Category: Gladys Mitchell

Announcing December 2021 Mitchell Mystery Reading Group title: GROANING SPINNEY (1950)

10/31/2021

Twice a year, I try to moderate a group reading discussion of a Gladys Mitchell mystery. Invariably, I’m delighted and surprised by the conversation that is generated. Some readers choose a subjective, personal approach; others might share their research into the geography or era in which the story takes place. Character, plot, setting, tone, and literary allusions are all fair game, and whether you find the story dazzling or dissatisfying, I welcome your thoughts.

I have been selecting Mrs Bradley books to explore in series order. Our first group reading foray, back in 2018, was a reading of 1929’s The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop. Every six months or so, a new title was selected and discussed: Dead Men’s Morris (1936), Come Away, Death (1937), Laurels Are Poison (1942), and the wartime Sunset over Soho (1943).

For December 2021, I want to revisit a particular wintry favorite in the series: Groaning Spinney from 1950. A few Gladys Mitchell fans were disappointed that they couldn’t join in with Sunset over Soho due to its rarity as a print title. I chose Groaning Spinney in part because it is still in print (albeit by a different name). Vintage Press published the book in 2017 as Murder in the Snow, and it is currently available from book retailers in the US and the UK. US eBook readers can also find a Kindle version.

Groaning Spinney displays the author’s transition to a more sedate storytelling style (and a more subdued Mrs Bradley, no longer cackling and poking people in the ribs with a bony, yellow finger). But there is still much to celebrate in this Cotswolds-set holiday story. Over the years, I have read the book three times – the group reading will be my fourth – and each time I am ensnared and held by the author’s charming literary spell.

If you would like to join us for the December reading event, either by sharing your observations or by reading along and visiting the weekly discussion posts, I hope you will do so!

As with previous readings, I would like to divide the chapters over four weeks and discuss one section of the book at a time. To take part, please email your comments (a couple paragraphs or so) to jason@jasonhalf.com by the Tuesday of the week due, and I will create a post incorporating everyone’s remarks shortly thereafter. Here is the schedule for Groaning Spinney:

TUES. DEC. 7 – Comments due for Chapter 1 “Mrs Bradley Takes a Christmas Vacation” through
Chapter 5 “Parson’s Farewell”
TUES. DEC. 14 – Comments due for Chapter 6 “Saturday’s Child” through
Chapter 10 “Peculiar Persons”
TUES. DEC. 21 – Comments due for Chapter 11 “What’s In a Name?” through
Chapter 15 “The Gun”
TUES. DEC. 28 – Comments due for Chapter 16 “The History of Worry” through
Chapter 20 “A View to a Death”

Of course, participants are welcome to read ahead, but please make notes of future chapters and send those comments on the appropriate week. I’m looking forward to revisiting and discussing this book. Let me know if you have any questions. Happy reading!

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GLADYS MITCHELL Celebrated at 2021 Bodies from the Library Conference

5/19/2021

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Howdunit (2020), ed. Martin Edwards

On Saturday, May 15, scholars, authors, and fans of Golden Age Detective fiction attended the annual Bodies from the Library conference. As the Covid pandemic threw everyone a global plot twist last year, the 2020 event planned to take place at the British Library in London was canceled and this year’s celebration was an entirely virtual affair. While it was surely not the same experience as the in-person conference would have been, the online version had one excellent silver lining: a landlocked American like me could attend without the challenge of navigating some formidable springtime travel, schedule, and income hurdles. (In short, if it had only been an in-person event, I would have surely needed to sit it out.)

The same gratitude for an online conference was shared by other attendees as well, based on the feedback provided by many international voices at the end of the day. Sincere thanks and congratulations to the organizers and tech (‘tec?) supervisors for a smooth and lively affair. It was immense fun to see and hear from all of the learned participants and enthusiastic fans, and the topics could not have been better chosen or more intriguing.

