Death at the Opera (1934)
The leitmotif of this Opera is death by drowning—"she sobbed and she sighed, Then she was thrown into the billowy wave, And an echo arose from the murderee's grave—'Oh, willow, titwillow, titwillow!'" Katisha is drowned at a school production of The Mikado, one of the teacher's mad wives is drowned at an asylum, and the trail leads to a sinister Brides-in-the-Bath type. There are really two stories here: The Mikado Murder Case, and the Brides in the Bath affair—both are linked by the mad wife's death. Katisha's death offers the most surprising solution, but the serial killer, George Bryan Cutler, is an interesting character, and nearly succeeds in removing Mrs. Bradley—rescued, at this stage, by Noel Wells. Critics have carped at the fact that the book is two cases instead of one, but the whole is so well-managed that it succeeds—the use of two separate murder cases would recur throughout Mitchell's books, most noticeably in The Twenty-third Man and Fault in the Structure, the latter of which owes something to this book.