When Last I Died (1941)
Like the classic ghost stories of M.R. James, to which this book is obviously an homage (“The Treasure of Abbot Thomas” is mentioned in a marvellously appropriate place), this book relies on under-statement to achieve its effects: a palpable sense of wrongness, of the supernatural, and of the bizarre. This is one of Mitchell’s masterpieces: innovative in form and approach, at once bizarre and realistic, inventively yet coherently plotted.
Mrs. Bradley is easily at the top of her form here: cynical and progressively-minded, and wonderfully perceptive throughout. She has shaken off her hooting / shrieking / prodding-people-in-the-ribs persona, and is more down to earth than in earlier novels, something When Last I Died—perhaps the most convincing and believable tale Mitchell ever wrote—requires. One cannot have a comic Mrs. Bradley in a story with such a disturbing solution as this one. Instead, she is serious, detecting “with a grimness strange to see upon her dread yet, on the whole, good-humoured countenance”. And such detecting!
Renting a house by the seaside—the previous owner, Great-Aunt Flora (surname unknown), having choked to death on grated carrot—Mrs. Bradley discovers what is supposedly the diary of Bella Foxley, Great-Aunt Flora’s niece, who was put on trial for the murder of her cousin, the psychical researcher Tom Turney, acquitted, and later committed suicide, drowning herself in the village pond of the village of Pond, Hampshire. As the diary’s “frankness, lies, evasions, and inventions made up such a curiously unintelligible whole”—the first instance of applied historiography in detective fiction, preceding Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs and Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time—Mrs. Bradley suspects that the diary is fake. This marvellously entertaining document, lasting one-quarter of the book, details the events leading up to the murder of Tom Turney, the haunted house—“a house with foundations very much older than the present superstructure…a house so damp that the water marks the walls”, with “voices from under [the] feet…bellows and screeches of laughter”, with its poltergeist who throws things and rings bells, its footsteps and music heard in the night, and its coach and horse, driven by a headless driver, rattling around the courtyard in the middle of the night—superbly described. Suspecting that there is more to the Bella Foxley situation than meets the eye, Mrs. Bradley delves into the past, interrogating servants, doctors, reporters, and jurors; reading newspaper articles and the memoirs of the prosecuting counsel; and renting the haunted house from its owner, Bella Foxley’s sister Tessa, ostensibly to hold séances, but really to investigate the “poltergeist” activity she believes to be crucial to the solution of the case. By the end, the reader firmly under her spell throughout, Mrs. Bradley has worked out the links between the poltergeist activity, the disappearance of two delinquents from the reformatory at which Bella Foxley was employed, the choking of Great-Aunt Flora, the murder of Tom Turney, the suicide in the village pond, and the diary; has made a particularly gruesome and stomach-churning discovery in the cellar (another triumph of understatement); and has caught the supremely nasty villain, one of Mitchell’s most rounded murderers, in an elaborate trap at the haunted house.
The plot and telling are both superb, but the icing on the cake is the style. There are eleven chapters in the novel (all with particularly apt chapter quotations which only make sense in hindsight): ten of which mirror each other (e.g., Chapters One & Eleven are “The Diary”, Chapters Three & Nine are “Counsel’s Opinion”), the middle chapter, Chapter Six, is “The Dear Departed”, tying in with the eerie title, and with the last line, “There really are such things as ghosts, and … occasionally they take a quite uncomfortable interest in human affairs”. A motif of food runs through the story: the opening line is “The lunch had consisted of sausage-meat roll, diced sewed and mashed potatoes; these covered with floury gravy and followed by tinned plums and custard”—particularly subtle when the reader knows the story, for food is invariably associated with death throughout the tale.
The only flaw in the story—and this is a very minor one—is Mitchell’s customary vagueness about details: the reader never learns Aunt Flora’s surname, and only learns the name of the haunted house on p. 181.