First, Martin Edwards, Alison Joseph, and Kate Ellis shared insights on the newly published Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by the Detection Club. Next, Martin and Christine Poulson discussed the criminous stage, screen, and book contributions of identical twin brothers Peter and Anthony Shaffer. Kate Jackson and The Puzzle Doctor explored the books of Brian Flynn, a GAD author once more in the spotlight thanks to the reprinting efforts of PD and Dean Street Press. Mark Green looked at the ease of readability among the prose of the four Crime Queens. Jim Noy shared a delightful classification of detective types “from Holmes to Hammer” and Curtis Evans (who will soon be publishing a comprehensive book on the subject) provided an overview of authors Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler, the driving forces behind the American pseudonyms of Patrick Quentin and Q. Patrick.

Whew. That’s a lot of fascinating GAD ground that was covered.

But wait; there’s more. As the creator of a tribute site for the sui generis, prolific mystery author Gladys Mitchell, I was particularly excited about the topic scheduled for 3.15 pip emma, British Summer Time. Moira Redmond from Clothes in Books and author L.C. Tyler were to provide an overview of “The Great Gladys” and her work, and their spirited discussion was delightful. While they rightly forewarned prospective new readers of some of GM’s elements that might disappoint or alienate – such as arbitrary killers or obscure motives revealed at a story’s solution – L.C. and Moira spent much of their time making the case for this highly original author and her strikingly strange psychoanalyst detective.

I found myself nodding in agreement (within my little webcam box) as the presenters made their case for Gladys Mitchell: her amazingly rendered and meticulous evocation of place; her fascination with British history, folklore, and the occult; her unforgettable creation Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, with her reptilian leer, raven-black hair, and claw-like grip of iron; the surprisingly progressive thematic ideas on display in a genre that is traditionally conservative; and the astounding variety of styles and stories that the author delivered, especially in her first two decades of published mystery fiction. Judging from the chat comments, it appears that several neophyte GM readers were tantalized by the conversation and planned to give Miss Mitchell a try.

Moira Redmond has posted a blog entry at Clothes in Books campaigning for The Great Gladys once more, and recommends 1941’s When Last I Died, which is also my favorite Mrs Bradley title of the 66 books in the series. And as Moira argues, “we strongly encourage people to give her a chance and stick with the books with their weird plots, strange motives, and strange plot turns. Mrs Bradley is worth it!”

Who am I do disagree?

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #4

4/30/2021

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As Gladys Mitchell’s unique 1943 tale Sunset over Soho concludes, there is still much for our discussion group to explore. One example: Chapter 20 gives us Book Six – Dunkirk, where David Harben and Sister Mary Dominic use the tub to deliver soldiers onto waiting destroyer ships as enemy fire surrounds them. In my opinion, it is some of Gladys Mitchell’s most vivid writing, full of details and dangers as it recounts the grim coastline battle. Overall, the literary journey for the readers has been an engaging one, based on their comments, although as a mystery story there are also some frustrating shortcomings.

REFLECTIONS

We start with Lynn MacGrath, who, like the rest of the group who have read other Mrs Bradley books, feels that Sunset over Soho is an atypical story, but one with certain strengths and merits. Lynn writes that she “can now see how different this book is from any of Mitchell’s others. The device of moving backwards and forwards in time keeps the reader concentrating and the love story element is what’s most important, rather than the mystery element, although the whole book is a mystery!”

Tracy K. thought that Soho’s wartime setting – and the author’s attempt at verisimilitude – made this a memorable reading experience. She writes, “This is the best fiction book I have read about that war that includes so many elements of that time and its effects on people at home.” And Erin Cordell comments that the prose was “a very interesting style of writing… The last few chapters were almost like a long poem.”

As effective as the author’s presentation of a country at war might be, I must also agree with Joyka and Chris B. when they express disappointment with Mitchell’s characterization of her two leads. By the book’s conclusion, David Harben and his bewitching love interest Leda don’t have the weight or definition needed to make either of them a truly empathetic character. Certainly Mitchell comes closer to a resonant figure with Harben, as we spend more page time with him and, crucially, as he engages in a selfless act of courage in serving his country.

