Catching up with Gladys

Gladys Mitchell seems to have been a fairly constant companion to me over the past few months (with the result that I am now on a first name basis with her), so I have some catching up to do here.

The Greyladies reprint of Gladys Mitchell's one career/school story had been on my TBR shelves for at least a couple of years. I would say I can't imagine what took me so long to get to it, but actually I can imagine only too well. Other books got in the way, of course.

But I'm glad I finally made time for it, as it proved to be quite entertaining. It follows two girls (young women, really), Lesley Scott and Frankie Allinson, during their three years at the Falcons Physical Training College. As the book covers all three years, as well as the beginning of the girls' careers after they've finished the program, the pace is understandably brisk. I could have wished, for example, for more about the girls' visit to Norfolk; Mitchell particularly excels at providing armchair travel to her readers, and I would have welcomed a whole chapter or two about Norfolk, not to mention a bit more about the trip the girls make to Greece later in the book. But it's clear that Mitchell was having to limit herself a bit to the focus of a career story.

On Your Marks does feature some mildly mysterious happenings, such as the draining of the school swimming pool and the shifting of planks across a stream during a foot race. Not quite at the Mrs Bradley level, but pleasant enough. And there's plenty of Mitchell's other great love, sports, though the descriptions of competitions are brisk enough that they didn't even bore a complete sports curmudgeon like myself. And there's just the suggestion of a budding romance by the end of the book…

All in all, it's energetic and humorous, and as tightly paced as one would expect from the glorious Gladys.

Although, having said that, perhaps I should qualify it and say "as tightly paced as one would expect from Gladys at her best." Because among the nine Mitchell mysteries I've read in the past few months, I've come across a few for which "tightly paced" is not the expression that first comes to mind.

I should hasten to say that my choice of Mitchell titles has been governed lately by a certain neurosis of mine, which came into play as I approached the halfway mark in reading Agatha Christie's titles as well. I started gravitating toward what were generally considered lesser titles, so I could save the best ones for last (or at least read them sparingly). A faulty logic, no doubt, but one I don't seem to be able to resist, and one that occasionally brings surprises.

If my count is correct, I've now read 26 of Mitchell's 66 Mrs Bradley novels. It might seem premature to be fretting about running out of them, but at the rate I've been reading, the 40 remaining books don't look like lasting more than three or four more years. Oh dear. Add to that that when I began reading Mitchell I gloried in her earliest, zaniest books, with the result that my supply of early Mitchells (overall her best period, by most standards) is in even more danger of running short. Which explains why I have been gravitating primarily to her later books of late, and a couple of earlier books that have had mixed reviews among fans.

The biggest surprise in the bunch was Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982), the sixth to last of the Mrs Bradley books. Having read The Death Cap Dancers (1981) a couple of years back and being rather underwhelmed by it, I let Gloria Mundy languish on my shelves for a long while after finding it at a book sale. It ranks 57th on Jason Half's ranked list of the Bradley books (see here—Jason's website has long been my Gladys Mitchell Bible), but I think it will rank considerably higher for me, should I ever manage to come up with a complete ranking of my own. The ending is a bit anticlimactic, and it lacks the morbid daftness of the early novels, but what I loved is that it's a marvelous travelogue of some smaller villages, churches, barrows, and other fun locales in England. It's a book I wanted to sink inside and live in for a while. It's true that Mrs Bradley doesn't appear as much as one might wish, but the young writer who is featured is perfectly adequate to keep things moving along. It's not one of Mitchell's eccentric best, to be sure, but a quite enjoyable mid-range title.

After Gloria Mundy I became irrationally convinced that Mitchell's late work was just seriously underrated and I would surely enjoy all of it just as much. Ummmm, right.

I turned, then, full of delusional optimism, to Uncoffin'd Clay (1980), another book sale find also left languishing on my shelves for a couple of years. This one ranks dead last on Jason's list, and close to the bottom of most of the other readers' lists he includes on his site. I'm not certain it will be last for me, since I am still harboring a powerful (and perhaps irrational, I admit) grudge against The Longer Bodies, but it will certainly be close. It's a slow, rather lifeless mystery, which doesn't even make much use of Mitchell's flair for local color and interest in historical sites. There's far too much chewing over clues, and Mrs Bradley is largely absent or inactive, making this a distinctly lesser entry in the series.

