B.A. Pike on Gladys Mitchell:
"In Praise of Gladys Mitchell"
1976 offers admirers of Gladys Mitchell double cause for celebration: Miss Mitchell herself has her 75th birthday, and Michael Joseph publishes her 50th detective novel, Late, Late in the Evening.
1. Biographical
Gladys Mitchell was born in the village of Cowley, near Oxford, in April 1901; she is of Scottish descent on her father’s side. Her early years were spent in Oxfordshire and Hampshire, but in 1909 her family moved to Middlesex, where she was educatd, at the Rothschild School, Brentford, and the Green School, Isleworth. She went on to Goldsmiths’ College and University College, London, qualifying as a teacher, and gaining an extra-mural diploma in European history.
She became a teacher, of English, history, and games, and though she found success as a writer, she remained in the teaching profession until her first retirement in 1950. Her first post was in a small C. of E. school, St. Paul’s, Brentford, where she stayed for four and a half years. She then taught at St. Ann’s Senior Girls’ School in Hnwell, remaining until the outbreak of war in 1939, specialising in history and athletics, and coaching, among others, a county hurdles champion in the mid-30s. After a year’s enforced absence from teaching owing to illness, she joined the staff of Brentford Senior Girls’ School, where, in addition to her usual history and games, she taught elementary Spanish, and where she remained until she retired in 1950.
After nearly three years of retirement, Miss Mitchell was invited to the Matthew Arnold County Secondary School for Girls to judge an inter-House gymnastics competition and to address the school. At the conclusion of her speech, the headmistress invited Miss Mitchell to join her staff the following term, and although she had had no intention of returning to teaching, the omens seemed favourable and she accepted the post offered her. In addition to teaching history and English, she wrote a number of plays for the girls to perform, including versions of the Greek legends of Theseus and Jason, the story of Jonah, and the Norse legends; an adaptation of The Frogs of Aristophanes; and a musical called Alice Again, based on the Lewis Carroll classics. Miss Mitchell finally retired from teaching in 1961, at the age of 60.
During her teaching career, miss Mitchell lived first in Brentford and then in Ealing, but on her retirement she moved to the country, to Corfe Mullen in Dorset, where she is able to pursue two of her principal interests, the investigation of pre-historic sites and the study of medieval architecture. She has long been an enthusiastic student of Freud; and she attributes her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the late Helen Simpson. Her membership of the British Olympic Association witnesses to her enduring interest in athletics.
Miss Mitchell wrote her first novel in 1923, but it was rejected, as were three others: in desperation, she tried her hand at a detective story, and the result was Speedy Death, which Victor Gollancz agreed to publish despite the fact that it “had every fault under the sun.” Since then, there have been forty-nine other detective novels to date, as well as the five novels which appeared in the Thirties under the pseudonym ‘Stephen Hockaby.’ Miss Mitchell was an early member of the Detection Club and contributed to one of the three concerted Club novels, Ask a Policeman (1934). She has also written nine novels for children, and a number of short stories, featured originally in The Evening Standard.
In 1966, under the pseudonym ‘Malcolm Torrie,’ she published Heavy as Lead and created a new detective, Timothy Herring, the Hon. Secretary of Phisbe, the Society for the Preservation of Historic Buildings. Five further Torrie novels have appeared to date, all featuring Timothy, latterly in collaboration with his wife, Alison.
Miss Mitchell also gave two radio talks, one, “The Plaid Bag,” about her teaching life, and the other, “Maps, Chaps & Murder,” about her writing methods.
2. Questions and Answers
Q.: Dame Beatrice, your detective, is a marvellous imaginative creation—how did she come about? Was it evolution or sudden total inspiration, pure invention or was she based on someone? Has she changed at all since 1929?
A.: Physically—that is to say, in appearance—Dame Beatrice is based on two delightful and most intelligent ladies I knew in my youth. Her mannerisms and costume and her formidable brains are entirely my own invention. When I began to write Speedy Death I had no intention of making her my detective. She simply “took over” and I became so superstitious about her that I would not dare to have another detective! I think she has changed a good deal since 1929, probably because I have changed too. She is much more mellow, I think, more sympathetic and kindly; also I have ironed out (I hope) her more irritating mannerisms. (I can understand why some critics don’t like her. Personally, I should hate to meet her in real life.)
Q.: Dame Beatrice has not effectually aged since 1929. How old did you imagine her to be in Speedy Death? Did you make a conscious decision at some stage to ignore the passage of time, or did it just happen?
A.: In Speedy Death I think I meant her to be about fifty-five years old, so I have had to ignore the passage of time in her case.
Q.: Have you ever become tired of her and tempted to invent another investigator? Was Laura perhaps a way of achieving this?
A.: No, I have never tired of her and Laura could never have taken her place. Laura is merely her Watson, as I found it necessary to have one. Laura is the kind of person I would like to be!
Q.: A newspaper article once claimed that you returned to teaching because your books deteriorated, and Penguin say you were bored without the constant stimulus of teaching. Are these statements true? If so, which books were you unhappy about, and which marks the return to teaching?
A.: The newspaper article is quite wrong. I know I have written some bad books, but I thought they were all right when I wrote them. I can’t bear to look at some of them now, but that certainly is not why I went back to teaching. Penguin is right, insofar as I missed the stimulus of teaching, and also, of course, my books have never made much money. The book which marks my return to teaching is Faintley Speaking.
Q.: Further to the previous question, were you really bored when not teaching? You seem an enthusiast for so many aspects of life that I can’t imagine this.
