Death and the
Maiden (1947)
1947 Michael Joseph blurb:
The
great detectives of fiction are men of varied and brilliant
gifts—Chief Inspector Alleyn, Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule
Poirot, Albert Campion and their peers—but in this
glittering company Gladys Mitchell’s famous Mrs. Bradley,
‘the greatest of women detectives’ as she has been
called, is well able to hold her own. ‘Mrs. Bradley is a
lovely ancient dame,’ wrote John O’London’s
Weekly, reviewing one of her recent cases, ‘bouncing
happily through crime with a will and a wit as deadly as a
snake’s tongue.’
In Miss Mitchell’s new story, Mrs. Bradley is at the top
of her form—as she certainly needed to be in the astonishing
tangle of crime which confronted her when an urgent summons from
an old friend took her to the Domus Hotel at Winchester. It all
began with a report of a water nymph alleged to have been seen in
the waters of the Itchen—a fantastic tale, but no more
fantastic than the murder of two boys and the whole fantastic
chain of crime which sprang from it, and far from enough to
defeat the unerring acumen of Mrs. Lestrange Bradley.
My review:
‘This
seems the place for naiads. It certainly isn't the spot for
two murders, is it? I do think Cathedral cities, and these
water-meadows, ought to be immune from horrors, and policemen,
and nasty little brutes like Tidson.’
‘…These
murders are not native to the place. They have been planted
here by the devil, or some of his agents.’
The blurb of Death
and the Maiden (1947) calls the plot an “astonishing
tangle of crime”—a description justified by the
events of one of Gladys Mitchell’s half-dozen masterpieces,
a tale at once witty, imaginative, original, and full of
incident. Yet this complexity—a veritable symphony of
complexity—seems neither cluttered nor convoluted, such is
the considerable skill with which the author unwinds her yarn.
The setting is the
cathedral city of Winchester, where a naiad has been seen in the
River Itchen (and is later heard to quote The Frogs of
Aristophanes—sheer Mitchellian genius), “which
ordinarily offered a habitat to nothing more sinister than
a pike, more beautiful than the grayling or more intelligent than
the brown trout”, a locale which Mitchell evokes with
her customary lyrical grace—and, “in a city which
harbours a naiad in a chalk stream, anything may happen”.
Edris Tidson, a retired banana-grower recently arrived from the
Canaries with his beautiful half-Greek wife Crete, and staying
with his cousin Priscilla Carmody and her niece Connie (much to
their discomfort, for Tidson is by way of being a parasite), is
much attracted by the idea of the naiad, and moves to the Domus
Hotel, Miss Carmody paying the bills for the four of them.
The characterisation of the four suspects is particularly sharp,
although, as Mrs. Bradley reflects, “the Carmody
household, comprising, as it did, the fantastic Mr. Tidson, the
astoundingly beautiful Crete, the discontented Connie and her
troubled, respectable aunt, appeared to have something more in
common with the surreal than with the real”.
Mrs. Bradley is
asked by Miss Carmody to vet Tidson, whom she believes to be mad,
and whom the natives of the Canaries feared as having the evil
eye—and finds herself in particularly strange territory,
even by Mitchell’s standards. Although Tidson is
clinically sane (if undeniably eccentric), Mrs. Bradley is
suspicious of Tidson’s interest in the naiad, feeling that “a
middle-aged gentleman of slightly eccentric mentality could cause
a naiad to cover a progressive multiplicity of actions, including
quite a number of sins. It was a fascinating field of
surmise, in fact, to work out what sins in particular the naiad
could help to screen”. Connie Carmody is disturbed
during the night by the squeaking ghost of a nun, which Mrs.
Bradley feels may have been created for human reasons (the hotel
porter, Thomas, a masterpiece of comic invention, argues that “hotels
are not made to be haunted. The guests, maybe, couldna
thole it. Ghaisties wadna come whaur they werena
welcome”), and which she believes may have entered
Connie’s room through that Mitchell trademark, the secret
passage.
A small boy is
found dead by the river, perhaps drowned by the naiad, perhaps
(as the police believe) murdered by one Potter, who found the
body, and with whose foster mother he was believed to be having
an affair. Miss Carmody differs, however, and, believing
Tidson to be guilty of the crime, asks Mrs. Bradley to begin her
enquiries, which she does in an absolutely superb way,
disquieting suspects left right and centre, and giving vent to
her customary eldritch cackle: “not a mirthful sound, and
Laura, who had learnt to regard it as a war-cry, looked at her
rather in the manner of stout Cortez regarding the Pacific”.
Laura Menzies (who meets and becomes engaged to Det. Insp. Gavin,
disguised for most of the story as an angler) and her two
friends, Alice Boorman (who discovers a second dead boy) and
Kitty Trevelyan, ably assist her, and, for once, the Three
Musketeers are an integral part of the story and not dragged in
for reasons of sentimentality. As her investigations
proceed, Mrs. Bradley finds herself “more and more
interested in the strange little man [Tidson]. His
potentialities, she felt, were infinite. She longed to ask
him, point-blank, whether or not he were a murderer, but she felt
that this would ruin their friendly relationship and defeat the
object of the question, which was, quite simply and
unequivocally, to find out the answer.” Her
suspicions are justified—Tidson’s guilt is suspected
early on, and stated halfway through; this is one of those
stories where the detective interest lies in piecing together
motive (Mitchell juggling several possibilities, including
practice makes perfect, gain, and revenge in the air) and method,
and in finding proof—of which there is plenty of
psychological proof, but “no material proof
whatsoever”, despite a plethora of sandals, black eyes
(a brilliant touch, this), rafts, wills, illegitimacy, secret
passages, and finger-prints. The problem is further
complicated by the suspicious behaviour of other characters,
especially Connie Carmody.
The ultimate solution to the mystery is particularly
ingenious: a devilishly subtle motive relying on bluff,
double-bluff and triple-bluff. Although all the clues to
the mystery are provided, it will be an intelligent reader who
finds the true solution before Mrs. Bradley chooses to reveal
it. Although every act is attributable by the end, and the
solution quite logical, there are a few points improperly
explained: why was the evidence planted when the individual in
question knew Mrs. Bradley had already searched the hole?
How did the Tidsons hope to make people infer that the dog had
been killed by a sadistic lunatic by throwing a boot into the
river? Why (and Jason Hall has already pointed this out in
his excellent review)
was Crete Tidson naked when drowned, why were her clothes hidden
in the river, and why was she placed in the river? There
are a few minor signs of carelessness: the boy’s age in the
paper on pp. 40 and 43; Connie’s whereabouts on pp. 75 and
76; and the victim’s name changing from Hugh to John Biggin.
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