Watson's Choice (1955)
Blurb:
<>My review:
In this novel, the final Mrs. Bradley story, Gladys Mitchell indulges her taste for literary allusions by setting the tale at a Sherlock Holmes party—the host is the eccentric Sir Bohun Chantrey, a former patient of Mrs. Bradley's, obsessed with Sherlock Holmes, and now engaged to a governess whom he dislikes intensely. "The Woman" is found stabbed to death in a disused railway station in which The Hound of the Baskervilles was chained up...
The strength of the book lies not so much in the plot (not as interesting as her usual work—very mediocre, and not properly clued), but in the characterisation and setting.
The characterisation is excellent. Out of the five principal female leads, all but two are obsessed with marrying / divorcing for money—the exceptions are Mrs. Bradley and her secretary Laura Menzies, who is to be married in the spring (having been engaged for 8 years!). Dialogue is always first-class—richly humorous. The setting—the countryside surrounding Sir Bohun's mansion—is handled as only Mitchell can do it.
The plot, however, is not so good—the Sherlock Holmes party is well-managed, but the Holmesian aspects rapidly fade out and are replaced by humdrum investigations—not as interesting as the earlier Mitchell stories, those of the thirties and forties. The murderer does not come into the front of the story at all - he instead hovers in the background, never with any indications of his character (c.f. Tom Brown's Body, The Death of a Burrowing Mole).