A.: No, of course I wasn’t bored when I was not teaching. Boredom is a curse which has never descended on me, thank goodness. I think I missed the daily self-discipline and the irritations of classroom work, and, in any case, I had to make up my mind in rather a hurry if I wanted the post offered me. Having said I would take it, I could hardly duck out later, and I am very glad the decision was forced upon me at such very short notice.
Q.: Which of your books do you dislike or consider sub-standard?
A.: The books I dislike most are Printer’s Error and Brazen Tongue—a horrible book—but there are others I'm not exactly proud of, and these are too many to mention.
Q.: Which of your books do you like best, apart from Laurels Are Poison, which you are on record as liking particularly, since it reminds you of your college days?
A.: Apart from Laurels Are Poison, I like best The Rising of the Moon, which recalls my Brentford childhood (I am Simon in that story and my adorable brother Reginald is Keith, and the same two children appear as Margaret and Kenneth in the fiftieth book, Late, Late in the Evening, which is about the two of us at Cowley before the motor works got there); and I also like A Javelin for Jonah, because it is about athletics and swimming; Winking at the Brim (I am a firm and fervent believer in the Loch Ness Monster), and Convent on Styx. My much younger sister is a Dominican nun, although we are not a Roman Catholic family, and she gave me the setting and most of the behind-the-scenes convent detail.
Q.: The imminence of Dame Beatrice’s fiftieth case suggests that your invention flows easily. Do you ever labour and grind away at a book, or do your ideas always come freely? Which book(s) was / were easiest to write? How long does a book take to write? Do you write or type them?
A.: I find every book difficult to write, partly because, even if I make a plan, I seldom keep to it. Then I am apt to get new ideas as I go along, and this often necessitates a certain amount of rewriting. I can’t think of any book which it was easiest to write, but I have, fortunately, immense powers of concentration and a single-track mind, so, on the whole, I suppose each book takes about seven months to write, but I do a great deal of revision and a certain amount of research as I go along. I write in longhand and send the MS. away to be typed. Then I make alterations to the typescript, so that means more typing. I can’t stand the sound of a typewriter, and can’t spell on a machine, either.
Q.: The Nine Stones of Winterborne Abbas—and may they be forever blessed—suggested The Dancing Druids to you. Did they do precisely that? Or did they fit in with an idea you already had? Can you think of any other starting-points like this? How do ideas suggest themselves?
A.: Yes, the Nine Stones did suggest the book. The setting often does. I also heard a child say ‘Soppy runner’ to a young man in a track suit (as at the opening of this same novel). In the same way, I once saw a boy dressed as I have described Simon in The Rising of the Moon, and I coupled this with a dirty little junk shop in Brentford high street, although there was no connection between the two things until I made one.
Q.: You are, as a novelist, a specialist in eccentric behaviour. Do your characters ‘take over’ and strike out on their own, or are you always fully in control of them?
A.: No, I am never in control of my characters. They do and say things I never intended.
Q.: Did you decided Dame B.’s profession before you read Freud or after? How great an influence (or source) was Freud for characters and emotional situations in your books?
A.: I had read some of Freud’s work before I thought of Mrs. Bradley, but Freud has no influence, so far as I know, on my characters.
Q.: You were a member of the Detection Club (a founder-member?), but do not, I think, belong to the Crime Writers’ Association. Is the latter part of this true, and, if so, is there any reason why not? Have you any specially happy or picturesque memories of the Detection Club, its meetings, its ritual, and your fellow-members? How did these collaborations work?
A.: On the contrary, I have been a member of the Crime Writer’s Association for many years, although I have never attended any of their meetings. Of the Detection Club, I have many happy memories. One of my proudest is that I was sponsored by Anthony Berkeley (Francis Iles) and Helen Simpson, and was initiated by G.K. Chesterton, our first president.
Apart from the brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual Helen Simpson, I liked Freeman Wills Crofts and Anthony Berkeley best of the early members, and, later, the delightful boy (as I thought and think of him) Edmund Crispin, always so courteous, happy and kind. I myself was one of the earliest members of the club, though not a founder. The main rules, according to the ritual, were that we should furnish all necessary clues to our murderers, ignore sinister Chinamen and poisons unknown to science, promise never to steal other people’s plots, whether these were disclosed to us under the influence of drink or otherwise, and (as it began as a dining-club, although we had premises later) not to eat peas with a knife or put our feet on the dining-table.
I remember that at one annual dinner some important ‘prop’ or other for the initiation ceremony had been left at the club rooms to which, of course, nobody had thought to bring his or her key, and we took an Assistant Commissioner of Police with us to break into the house. He was a co-opted member, but did not seem to be exactly delighted to join us in committing the crime of breaking and entering, particularly as there were other daytime occupants of the building besides ourselves.
I was engaged in only one of the collaborations, which were for the benefit of club funds. Anthony Berkeley and Dorothy L. Sayers exchanged detectives and, of course, Anthony’s manipulation of Lord Peter Wimsey caused the massive lady anything but pleasure. Helen Simpson took over Mrs. Bradley in exchange for Sir John Saumarez. We two, I am glad to say, got along famously and it is to her that I owe, as you know, Dame Beatrice’s second name, Adela.
Q.: Dame Beatrice’s omniscience annoys some people (e.g., Barzun & Taylor). How often is she wrong? Do knowing readers delight in pointing out her (or your) mistakes?
A.: I am not a bit surprised that she annoys people, because she never is wrong. Besides, she has a god-like quality of being much larger than life, and of being so much superior to ordinary people that she can afford to be benign and kind even to my murderers, who seldom get hanged (in the old days) or suffer life imprisonment (in the later books).