Another of my recent reads is the only other Mrs Bradley I've read so far that might compete with Clay as my least favorite. Adders on the Heath (1963) shares many characteristics with Clay; here are my original notes:

Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. One of the least action-oriented of Gladys' novels, and not even effective for armchair sightseeing. Although the setting is the New Forest, there is even little description or exploration of that locale. The murder and the motive are far-fetched, which I can handle, but in this case also thoroughly uninteresting. Laura's 10-year-old son adds some not-entirely-plausible entertainment value (Mitchell is excellent at portraying young boys), but he's not in it enough, and although Dame Bradley is present for most of the novel, all she does is chew over the clues endlessly. A lackluster performance, for sure.

Jason ranked this on 64th out of 66, so we're in sync here too. (Though I do have to keep repeating that, if you're a true fan, even a weak Gladys Mitchell is better than anything by most other authors.) 

He actually ranked Fault in the Structure (1977) a bit higher, and I think I do too, just slightly, though my comments seem pretty consistent:

Endless chewing over of details, Mrs Bradley often absent from the scene, and little or no local color. It's strengthened a bit only because it's use of an amateur theatre production is moderately entertaining. It also has a very unusual structure (perhaps the title refers to the novel itself as well as to a method of murder?), without much real investigation apart from Laura and Mrs Bradley chewing the fat.

Well, at least I've got several of the weakest Mrs Bradleys out of the way…

Although Faintley Speaking (1954) also ranks near the bottom for Jason, it places a bit higher for me. Indeed, it was a frustrating book precisely because it started out so well. A schoolmistress who may also be a spy, a man receiving an anonymous message by mistake in a public phone booth, and an entertaining teenage boy saddled with his least favorite teacher on a holiday outing. If the second half had offered half as much, Faintley could well have ranked among my favorites. But alas, it petered out, despite a completely random trip on Mrs Bradley's part to the Lascaux cave paintings in France (which was at least reminiscent of the random occurrences in some of her best early mysteries). As a result, it ends up splat in the middle range of all the Mitchell's I've read.

Also somewhere in the middle, and also not living up to its considerable potential, is Brazen Tongue (1940). Oh my. You would think that with a well-utilized wartime setting, this one would score very highly with me, but it turned out to be another of Mitchell's "talky" mysteries, in which Mrs Bradley seems lethargically prone to chew over the details (many of which, in this case, still make little sense to me—it's a complicated plot, to say the least) instead of doing anything. I was also surprised to find a burst of anti-Semitism here, which seems anomalous in Mitchell's work and which took away points for me (apart from being intensely irritating for practical reasons, as the Jewish character speaks in a bizarre dialect that I could barely follow, not equating to the procunciation of any human I've ever spoken with!). But the details of life during the Phony War are worth the price of admission, and the stuffiness of Mrs Bradley's former sister-in-law, Lady Selina Lestrange, adds to the entertainment. Dame Gladys herself apparently had a very low opinion of Tongue, calling it "a horrible book". It's not as bad as all that, but I wonder if her strong feelings about it were inspired by the realization of how great it might have been had it lived up to its potential?

Finally, I read My Father Sleeps (1944), which I enjoyed quite a lot. I somehow forgot to make notes on this one at the time, but I remember being rather bewildered by the mystery itself—lots of appearances and disappearances of characters and victims, bait-and-switch elements, etc. (I seem to have been confused by a lot of these novels, so maybe the problem is me?) However, I also remember finding it entertaining, and the Highlands setting provides some good armchair sightseeing. It's not an absolute favorite because it's neither so zany that I don't care at all about making sense of it all and am just along for the ride, nor coherent enough for me to feel I've got a handle on it, but nevertheless quite a pleasant mid-level entry.