Joyka observes that “the sterling character we see in David during the Dunkirk rescue and as he is with the nuns and the orphan boys evaporates as he meets up once again with Leda. He returns to the morose, uncooperative schoolboy concerned only with his own love affair.” Joyka adds, “Perhaps his sterling character is envisioned only though the eyes of Mrs Bradley. I applaud Inspector Pirberry’s patience.”

Of all her Mrs Bradley books, Sunset over Soho is perhaps the one where tone and geographical/historical detail drive the novel’s reason for being, with the mystery puzzle plot used ornamentally and treated superficially in contrast. Chris argues that “we have not had a proper murder-mystery here. What we get is hardly more than a displaced-body puzzle. No credible murder investigation, either by the police or by Mrs Bradley, even takes place. Although the ‘means’ of killing come into question, there is no interest shown in motives or opportunities. Those are replaced by subjective assessments of character, such as whether David or Leda is the kind of person who would stoop to poisoning.”

DETAILS

Further evidence to support my analysis that Mitchell found it more interesting here to craft her world than her puzzle can be found among the details she includes in this book. Gladys Mitchell is such a special writer to me in great part because of these very details, and because of the worldview she chooses to share with the reader. So while I find many of Soho’s informative text inclusions fascinating and indeed very Mitchellian, I also recognize that they are not necessary (and indeed obstructive) because they are not active components of the mystery plot or the scene in which they are introduced.

A few examples: in Chapter 18, we are treated to a page of esoterica on street name origins, such as “High Holborn formed part of the route along which condemned criminals passed from Newgate Prison to Tyburn. The great bell of St. Giles’ was tolled when the condemned man was passing...” In Chapter 19, we have multiple paragraphs dedicated to describing the features of the Dominican habit: “The scapula was an over-garment consisting merely of a front and a back panel of serge…” If such details were important in the moment or connected to the mystery puzzle, they would not feel extraneous. But I am certain that these points – which are educational and objectively interesting – are included because they are subjects the author values and treasures, and Mitchell was a career school teacher as well as a writer who cherished lifelong learning.

Chris comments that the details regarding the life and dress of Dominican nuns “are clearly provided by Gladys Mitchell’s younger sister, whose help is briefly acknowledged in the author’s 1976 interview.”

LOCALES

Chris has actually located the mystery house on the river, inhabited (at various times) by the dead man, Leda, a monkey, a parrot, and some shadowy Spaniards. I will let Chris tell his tale:

“For entirely unrelated reasons, I happened to be in Kew the other day, so I strolled across Kew Bridge to take a closer look at the Chiswick riverfront at Strand-on-the-Green. What I discovered was that the principal Chiswick scenes in the novel are a little further to the east of Kew Bridge and the Bell & Crown than I had assumed, the almshouses and the mystery house, which I can now identify precisely, lying at the eastern end of Strand-on-the-Green.”

Chris continues, “A key detail on the second page of Chapter 12 is that the entrance to the house has a porch with pillars. There is only one riverfront house with those features, and it is Strand on the Green House, otherwise known as No. 1, Strand-on-the-Green, a rather elegant 18th-century building with bay windows to its upper floors, opposite which are steps down to the river at low tide. Curiously, the plain-brick house next door is No. 0, presumably because it was built later. According to the Brentford & Chiswick Local History Society website, the same No. 1 had previously been used as one of the settings in a more famous novel, Margaret Kennedy’s bestseller The Constant Nymph (1924).”

Chris also offers this clarification: “When I identified the Bell & Crown as the first pub east of Kew Bridge, I should have said the first riverside pub. I found that there is one pub closer to the bridge, this being the Steam Packet, established c. 1870, but it is on the wrong (north) side of Strand-on-the-Green, and so does not face onto the river, making it less likely to be the one Gladys Mitchell had in mind.”

CONTEXT

Sunset over Soho is a GM title that particularly benefits by a little exploration into historical context. Erin C. enjoyed the encyclopedic research options available with an eBook edition. She reports that “the notes about places and history references were easy to access and helped me stay oriented. This tale did travel far and wide!” Lynn M. “wondered if the book reflected a relationship in Mitchell’s life at the time, as it felt so personal.” Indeed, it feels like many of the specifics in this story, like the descriptions of the nuns and the Rest Centre workers, may have been based on acquaintances or relations of the author.