People who write to me usually do so to point out errors of fact. A Scottish lady told me that one cannot put a car on the train from London to Glasgow, an Irish priest pointed out my misuse of Hibernian dialect, and a very irate Scotsman complained that no elderly female could perform the feats I attributed to Dame Beatrice. As, at the age of seventy-four-plus I can perform most of them myself, including throwing a knife, and hitting a post-card ten times out of ten at twenty-five paces with a rifle (a thing I don’t believe I have ever mentioned as being one of her accomplishments, as her favourite weapon is a small revolver), I think the gentleman is wrong.
Q.: Do you read other people’s detective stories? If so, whose do you most enjoy? What sort of crime novels do you avoid? Which straight novelists do you admire? Who besides Wodehouse makes you laugh?
A.: Yes, I do read other people’s detective stories, but by no means all. I have a big collection of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh (what a superb writer! How I wish I had written some of hers!), Dorothy L. Sayers and Edmund Crispin. Sad to say, I can’t enjoy Margery Allingham or Michael Innes, but I like and admire all Nicholas Blake’s detective stories. The only American writer that I can read is Hillary Waugh. I very much like John Dickson Carr as a person, but can’t read his books.
As for straight novelists, by far my favourite is that very ‘odd bod,’ Ivy Compton-Burnett, of whose works I have a collection which I read and re-read. The authors, apart from Wodehouse, who make me laugh, are both American, Damon Runyon (although sometimes he is over-sentimental) and the creator (Leonard Q. Ross) of the immortal Hyman Kaplan.
Q.: Are your non-fictional reading tastes clearly defined, or are you continually breaking new ground as new areas of interest catch your attention?
A.: My non-fictional reading tastes are very clearly defined. I read poetry, mostly the Elizabethans, the Border ballads and the not-quite moderns up to about 1940, and I also read about real-life murders and the reminiscences of the great lawyers.
Q.: Society is much changed since 1929, but the horrors of modern life seem happily not to impinge on your novels. Do you consider this to be fair comment, or have you in fact attempted to change with the times?
A.: No, I don’t think I have attempted to change with the times. In fact, I was glad to retire from teaching because I realised that my lovely and sweet-natured girls, although we were very fond of one another, were not on the same wavelength, kind to me though they were, and most patient with an old fuddy-duddy.
Q.: You began as a novelist, but turned to detection because your novels failed to find a publisher. What sort of novels did you write? What are the Stephen Hockaby novels like? Why did you abandon “him” and why did you use a male pseudonym?
A.: I suppose my first novels were love stories, some with a historical background, but I've forgotten about them. The Stephen Hockaby books were rather good, I think, but I received very little encouragement over them. Marsh Hay was romantic, colourful and full of action and received splendid notices from the critics. Seven Stars and Orion was a historical novel set in the fourteenth century. Gabriel’s Hold was set in a lighthouse, on detailed information supplied by one of the keepers of The Needles light, and the last one, Grand Master, was concerned with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem and the Siege of Malta.
I abandoned them because the rewards were so utterly inadequate considering the amount of research involved and also because, after Grand Master, I wrote a book about the First Crusade which Michael [Joseph] turned down, so I felt that, one way and another, I had shot my bolt. I chose a male pseudonym because Marsh Hay was told in the first person by a young man.
Q.: Do you read reviews of your books? Have you ever been hurt by a harsh criticism or exhilarated by a glowing one?
A.: Before the war, I subscribed to a press-cutting agency. Nowadays, I read such reviews as come my way. Some are sent by the publishers, others by friends. No, I have never been hurt by harsh criticism and have had very little of it. People who rebuke me are very helpful, in fact, and I almost always agree with what they say. The good reviews always give me great pleasure and wonderful encouragement.
Q.: Despite the fact that you deal in crime and specifically in murder, your work is essentially cheerful: however dark the deeds, you transmute them into entertainment. Are you an optimist? Is the writing of crime novels in any way therapeutic for you?
A.: Yes, I suppose I am an optimist. I would far rather ignore (from cowardice, I think) the seamy side of life. I have only academic knowledge of romance and sex, love to laugh, and hate and detest violence and cruelty. The writing of crime novels is in no way therapeutic to me. I am fascinated by murder because it is about the last thing I would think of committing, apart from blackmail.
3. Critical
Gladys Mitchell is a prolific writer, and her work is decidedly uneven. She has some formidable failings such as might sink a lesser writer altogether. Her books are sui generis, genial, high-spirited, bold and complicated, but lacking in the formal disciplines of the genre at the pitch of classical perfection. But it would be absurd to expect orthodoxy from a fantasist of genius.
Over-complication is probably Miss Mitchell’s besetting sin: even the best of her books show signs of this, and in some the failure of organisation is such that the movement of the plot is at times barely comprehensible. Here Comes a Chopper (1946) begins admirably, only to tail off into vagaries of character, motive and incident that topple it over into incoherence long before the end. Maurice Richardson complained of Dance to Your Daddy (1969) that it is “a murder mystery so mysterious that it’s not easy to find out what is being done to whom, much less who by”; and Edmund Crispin’s observation that Miss Mitchell narrates less well than she writes surely also refers to this sort of thing.
So much of Miss Mitchell’s dialogue is allusive and inconclusive, and so many of her characters lay false trails in conversation, from the delicate half-truth to the lie direct, that the reader is sometimes in danger of not knowing what he is to believe, and is left floundering, still vague, even at the end, about details of the action and its motivation. Death and the Maiden (1947) is a distinct success and thoroughly entertaining, and yet it is possible to read it without being entirely sure of the motive for the crime.