What a nitpicky summary of my Mitchell reading this has been! But all is not lost, because I was also quite surprised by reading the first two entries in Mitchell's Timothy Herring series, written under the pseudonym Malcolm Torrie. Happily, most of these six books have also been released in e-book format by the same company that released the Mrs Bradley books (though they seem to have, quite inexplicably, failed to make the fourth, Churchyard Salad, available, in the U.S. at least—what on earth is the deal with that?!?!)

The Timothy Herring books make an interesting comparison with the Mrs Bradley books. There's no question that Mitchell is and should always be better known for the latter, but the former do have redeeming qualities. Herring is the well-to-do secretary of—and, in large part apparently, the funding behind—an organization dedicated to the restoration of historic sites. Which means that he tends to travel around to historic churches and intriguing villages, shedding historical knowledge along the way, and which also means that the series (at least the two I've books I've read so far) partakes considerably of Mitchell's own interest in and knowledge the English countryside and her skill at sharing that knowledge. For that reason, the books are right up my alley.

That said, the mysteries are perfectly adequate, if not as sophisticated and lively as the best of the Mrs Bradleys. (On the other hand, the rather more straightforward, mellow tone might appeal to those readers for whom the eccentricities of the Mrs Bradley books are a negative.) But they are their own thing, and based on my enjoyment of Heavy as Lead (1966) and Late and Cold (1967), I'll be a fan of the whole series, and may well enjoy periodic rereads of them. Though, terrible thought, that means there are only four more of this series for me to read. Something else to feel anxious about…

Okay, I know there are many other GM fans out there. How do my reactions to these compare with yours?

Book report: Mysteries and the Chalet School

Not "Mysteries at the Chalet School," mind you, which would no doubt be an exciting post (possibly more exciting than this one). This post is, in fact, to rectify my laxness in reporting on some of my recent reading. In truth, I'm not sure it can be called laxness, as it's largely the result of spending much of the past couple of months wearing my new publishing cap and getting to finally announce the titles we're releasing (see here if you missed it). 

I'm behind on writing about several books I've read lately, including one that was rather exciting, but since I focus so much on this blog on really obscure books that many of you may not have a chance to read, I decided that my next non-publishing post should be focused on books many of you may have actually read. Just for a pleasant change of pace. And most of those, lately, have been either mysteries or Chalet School books. Hence the title.

Much of the mystery reading of late was inspired by my loot from the most recent book sale. I recently finished my fourth NGAIO MARSH novel of the past few weeks, and I've made an interesting (well, to me) discovery about my biases. I think because for so long the only mystery author I really read was Agatha Christie, and because there are such differences between early Agatha, middle Agatha, and late Agatha (with the late books pretty definitively her lesser achievements, at least in my opinion), I have tended to assume, for no good reason at all, that the same differences apply to Marsh's work. (There are few mystery writers so prolific over the same decades-long periods, so there aren't many other authors I could apply such assumptions to.)

At any rate, judging from Killer Dolphin (1966) and Dead Water (1963), such assumptions should go out the window. Far from being inferior late works à la Elephants Can Remember or (ugh) Passenger to Frankfurt, these have enormously entertaining casts of characters and highly intriguing situations. I picked up Killer Dolphin just to sample the first page or two, and a couple hours later was halfway through it—Andy thought I must have fallen asleep, I was so intently silent.

Killer Dolphin flaps

In short, Dolphin centers around theatre director and manager Peregrine Jay (who reappears in Marsh's final novel, Light Thickens) salvaging and renovating an old Blitzed-out London theatre, producing a play about Shakespeare's son Hamnet, who famously died tragically young. In the process, he comes across a glove apparently made for Hamnet by Shakespeare's father, which goes on display in the renovated theatre, until a man guarding the exhibit is brutally murdered and the glove stolen. Suffice it to say that the opening, in which Jay explores the run-down theatre and tumbles into a flooded hole in the stage and nearly drowns, will tend to suck you in and make it difficult to stop reading.

Dead Water flaps

Dead Water has a similarly-intriguing situation, set on a tidal island on which a lovely woman in green appears in a vision to a young boy, instructing him to bath his hands in a spring, after which his embarrassing warts are miraculously healed. The quiet island is transformed into a tourist destination for visitors with maladies of all sorts, until the elderly owner of the island dies and her eccentric (but strangely likeable) sister decides to shut down all this rank commercialism. Resentment, infighting, murder, and mayhem follow, and it's all great entertainment.

