since I first searched a couple of weeks ago. Thus, for once, I am shockingly timely with this post. I'm also hopeful that a batch of new readers will now take the plunge into the great Gladys's odd, brilliant oeuvre.