Edmund Crispin has applauded Miss Mitchell’s ear for distinctive idiom, justly, since much of her dialogue is sharp and savoursome. But here, too, there are lapses—in some of the banter in the earliest books, now sorely dated; in the casual exchanges of schoolboys and students (even when, somehow, the right spirit is achieved); and, specifically, in the uncouth roars of the amateur athletes at the beginning of Adders on the Heath (1963). Mr. Crispin regrets the resort to “generalised Mummerset” for the servants in Dance to Your Daddy. Even when Miss Mitchell has clearly worked hard to achieve a particular dialect, the results are not always happy: all that careful Cockney in Gory Dew (1970) makes for decidedly uphill reading. The characteristic utterance of Laura, secretary and Watson to Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, is a law unto itself: picturesque yet pertinent, with a vigorous crackle of metaphor, it moves in a headlong rush of slang, quotation, imprecation and flight of fancy, flippant, fervent, awestruck, satiric, literary, sporty, maddening at times, but always incisive and never dull.
In her narrative prose, Miss Mitchell is more consistent, and the melodramatic crudities of Speedy Death (1929) are not repeated; the account of Eleanor Bing, rampaging round the old home with a knife in her hand and murder in her heart is not one’s favourite passage from the works. In The Longer Bodies (1930), a reassuring advance in sophistication is apparent, and the critical fluency of Miss Mitchell’s style is well maintained over the years (and was recently described—again by Edmund Crispin—as “pellucid”).
Despite her shortcomings, Miss Mitchell remains one of the most consistently entertaining of detective novelists, her vices more than atoned for by her virtues. Much may be forgiven so colourful, varied and exuberant a writer, whose vivid inventive flair, after fifty books, happily shows no sign of declining. Repeatedly, the sheer verve of the narrative, the teasing intricacy and driving energy of the action carry the reader over obscurities of motive, and improbabilities of character and incident.
A feature of the novels is the uncommonly literal sense Miss Mitchell attaches to the word ‘action.’ Her most typical plots involve considerable outdoor activity, and an immense amount of ground is covered by her detectives: tramping the terrain is a sine qua non. Miss Mitchell explained some years ago, in a broadcast talk called “Maps, Chaps and Murder,” that she uses the one-inch Ordnance Survey map, both in plotting the action of a novel in an actual setting and in adapting a real environment to a fictional one; and such books as The Worsted Viper (1943) and Death and the Maiden receive an added interest from the close co-ordination of setting and action encountered in them. The Dancing Druids (1948) is another very ‘physical’ book, and so, too, is Dead Men’s Morris (1936), where the meticulously detailed locality is that of Miss Mitchell’s own native heath. Laura tracks and climbs, scrambles and swims in the interests of detection, and Dame Beatrice is equally game for any amount of leg-work, in the Western Highlands [in My Father Sleeps, 1944] or the New Forest [Three Quick and Five Dead, 1968], or on a Lundy-like island called Great Skua [The Murder of Busy Lizzie, 1973]. At other times, they sail all over the Norfolk Broads [in The Worsted Viper], or cruise around the islands off the West coast of Scotland [in My Father Sleeps].
Anything is liable to be grist to Miss Mitchell’s mill—archæology or athletics, black magic or clan lore [in My Father Sleeps], castles [in The Croaking Raven, 1966] or caves, Shakespeare or Freud, classical mythology [in Come Away, Death, 1937 and Lament for Leto, 1971] or natural history, folklore or beards in literature, psychic phenomena [in When Last I Died, 1941] or the Loch Ness Monster [in Winking at the Brim, 1974]. Islands and convents exercise their fascination, and schools and colleges felicitously recur. We get ferns in Faintley Speaking (1954), Old Crome in The Dancing Druids, Sherlock Holmes in Watson’s Choice (1955), and word-association and nudism in Printer’s Error (1939). The range of reference is wide and challenging: in Laurels are Poison (1942) alone, Miss Mitchell invokes Webster, Keats, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Will Hay, M.R. James, Timothy Shy, ‘the Grave of a Hundred Heads,’ Toby Weller, Little Lord Fauntleroy, ‘the doomed cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum,’ Drayton, Ouida, Patrick Mahon, Swinburne, and Gilbert and Sullivan.
Miss Mitchell’s sharp eye to eccentricities of character is further decided advantage. ‘Hoodoo, Voodoo and Just Plain Nastiness’ is the title of a chapter from Tom Brown’s Body (1949), but it would serve equally well as a succinct overall statement of the kind of goings-on in which the author involves her characters. A critic described the characteristic ambience of Gladys Mitchell’s fiction as “rich, fantastical and tuppence-coloured,” and it is in just such an atmosphere, at once bizarre and engaging, that her characters move. Eccentrics abound, and, as if the author were declaring her hand at the outset, even the corpse is odd in Speedy Death—it is female, whereas the celebrated explorer to whom it belonged in life was male. The Echoing Strangers (1952) has a blackguardly old baronet with unnerving twin grandsons and a passion for cricket; Merlin’s Furlong (1953), an unspeakable old don of staggering depravity, with a Negro maid and a mulatto valet; Death of a Delft Blue (19640, a trifurcate family of multi-national exotics, with names like Binnen, Opal, Florian, Derde, Sweyn, Rebekah and Sigismund; and My Bones Will Keep (1962), a lurid laird, “big, red-headed, red-bearded, and with a wild and bright blue eye,” fixated on “fabulous animals,” “the petrified fauna of another and more picturesque age,” the basilisk, the gryphon, the werewolf, the salamander and the gorgon. In Death and the Maiden, Edris Tidson watches the River Itchen for a naiad; and in Winking at the Brim (1974), Sir Humphrey Calshott surveys Loch na Tannasg for a “monster.” In Come Away, Death (1937), Sir Rudri Hopkinson convenes an expedition to probe the nature of the Eleusinian Mysteries, during which the head of one of the party is substituted for the serpents of Aesculapius, and in Watson’s Choice, Sir Bohun Chantrey celebrates a Sherlock Holmes anniversary with a party at which the Hound of the Baskervilles makes an unexpected appearance.