Joyka hopes that someone can verify Gladys Mitchell’s evocation of the small boat rescue of Dunkirk, “for I find this to be one of the most heroic and compassionate events in a war filled with heroic and compassionate events.” Tracy praised the scene as well. “I loved the chapter on Dunkirk. I would have read this book for that chapter alone. I haven't read much about Dunkirk and the descriptions in this book were amazing. It inspires me to read more about this event, and I like it when a book does that.”

Also from Tracy: “I found the comments about the errors in chronology in last week's summary post very interesting and that may explain away some of my confusion while reading this book. When we get to the point in the book where David Harben says that the events started fifteen months before when Leda came to his boat, I was amazed.”

Chris ran to ground a couple literary allusions in Soho. “The description of the war which begins ‘Satan was out of hell’ seems to be influenced by Rupert Brooke’s ‘Peace’, the first of his 1914 sonnets, in which the arrival of war is welcomed as cleansing ‘a world grown old and cold and weary’ (Mitchell: ‘a world grown slack and careless’) and its petty obsessions with love-affairs.” He adds that “the verse quotation on the novel’s penultimate page is the first stanza of Walter de la Mare’s poem ‘The Ghost’, from Motley and Other Poems (1918).”

Some final thoughts about the book, first from Tracy: “Leda was the least interesting character. I kept expecting that her character would get fleshed out more or she would get more of a role, but I admit that this approach of her being a mystery woman made sense.”

When it arrives in the book’s final paragraphs, Joyka felt Sunset over Soho’s mystery solution was weak. And so it is, in my opinion. GM provides a resolution based not on fair-play cluing or even on character psychology, but mainly because one is needed. While puzzle purists will likely be sorely disappointed, readers looking for an atmospheric novel with murder mystery elements (rather than the other way around) may find the journey as fascinating and vexing as we have.

A sincere thank you to all the contributors for this reading group, and best wishes to those reading along with us! Look for the next Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event around December.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #3

4/24/2021

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The Reading Group this week looks at Chapters 13 to 18 of Gladys Mitchell’s challenging 1943 wartime Mrs Bradley mystery, Sunset over Soho. In my initial reading and review of this book more than 15 years ago, I argued that Soho has some qualities that are absorbing and fascinating, while other elements work to create alienation and confusion, resulting in a mixed reading experience. The observations provided by the readers for this section seem to support my analysis.

THE STRUCTURE

Tracy K. from her site Bitter Tea and Mystery encapsulates the plot for these chapters. “Mrs Bradley continues to discuss the events related to David Harben's connection to the dead body found at the Rest Centre in Maidenhead Close with Detective-Inspector Pirberry. Now and then he interjects his reactions to the details of the story, especially questioning whether Harben's story is truthful or not. He suspects that Harben either killed the man or is protecting Leda.”

Joyka adds this context: “Mrs. Bradley, unwilling to call the story told by Harben the total truth, is also unwilling to say it is a totally false tale. Her explanation is interesting: David is telling what happened to him but is using the novelist’s tool of filling in the blanks and providing an ending where there may be none in actual life. Inspector Pirberry is skeptical but he respects Mrs B. to the point of allowing her to detect in her own fashion.” And Lynn MacGrath offers this compliment of the author’s singular style: “Gladys Mitchell packs so much into her pages. She is concise and yet still manages to set the scene and move that action along.”

Joyka says that “the characters are starting to flesh out a bit” in part because Mitchell is finally allowing a glimpse of how the components fit together. She notes that in this section “the Spaniards have been labelled as relatives of Leda, who have lived in the house on the river during breaks from their seafaring. Why they are after David and possibly Mrs B is still murky.” Tracy enjoys the adventure aspect of this tale. “Harben's story of being cast adrift on the sea, ending up who knows where, acquiring a boat to get back, and arriving in England, is somewhat fantastical but fun to read about.” And Lynn M. comments that “the switching from past to present kept my attention focused and added to the atmosphere, especially the dream sequences.”