Of course, if your taste in mysteries lies more in the puzzle and procedure than in the characters and events, then you may not think these two books are any great shakes. You might prefer Vintage Murder (1937) or Enter a Murderer (1935), which I also read recently and which are much more focused on puzzles and investigations. Both are entertaining, both also have theatre settings (one of Marsh's particular interests), but they're also more meticulously focused on the hows and whys and lots of speculation about possible scenarios, which for me is less entertaining than interesting characters. And Vintage Murder contains, for those keeping track, yet another strikingly implausible method of murder…

[I have to add here that, in doing some Google search or other to find information for this post, I came across this site, which consists of a bibliography, made by one Helene Androski, of Golden Age mystery novels, and which I know many of you will enjoy. But I mention it here because it revealed to me that there is in fact a term for the kind of puzzle- and explication-centric mystery novels that tend to put me to sleep. Apparently, Julian Symons, a prominent mystery writer himself, coined the term "humdrum school" to describe "a style where a complicated puzzle plot predominated at the expense of character development, realism, or interesting dialogue." Well, there you have it! And if such a prominent figure found such novels humdrum, I will no longer apologize for my preference of character and dialogue over clever puzzles. Though perhaps I don't prioritize realism as highly as Symons did—see next paragraph...]

Speaking of eccentric characters taking priority over the puzzle and the investigation, my reading of GLADYS MITCHELL's The Twenty-Third Man (1957) reminded me why I love Mitchell and the glorious Dame Bradley so much (and why some mystery fans don't feel the same). It has a daft plot about a Spanish island with a famous cave containing 23 mummified bodies, which during Mrs. Bradley's stay become 24, then 23 again, but maybe 24, or something like that. It's nonsense, and no one would think of committing or concealing a murder in such a way, but Mitchell's novels make such a wonderful mockery of realistic murders (and, for that matter, realistic investigations) that I couldn't have cared less. There's a highly-entertaining example of a monster child who turns out to be quite likeable (after a bit of Mrs. Bradley's tough love), an array of other suspicious folk, a past murder still haunting the present, and the delightfully creepy cave with its sundry corpses. I've already forgotten who did it and why, but I've rarely had such fun turning pages.

I've also recently read three of the mysteries picked up at the recent book sale—The Murders of Richard III (1974) by ELIZABETH PETERS, Johnny Under Ground (1965) by PATRICIA MOYES, and Malice Domestic (1986) by MOLLIE HARDWICK. The Peters, of course, was picked up out of a yearning for something half as good as Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time, also concerned with Richard III's status as a murderer or not, and it certainly was half as good (which, by comparison to a Josephine Tey, is really quite good, so perhaps I'll give some of Peters' other books a try). The Hardwick was, as a couple of you warned me, an odd one—all the hallmarks of a cozy mystery but with a surprising darkness around the edges. I picked up three books in the series at the book sale, and I liked this one enough to try a second, but I haven't felt compelled to rush onward with the series quite yet.

Rounding out the mysteries I've read recently, you may already know I'm a fan of Patricia Moyes, and Johnny Under Ground is a particularly entertaining one of her books. My favorite element of this series is really the relationship between series detective Henry Tibbetts and his wife Emmy, who are both realistic, flawed, but completely likeable characters, and a particular strength of this title is that it centers around Emmy's wartime experiences (based on Moyes' own time in the Radar Section of the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force). It's partly a retrospective mystery, dealing with the mysterious apparent suicide of Emmy's old RAF pilot flame, and I sometimes find retrospective mysteries a bit dry. Indeed, the mystery here is not particularly stunning for hardcore puzzle fans (or should I say fans of the humdrum school). But despite that, and partly because of the war interest (I've now added Moyes to my war list on the basis of this title), I found this one quite enjoyable.

Transitioning from murder mysteries to Chalet School books isn't easy (have any of the modern authors writing continuations or connectors of these stories ever thought to write a murder mystery for the Chalet girls to solve, I wonder???), but it's also been a while since I've mentioned any of my reading of school stories and I know that some of you are big fans.