4. Dame Beatrice
At the centre of all the fun and games, all the treasons, stratagems and spoils, from the first in 1929 to the latest in 1976, is that “singular old lady,” Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. (Of enduring detectives, only Poirot has been active longer, and his last case came recently before the public. Leonard Gribble’s Anthony Slade made his début in the same year as Mrs. Bradley, but has not been heard from since 1967. Miss Marple, whose final exploit is being held in reserve, made her first appearance the year after Mrs. Bradley, in Murder at the Vicarage [1930].) We receive constant reminders of all four of her names: to Chief Constables and other old friends she is ‘Beatrice’; to her principal nephews ‘Aunt Adela’; and her family comprises both Lestrange and Bradley elements. (She also tells an old school friend that Helen Simpson instituted the fashion of calling her ‘Adela’—and Miss Mitchell confirms that Miss Simpson did, in fact, give Dame Beatrice her second name.) She is Mrs. Bradley until 1955, making her first appearance thus in Watson’s Choice, where there is a curious passage in which Laura seems to be laying false claim to the honour of D.B.E. for her employer, to impress a gullible matron; but she is Dame Beatrice in earnest in Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956), and so she remains.
She is already old on her first appearance in 1929, and as the years advance miss Mitchell solves the problem they present by ignoring it. Laura ages, and so does Hamish, her son: Dame Beatrice does not. Were she subject to the ageing process like the rest of us, she would be over a hundred now, conceivably older, even, than Poirot: if 55 in 1929, as Miss Mitchell suggests, she would be 102 now; if 60, 107; and if 70, 117! In the same way, Miss Mitchell from time to time takes up members of the Lestrange-Bradley family when she has a use for them, but without any great concern for the march of time; thus, the Sally who is making her own way to her cousin Carey’s farm in Laurels are Poison in 1942, is presumably the young woman of the same name who goes monster-hunting in 1974, in Winking at the Brim, a mere 32 years later!
Dame Beatrice has a large and devoted family of whom we meet only one who is her co-eval, her “massive sister-in-law,” Lady Selina Lestrange. Lady Selina’s title must be her own, that of a nobleman’s daughter who took her husband’s surname on marriage, like Lady Violet Powell or Lady Antonia Fraser: it follows that she married one Lestrange brother and Dame Beatrice another—and a third must have fathered Carey. Lady Selina has two children, John, removed at 16 from Rugby to receive the benefits of co-education at Hillmaston [in Death at the Opera, 1934], and Sallie (not to be confused with her cousin Ferdinand’s daughter Sally). She alone of Dame Beatrice’s relatives seems to dislike her, disapproving of her unconventional approach to life, and rather in awe of her gifts and her fame.
Dame Beatrice has been three times married, and she has at least two sons, one by her first husband, a Lestrange “of French and Spanish descent,” and one by her second, whose name we never learn (and Miss Mitchell doesn’t know it, either). Bradley must be the name of her third husband, the one who put an end to her “brief second widowhood.” She refers in Tom Brown’s Body to “other sons” whom she likes less than her nephews, but she is trying to disconcert Miss Loveday at the time, and the only documented sons are these two.
Her elder son, Ferdinand Lestrange, is a barrister, subsequently a K.C. and, at least as early as St. Peter’s Finger (1938), Sir Ferdinand. He is of “distinguished” appearance and has, like his mother, a “beautiful voice.” In court, defending his mother against a murder charge, he is “suave” and “hypnotic,” with “the stage sense of the born actor.” We learn from his mother that he “never quite accustomed himself” to her second marriage “and its aftermath of a half-brother,” but the adult Ferdinand has no cause for unease on that score, since his half-brother takes himself off to India as a young man, to specialise in tropical diseases, and we learn little more of him. His son, John, “a lively child, healthy and quite well-behaved,” appears in Watson’s Choice. Ferdinand has two sons, Derek and Sebastian, and one daughter, Sally. Derek seems not to have a case of his own, but the others do, Sebastian in Gory Dew, where he emerges as a chip off the old block, defending the Moonrocket Kid with attack and finesse; and Sally in Winking at the Brim, where she joins Sir Humphrey Calshot’s ill-fated monster-hunt. Ferdinand also appears to have at least two wives: Mrs. Bradley sends her love to Juliet in St. Peter’s Finger, but it is Caroline who joins the Christmas reunion in Laurels Are Poison.
Of the nephews whom Mrs. Bradley prefers to her sons, Carey Lestrange is perhaps the most prominent. He is an amateur painter (of inn-signs in Printer’s Error), and a professional pig-breeder, long-haired, good-looking, and with a “lean and graceful strength.” Dead Men’s Morris takes place in and around his Oxfordshire pig-farm, Old Farm, Stanton St. John, and he is notably active in Printer’s Error, where he enters a nudist colony in the cause, and Spotted Hemlock (1958), where the popularity of his classes among the young ladies of Calladale Agricultural College shows that he retains his looks into middle age. Even when not in the front line, he is “kept alive” by constant reference, as are his wife Jenny, his two children, and his devoted servants, the Ditch family.
Another nephew, Denis, is something of a changeling, since he is distinctly referred to as ‘Lestrange’ by a schoolfellow in Laurels Are Poison; but six years earlier, in Dead Men’s Morris, he is established as a Bradley, and so he remains in The Dancing Druids and Adders on the Heath. He is at least ten years Carey’s junior, though, like him, “middle” rather than “youngest” generation, his status as a nephew assured even if his surname is uncertain. He rides a motor-cycle and plays the flute, the violin, and the organ, and is known to his intimates as ‘Scab.’ There are hints of war-service in The Dancing Druids, not impossible if he left school in the summer of 1943 and enlisted at once. He is certainly no longer a boy on his later appearances, but a young man, “discreet… bold and mettlesome.”