Still, characterization and narrative structure can prove problematic in this novel for its readers; this was the case for myself and Chris B. this week. Chris comments that he “agrees with Joyka [from last week’s discussion] that Gladys Mitchell’s interest in human character seems to have gone missing: David is a cipher Hero figure, Leda is only a mythological cartoon, and the nearest we get to a human portrait is Plug Williams the shifty Welsh boxing coach.” As for the layered narrative approach, Tracy offers this reaction: “This is a very interesting way of telling a story but I also find it confusing. It is like reading a story (Harben's) within a story (Mrs Bradley's) within a story (Pirberry's) and not knowing if anyone knows the real story.

With Sunset over Soho, Chris perceptively identifies what he terms “the author’s fatal flaw in construction: that of founding the story upon an ‘unreliable’ narrative provided by David while failing to put that narrative into his own voice, which means that its psychological and dramatic potential is entirely thrown away. Instead, his story is relayed at second-hand, and therefore without conviction, by the character who by necessary convention should be trustworthy and credible as to fact.”

Chris continues, “The result is that the sleuth is compromised by glaring sins of omission while the hero becomes a puppet who simply goes through chase-and-escape routines quite perfunctorily. The attempted thriller material is also disappointingly stale and juvenile, as in other novels where Gladys Mitchell resorts to jewel-smuggling gangs or buried treasure. Getting kidnapped by pirates (or here, gunrunners) whose secret then gets betrayed by a parrot is corny comic-strip stuff.”

Which leads us conveniently to…

THE PARROT

I once wrote that the parrot in this mystery story is used in the way that parrots will be used as clues in most mystery stories, i.e., by uttering a phrase that puts the detective on the track. The talkative bird here is no different, although it takes an esoteric omniscient like Mrs Bradley to fully appreciate the meaning.

Chris helps us again with the references, informing us that “‘No, not Cripplegate’ refers to a possible confusion between two central London churches called St Giles, the first, St Giles Cripplegate, being a medieval church in the City (i. e., East End), in what is now the Barbican district; the other, officially St Giles-in-the-Fields, the 18th-century church that gives its name to the West-End parish of St Giles near Soho. Mrs Bradley deduces that the latter is indicated.”

And that strange single word uttered by the feathered confessor? Explains Chris, “‘Otamys’ in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728) – a work from which Gladys Mitchell often quotes – is Cockney for ‘Anatomies’, meaning corpses of hanged men that were consigned to Surgeons’ Hall for use in anatomy classes.”

Obscure as its literary and geographical references may be, the parrot still proves a colorful addition to this story. Joyka explains her affinity this way: “I have to say, I love the parrot whose squawking only a psychoanalyst of Mrs. B.’s caliber could piece together into clues to solve the mystery. The monkey? We have not settled his or her place in the story.”

THE TIME

With Sunset over Soho, Gladys Mitchell chose to place her story within a window of history that is at once contemporary and global when she wrote it. With events being described non-linearly and set against a backdrop of wartime actions occurring between 1939 and 1941, there is by definition less latitude for the chronicler than an author fixing the setting in more general terms.

It is ironic, then, that Sunset over Soho’s disjointed timeline ultimately presents some discrepancies when compared with the real world’s sequence of events. Chris has calculated the narrative times, and this is what he reports. “The start of Chapter 12 had indicated the date of David’s meeting with Leda at the Chiswick house, during which he is concussed, to be late October 1939. Early in Chapter 14, though, we find that David and his mixed crew set off on their voyage from Tenerife to England on 1st April 1940, arriving on the 19th. (This date disagrees with the date given in Chapter 16 for the same event, indicated there to be early April or even late March.) Either way, about five months of historical time, as David confirms at the end of Chapter 14, have somehow slipped by in what cannot be more than a few days in the time of the fictional narrative: the period from David’s rescue to his meeting the English ladies seems to be less than a week. This may be among the reasons for Pirberry to dismiss most of the story as phony.”

