Gladys Mitchell: A
Biography
It was in 1921 that she began her career as a teacher of English, history, swimming and games, teaching from 1921 to 1925 at St. Paul's School, Brentford, Middlesex; St. Ann's Senior Girls' School, Ealing, London from 1925 to 1939; the Senior Girls' School, Brentford, Middlesex from 1941 to 1950; and at the Matthew Arnold School, Staines, Middlesex from 1953 to 1961, where she wrote the annual school play, taught English and history, and coached hurdling. She retired from teaching in 1961, and wrote one novel a year for the rest of her life, working from her home near Wimborne in Dorset. She was the recipient of the CWA Silver Dagger in 1976 - an award for having written fifty first-class detective novels, with sixteen more to come. She was a member of the Detection Club, the P.E.N., the Middlesex Education Society, and the British Olympic Association. She died on the 27th of July, 1983. As might be expected, several of her books (e.g. Death at the Opera, Tom Brown's Body, Faintley Speaking) were set at schools.
So much for her professional career. It was as a writer of detective
novels that Mitchell achieved lasting fame - her books
starring the indomitable Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley,
psychiatrist
and witch, have been hailed as classics by the
leading critics of detective fiction.
Mitchell's themes were original: a mixture of witchcraft and the bizarre against a naturalistic background - her non-emotive prose enhancing the surreal effect of the whole, and adding a distinct flavour to her books. Impersonation and multiple murders often figured in the books, and there was very often an incongruous and ingenious incident in the tale which no other author could have thought of (or dared to use) - Everard Mountjoy's body in Speedy Death, the business with the cockerel and the witch in Tom Brown's Body, and the revenant in Here Lies Gloria Mundy - what Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan termed "productive idiosyncrasy" (When Last I Died, Hogarth 1983). Lunatics often appeared - either real or pretended - and, unlike many of her peers (e.g., Carr and Chesterton), the supernatural was never fully explained away at the end. In Mitchell's books there is an entire world depicted - a world of the real and the supernatural melded together.
The detection was done by Mrs. Bradley, using a mixture of psycho-analysis and witchcraft to find the killer. Mrs. Bradley also committed murder when the situation was justified - very often it was the humane thing to do.
Mitchell's view on justice was similar to Anthony Berkeley's: it is often more of a crime to let someone live than to murder them. Murders are committed by the detective, murderers escape from justice on Mrs. Bradley's command, or die. Only in a handful of novels are the killers actually arrested, and, if they are, they are often acquitted. Owing to the nature of the victim, the murderers are seen as benevolent philanthropists.
Critics have viewed her best books as being: The Saltmarsh Murders (1932), Death at the Opera (1934), St. Peter's Finger (1938), When Last I Died (1941), Laurels are Poison (1942), Sunset Over Soho (1943), The Rising of the Moon (1945), Tom Brown's Body (1949), The Devil's Elbow (1951), Watson's Choice (1955), and Spotted Hemlock (1958). To my mind, her best books are Speedy Death (1929), The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1929), The Saltmarsh Murders, Death at the Opera, The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935), Come Away Death (1937), When Last I Died, The Rising of the Moon, and Tom Brown's Body. Her golden period lasted from 1929 to 1953.
The critical response to Mitchell's work has been very favourable.
In
Britain she was one of the most famous of detective
writers, thought to be "scarcely less senior than Agatha Christie"
(Times Literary Supplement review of Say It With Flowers,
1961), "one of the half-dozen best detection writers in the country"
(Nicholas
Blake in The Spectator), "unrivalled in the detective field …
for
sheer unbridled imagination" (The New Statesman), and "a wittier
and more original writer than Sayers or Christie" (Patricia Craig in The
Guardian). Philip Larkin, C. Day-Lewis, Edmund Crispin and P. D.
James
considered her one of the greatest names in detective fiction - Larkin
wrote rave reviews of her books, viewing them as novels rather than
detective
fiction, and many of Crispin's novels were inspired by her work.
Despite
this overwhelmingly positive response, her books have not been much
printed
in America, and the majority of her books are out of print.