One other nephew, the “saturnine” Jonathan, is indisputably a Bradley, and thus a courtesy cousin to the Lestranges. He meets his lovely wife Deborah during the action of Laurels Are Poison, when she is Mrs. Bradley’s assistant at Cartaret College, and they recur together, married, in The Worsted Viper and My Father Sleeps (1944). Reflecting on the marriage, Mrs. Bradley is “relieved and amused to note” that Jonathan “appeared to have asserted himself with the simple, beautiful, selfish and comforting decisiveness for which his mother … was celebrated throughout the family, and which it had been evident for some time her son had inherited in full measure.” A further consequence of the marriage is twins.
Other relatives occur from time to time, including another Lestrange nephew, Brian, active in My Father Sleeps; a great-niece, Fenella, also a Lestrange, to whom weird things happen in A Hearse on Mayday (1972); an unnamed sister-in-law and her son and daughter; and a named nephew, Philip, who knows about gas appliances and calls Mrs. Bradley ‘Aunt Beatrice’ (all in St. Peter’s Finger). To tie these in to the main family would require more data than we are given, and, conceivably, more ingenuity than even Miss Mitchell possesses.
On her first appearance, Mrs. Bradley is described as “dry without being shrivelled, and bird-like without being pretty,” reminding Alastair Bing “of the reconstruction of a pterodactyl he had once seen in a German museum. There was the same inhuman malignity in her expression as in that of the defunct bird, and, like it, she had a cynical smirk about her mouth even when her face was in repose. She possessed nasty, dry, claw-like hands, and her arms, yellow and curiously repulsive, suggested the plucked wings of a fowl.” (Interestingly, that first image persists, recurring as late as 1970, when Toby Sparowe, in Gory Dew, is reminded by Dame Beatrice’s “yellow hands and wrists” of “the wings of a pterodactyl.”) If this is pitched rather strongly (like the description of Mrs. Bradley’s teeth as “the teeth of a relentless beast of prey; a creature tigerish, carnivorous, untamed”), its impact is undeniable, and Miss Mitchell maintains and diversifies the saurian image in subsequent books: in The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929), where Jim Redsey reflects that he has “never seen such a wicked old woman. She reminded him of some dreadful bald-headed bird he had seen in a picture at some time … you got the same sort of sick feeling when you looked at her … her little smile was like that he had seen on the face of a newt—no, a sand lizard—no, one of those repulsive-looking giant frogs. But when the woman … grinned a bit wider … then you could see what she must have been in a former existence! … an alligator!”; and in The Saltmarsh Murders (1932), where the curate Noel Wells, who “liked old women to be soothing,” is reminded of “a deadly serpent basking in the sun, or of an alligator smiling gently while birds removed animal irritants from its armoured frame.” Over the years, the picture is sustained with remarkable consistency and vigour, Dame Beatrice continually unnerving people with the “fiendish, anticipatory grin” of one or other of the larger Sauria (and even, once, with “a herpetological leer”!).
There are variations: there is one striking comparison to “the gargoyles on Notre Dame”; Richard Cowes in The Longer Bodies calls her “a man-eating shark in disguise”; she is on record as “howling like a hyena”; and her “witchlike aspect” is noted from time to time. There are also numerous bird-like references—to the “hawk-like gaze”; to the “little beak” into which she purses her mouth; to the “quick glance” like that “of a bird seeing a worm”; to the hoots and screeches that punctuate her progress; and to her appearance on one occasion “dressed like a macaw.” But it is the saurian aspect that most memorably persists, and the motif is developed in a host of metaphors, and recognised and preserved in the familiar name of her employer perpetuated by Laura (though originated by Mrs. Gatty of Saltmarsh): Mrs. Crocodile, or Mrs. Croc. (During the earliest days of their acquaintance, Laura also refers to Mrs. Bradley as “the Old Trout,” “the First Grave-Digger,” “the Third Witch,” “the Duchess of Malfi,” “Aunt Glegg,” “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and “Boadicea”!).
Despite her years, Dame Beatrice has “raven hair” with “not a touch of grey”; her “snapping black eyes” are often “brilliant”; and she has what Laura’s friend Kitty calls “the bones,” that give a face distinction regardless of age or lack of conventional appeal. We are constantly reminded, too, of her “rich, remarkable voice,” “no bird-like twitter nor harsh parrot cry, but a mellifluous utterance, rich and full, and curiously, definitely, superlatively attractive,” its exceptional beauty in dignified contrast to the clamorous cackles and shrieks with which she expresses her delight at the discomfiture even of those she loves.
Her clothes are invariably “hideous,” and come “as P.G. Wodehouse would put it, from another and a dreadful world.” She is on one occasion “an easily-recognised figure” in a tweed suit in a “lordly purple,” a jumper in “another shade of purple” and a “bright yellow hat”; or she outfaces all comers in a “blue and sulphur jumper,” or an outfit in “sage-green, purple and yellow.” En route for the dance at Cartaret College [in Laurels are Poison, 1942], she encounters Kitty, whose face visibly drops at the sight of Mrs. Bradley’s “orange and royal blue evening frock which was then in its fourth season.” At Saxon Wall [in The Devil at Saxon Wall, 1935], she descends the stairs “fearful and wonderful in a bright blue silk dressing-gown on which great dragons, gold, and red-gold and bronze, sprawled in the insolent splendour of Chinese hideousness.” Some of her garments are evidently made by her own hands, since she is forever clicking away at her “indescribable knitting,” and is once observed as being engaged on “a shapeless piece of work in a particularly oppressive shade of gamboge.”