Almost a year ago now (unbelievably), I wrote a post (see here) about reading the first two volumes of ELINOR M. BRENT-DYER's immortal series. You would think that in that year I would have managed to progress at least halfway through all the 60+ volumes, wouldn't you? But alas, you would be underestimating the schizophrenic nature of my reading habits. In fact, I have now progressed through exactly four more of the books, though I am enjoying them no less for averaging only one per quarter.

I have to admit one of the four was read totally out of order. When Girls Gone By reprinted The Chalet School Reunion (1963), in which many of the earliest Chalet girls, now grown-up and with widely-varied lives and adult concerns, gather at Jo's home for a weekend, I knew I could never wait to read it in its proper order. And indeed, its combination of a school connection with a group of grown women chatting and commiserating and (in Grizel's case) recovering from heartbreak and illness (not to mention a couple of harrowing experiences without which it wouldn't be a Chalet School novel) proved irresistible to me, and I gobbled it all up with pleasure. I assume that, as I think Jo continues to figure prominently in these books long after she is grown, the later volumes in the series must all have some degree of more grown-up content, right? Are there (I ask those of you who are experts on the series) other volumes that have a particular focus on Jo's or other former Chalet girls' adult lives?

But I also still love the early books, and I very much enjoyed The Princess of the Chalet School (1927), The Head Girl of the Chalet School (1928), and The Rivals of the Chalet School (1929). Perhaps I'm just particularly fond of Grizel, because my clear favorite of these was Head Girl, which also focuses much of its attention on her. There's also a lot of travel in that book, and I always love vicarious tourism (almost as much as the real thing, and more so when getting lost in a cave is part of the itinerary). I have a feeling that some of those sections were the ones that were cut or edited in the original paperback versions, so I'm glad I managed to get hold of a Girls Gone By edition of it.

In Head Girl, too, we get a glimpse of Jo's beginnings as an author, which is always entertaining for what it suggests about Brent-Dyer's own ideas about fiction-writing:

'I say, Jem, I've nearly finished my story! The only thing I can't decide is what to do about marrying them.'

'Aren't you going to marry them?' asked Madge, who had been privileged to read the first part of this tale. 'Oh, I think I should, Joey. What else do you want to do with them?'

'I could kill "Raymonde" off,' said Jo. 'Then "Adelaide" could—could—'

'Well? Could—what?' demanded Jem.

'Go into a convent?' suggested Grizel.

'Of course not, idiot! She's not a Catholic!'

'Marry them, of course,' said Madge. 'Don't make them unhappy, Jo! Even if it's only a story, let them end up all right.'

'Lots of stories don't,' argued Jo as well as she could for a mouthful of cake. 'Look at A Tale of Two Cities, and The Old Curiosity Shop, and The Mill on the Floss.'

'It requires genius to write a tragedy, Jo,' said her brother-in-law. 'I grant you that Dickens and George Eliot got away with it; but nothing is worse than the mawkish rot that some people write.'

And finally, I don't usually think of the Chalet School books as being particularly uproariously funny, though they may often bring a smile to one's face. But I can't resist sharing this giggle-worthy passage from early in Princess, when Elizaveta is falling asleep while fantasizing about finally getting to go to the Chalet School:

Elisaveta lay very still and watched [Nurse], turning over in her mind all that she had been told and all the splendid time that was coming to her. It seemed too wonderful to be true.

Then she knew that it was; for she was there already, and was assuring a quite serious headmistress that she never went on a lake with other girls unless they had an elephant in the boat.

A great mental image, the elephant seated cheerfully, in an impeccable school uniform, in the boat with Jo and Elizaveta and perhaps the Robin.

So that's all the Chalet School reading I've done for now, but I'm pretty certain there will be more before long. I've been keeping my eyes peeled for affordable copies of the out-of-print Girls Gone By editions of later series titles—especially those that were most egregiously slashed and abridged in the original paperbacks. And I've had a bit of luck…

Plenty to keep me busy for a while!

Recent Reading: The Great Gladys

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.