Interestingly, Gladys Mitchell may have had a winking reason to schedule the group’s arrival into England on April 19th – the date is in fact the author’s birthday! Some websites (including Wikipedia) say her birthdate is 21 April, 1901, but her birth certificate shows 19 April as the date.

The chronology confusion doesn’t end with the missing five months, however. Chris points to another instance of time out of joint. He writes, “In Chapters 15 through 18 we are still shuttling between Mrs Bradley’s narrative of events in late 1939 (including her investigations once David is reported missing) and her later conversations with Pirberry after the discovery of the body (thus in what must be November 1940). The awkwardness here is that she is no longer telling her ‘story’ reproducing Harben’s version of events but at this stage is telling the story of herself and of Pirberry, referring to both in the third person, and for no obvious reason. The style and voice of the ‘dramatic’ framing in Bradley-Pirberry dialogue are no longer adequately differentiated from those of the inset narrative, as they had been in the poetically-coloured style of Chapters 4 to 7. The entire split-chronology construction,” Chris concludes, “seems to lack clear purpose, and is bungled in execution.” The authorial choices and their questionable effect certainly add to the book’s unevenness.

THE TRAVELS

Tracy comments that Sunset over Soho’s specificity of place, and the details provided within the prose, are very enjoyable, and I would agree. She singles out this passage as an example:

But these were the days before the blitz; before Dunkirk; before the capitulation of the French or the invasion of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg; before the threat of an invasion of England. All seemed calm, even normal, and out in France an English Field Security Officer stationed at Croise Laroche, just north of Lille, was still keeping fit by doing “the steeplechase course … occasionally in the evenings, on foot, taking all the jumps except the water-jump, while the French A.A. gunners...” jeered at his incomprehensible antics.

The quotation within the text above is actually a source identified via the author’s footnote as coming from My First War, a memoir from Captain Sir Basil Bartlett, Bt. It is clear, if any additional evidence need be provided, that Gladys Mitchell has decided to provide her wartime mystery with as much background verisimilitude as possible.

Lynn M. also enjoys the author’s eye for details, and opines that “the scenes in the pub and the gym are very funny. The list of the goods in Plug’s shop and the description of the room behind it are very convincing.”

Chris chooses two locations, one foreign and one domestic, to discuss further. The first concerns David Harben’s brush with Spanish sailors. Chris writes, “The significance of the ‘non-belligerent’ Spanish boat that rescues David in Chapter 13 is that Spain was officially neutral in the war, although General Franco, recent victor of the Civil War (1936-1939), was sympathetic to Hitler, and offered him covert help. Gladys Mitchell’s evident knowledge of the islands, and of Spanish, suggests that she must, like the oddly anonymous English ladies whom David meets, have holidayed there, which it was still safe for foreign tourists to do during the Civil War period.” Chris notes that Mitchell “would later refer to the islands as a background for one character in Death and the Maiden (1947), and set most of The Twenty-Third Man (1957) on a fictional Canary Island.” The Canaries also feature in the Stephen Hockaby title Shallow Brown, published in 1936.

And finally, Chris identifies a literary allusion that pins down some West End geography. “When Mrs Bradley revisits the pub known to criminals as the Cat’s Whiskers, and ‘owns the soft impeachment’ of being a fence (the quotation being from Mrs Malaprop at the end of Sheridan’s The Rivals, first performed at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane), her thinking indicates that she is ‘between the purlieus of Charing Cross Road and the environs of Drury Lane’. The pub is therefore in the Covent Garden district, south of St Giles. In Chapter 18, she reads up on the history of the St Giles parish and its old street-names, some of which (Broad Street, Maidenhead Close) are anachronistically imported into the novel’s own fictional topography.”

Thank you once more to those who contributed this week, and to those reading along with us. We will learn next week whether readers feel this strange story finishes on a strong note or a weak one.

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Announcing December 2021 Mitchell Mystery Reading Group title: GROANING SPINNEY (1950)

GLADYS MITCHELL Celebrated at 2021 Bodies from the Library Conference

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #4

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #3

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