She is, as Deborah realises on their first meeting, “one of the most famous of modern women,” pre-eminent in her sphere, and of commanding intellect and erudition. Both to Deborah and the staff of Hillmaston School, she is “the Mrs. Bradley.” As “psychiatrist and consulting psychologist to the Home Office,” with, in Laura’s words, “degrees from every university except Tokio,” she is immensely distinguished, her services in constant demand, her reputation, both in her professional and amateur capacities, wide and unquestioned. Her publications include “her famous popular book on hereditary tendencies towards crime,” the “Small Handbook to Psycho-Analysis” (1929), a paper on “the psychology of martyrs, both Christian and otherwise,” and another “On the Psychology of the Re-orientation of Paranoiacs.” At the Scheveningen Conference in 1964, she delivers a paper on “Traumatic Regicides, with special reference to the death of Charles I.”
Her town base is a “tall house in Kensington,” and she has lived at the Stone House in the village of Wandles Parva in Hampshire since 1930, when her arrival as a neighbour greatly distressed Mrs. Bryce Harringay. (Hannibal Jones’s telegram from Saxon Wall places the village in Bucks, but this is clearly attributable to his distracted state at the time of despatch). She is impeccably served by Henri, her cook, Celestine, his wife, who doubles as housekeeper and lady’s maid, and George, her chauffeur, a notably fine driver, who maintains his employer’s car to perfection, and is acknowledged as “an advance on Henry Straker.” He gives perhaps the noblest service of all, far beyond the call of his primary duty; tough and intelligent, level-headed and resourceful in a crisis, he is absolutely rock-like in his reliability.
Laura Menzies became Mrs. Bradley’s secretary after The Worsted Viper (1943) and before My Father Sleeps (1944) (possibly in Sunset Over Soho [1944], which comes between these two), and she plays some part in most of her employer’s subsequent investigations. As Watsons go, she is notably flamboyant and positive, handsome, confident and clever, full of energy and ideas, of ‘Amazonian’ physique and extrovert disposition. Rather reluctantly, she marries a policeman, the “handsome young Highlander” Robert Gavin (but ‘David’ in Tom Brown’s Body); and their son, Ian Alastair Hamish, known by the last of his baptismal names, creates something of a precedent by maturing from infancy (in The Twenty-Third Man [1957]) through boyhood (in The Croaking Raven [1966]), to young manhood (in A Javelin for Jonah [1974]).
Two fellow-students of Laura’s at Cartaret also recur: Kitty Trevelyan, later a celebrated hair-stylist and contributor to Vogue; and Alice Boorman, who is married to a farmer called Cartwright in Watson’s Choice(1955), but six years later, in The Nodding Canaries (1961), is ‘Miss Boorman’ again when, a P.E. mistress at Nodding, she sends an S.O.S. to Dame Beatrice. Wild attempts to rationalise Alice’s situation through the death of her husband, the adoption of her children, and a simultaneous return to teaching and single blessedness, are totally confounded by the flat, unequivocal statement that Alice is “a spinster” and, by implication, a virgin. (Miss Mitchell comments: ‘This was a dreadful mistake of mine. I am quite sure that Alice never would have married, in spite of something she says, I believe, in Laurels Are Poison.’)
Kitty is the glamorous one of the three, the one who transforms Mrs. Bradley’s appearance at the dance, who is bored by the Broads, and who is clearly not destined to become a teacher. She marries Rafe Vinnicombe, by whom she has three children; but at the time of the Brayne historical pageant, of which she becomes organiser (in Pageant of Murder [1965]), she is known as Kitty Trevelyan-Twigg, either because she has remarried, or because she has adopted this as her professional name, ‘Kitty Vinnicombe’ having rather less chic. Alice is sensitive, serious and law-abiding, but by no means lacking in spirit. A fine gymnast, “all india-rubber and muscle,” she makes a good job of both her manifestations, a capable farmer’s wife in one, and a dedicated teacher in the other.
As a detective, Dame Beatrice is a striking exemplar of the omniscient school. Messrs. Barzun & Taylor refer, in Catalogue of Crime, to a story, “Daisy Bell,” in which Mrs. Bradley is “cut down to size”; but this is probably the unique instance of that process, since it is rare to find her even disconcerted, and the usual turn of events is quite the reverse. It is a safe prediction that she will “lay down her cards and scoop the pool … She always does. She weaves the web and, in the end, the flies walk into it.” Her overall mental ascendancy is quite remarkable. Deep-dyed villains blush and fumble and fail to meet her gaze, and Alastair Bing and Mrs. Harringay are only the first and second of a long line of people who are “afraid of her.” Her habit of addressing most of the males she encounters, from schoolboys to Chief Constables, as “child,” is further indicative of her benign Olympian supremacy.
In addition, she leads a charmed life. Other detectives get cracked over the head, or have boulders hurled down upon them, or bullets avoiding brain or heart by a hairs-breadth. But however many dark passages, or dank caves, or sinister, twilit gardens she may investigate, Dame Beatrice escapes all hurt, often turning the tables on those who foolishly imagine they can better her, protected at such times by “a curious sixth sense which she trusted” (as well she might, since it informs her when “all was not as it should be”). “She was not unaccustomed to homicidal maniacs,” and predictably knows just what to do when one such threatens her with her own revolver: “Mrs. Bradley suddenly moved faster than could possibly have been expected of an elderly lady. She seized, not her notebook, but a beautiful little bronze which she used as a paperweight. It represented the shepherd boy David.
“‘Down with Goliath,’ she said with an unearthly cackle, as the heavy missile found its mark and she, like a tigress, leapt after it towards the bulge. The bulge fell forward with a crash which shook the room.” [This occurs in Laurels are Poison.]
On an earlier occasion, during her visit to Saxon Wall, her reactions are equally quick, her behaviour just as picturesque: “Something sang through the air. Mrs. Bradley jerked her body to the left. A large hammer swung past her, and cut a chunk of turf out of the lawn when it fell. Mrs. Bradley retrieved it, swung it thrice round her head as the arm clothed in white samite once had waved the sword Excalibur, and then darted in among the rhododendron bushes.” It is good to know that in Miss Mitchell’s most recently completed novel, Noonday and Night, she is still evading ill-wishers by the time-honoured device of retreating to the powdering-closet while a deceptive dummy awaits the murderous attack.
Physically, she is very much stronger than she looks, her arm “deceptively stick-like” and capable of exerting and sustaining considerable pressure, and even the “yellow forefinger” with which she habitually prods people in the ribs, “like an iron bolt.” When Laura is downed in a fight, Mrs. Bradley performs “a feat … to make strong men quail,” picking up “the hefty Laura in her arms” and carrying her off “to put her to bed as though she had been a small child.” (Laura returns the compliment in My Father Sleeps, bearing Mrs. Bradley in her “powerful grasp … on to Scottish soil, much … in the manner of the Roman eagles being carried on to disputed territory”). Elsewhere, she proves herself “no mean performer at a game in which muscle and temper, skill, boldness and patience all played a considerable part.”
She has nerves of steel, and “alone among those present seemed entirely unimpressed by the manifestations” of the Athelstan ghost. No one as adept as she at avoiding injury from the forces of evil in this world could possibly fear harm from the agents of any other. At times, even, she seems herself in tune with other worlds, with her “eldritch” cries and oracular pronouncements, and it is notable that even before we meet her Bertie Philipson expresses the view that she “would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age.” To Nao, the Japanese servant at Saxon Wall, she is “the small wise woman,” and in Tom Brown’s Body, Mrs. Bradley herself acknowledges her curious kinship with the witch Lecky Harries, from whom she obtains “the magic book of her ancestress, Mary Toadflax”: “We be of one blood, thou and I.” As if that were not sufficiently explicit, a chapter is entitled “Hecate at School House”; and, at the end, as Mrs. Bradley departs with her treasure, “a small hedgehog remained motionless. Then it lifted its tiny snout and whined three times.” She shares with the Ancient Mariner not only a “skinny hand,” but the capacity to hold a man “grounded as though by some magic spell.”
Once involved in a case, Dame Beatrice spares no effort or expense, conducting innumerable interviews regardless of the sometimes considerable distances separating those whom she wishes to consult, and instructing George to drive her the length and breadth of England and Scotland (Wales, too, in the fifty-first book, Noonday and Night). Nor does she jib at jaunts overseas: if the caves at Lascaux seem germane to an enquiry, to Lascaux they go [in Faintley Speaking]; and no sooner has she decided that “the visit to Naples was necessary,” than she is organising the aeroplane tickets [in Spotted Hemlock]. She also takes physical discomfort in her vigorous stride, scrambling over mountainsides in streaming rain; sinking on her stomach in “the harsh and saturated heather”; or crawling her way painfully but with infinite patience through a narrow, cramping tunnel. Far from dying of pneumonia, or even aching all over, after these and comparable experiences, she emerges serenely unaffected, immune to the ills of lesser mortals.
Dame Beatrice has three or four principal props: “the small notebook which was her invariable companion,” in which she records her perceptions and suspicions in “her neat, illegible script,” usually in a shorthand of her own devising; “the small magnifying-glass which she invariably carried”; and the “small electric torch” that also accompanies her everywhere. All three are accommodated in “her capacious skirt pocket,” at moments of crisis together with her revolver; at other times, with a small tin of biscuits or a flask of brandy.
There is no predicting what she will do next, or what other accomplishments she will manifest. Aubrey Halliday praises her as a “hot” billiards player, and she delights the boy Richard at Saxon Wall by “teaching him how to throw a knife,” scoring a spectacular bulls-eye herself “with what looked like a negligent flick of the wrist.” Also at Saxon Wall, she practises a ‘thirties form of karate on the vicar. She startles a nun by lip-reading, and frequently exercises her power to induce hypnosis. Not the least of her many remarkable achievements are the one and a half murders she commits, for the first of which she composedly stands trial (on the second occasion, to be scrupulously accurate, she knowingly causes a death rather than commits a murder).
Two final instances must suffice to indicate the range of her capacity to take us by surprise. When the ballcocks at Athelstan Hall give trouble, there is no need to send for a plumber: “‘Student,’ said Mrs. Bradley … ‘do you understand the nature and function of the ballcock?’
‘N—no, Warden,’ replied the girl looking thoroughly alarmed.
‘Good,’ said Mrs. Bradley, thoughtfully taking her arm in a firm grip. ‘Roll up your sleeves as we go. I will teach you all about them.’”
On the other occasion [in Here Comes a Chopper, 1946], an indisposed lady cellist is unable to continue with her concert, and Mrs. Bradley deputises for her, stilling a restive audience with her renderings of the “Ave Maria” and a Spanish dance, and “smirking” the while “like a satisfied boa-constrictor.”
Beyond all question, “She scoops the pool.” There is no one quite like her: nor, of course, could there be.
Source: B.A. Pike, writing in The Armchair Detective, Vol. 9, No. 4, Oct. 1976.
My greatest thanks to Barry Pike for letting me put his excellent article on the Internet.