Category: Mitchell Mystery Reading Group

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

4/30/2021

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. He has shared pictures of the Strand-on-the-Green row of houses that he found on the Internet, and I post them here. 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

Actress Nancy Price (who would have made a great Mrs Bradley) with pet parrot Boney Whiteoaks.

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.

The harbor of Tenerife in the Canary Islands.

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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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #2

4/18/2021

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We begin this discussion of Chapters 7 through 12 of Sunset over Soho with a helpful summary from Tracy K., on loan from her website Bitter Tea and Mystery to read along with us. “Mrs Bradley tells Detective-Inspector Pirberry the story of David Harben's initial encounter with a young woman, which leads to the discovery of a dead body in a house. This continues with Harben's accounts of what happened after that, further encounters with Leda and some later investigations in the house where the body was found. These events go back to a few months before the war started and continue to a couple of months after the beginning of the war.” Tracy adds, “It is clear that Mrs Bradley is telling the story as it comes from Harben, and both she and Pirberry note that there could be lies and omissions in his story.”

Brentford Gasworks, c. 1950s.

Responding to the natural but forceful perspective shift of this layered narrative, Joyka writes that “Gladys Mitchell is so successful at creating this story within a story that I have to remind myself that Mrs Bradley is retelling the story.” She adds that “three times Mitchell jerks us back to Mrs B and Inspector Pirberry as though she wants to remind us” that it is Harben’s tale, and that the psychoanalyst is relating these events already once removed. It’s a fitting caveat lector, but it also provides a character justification for the surreal and shadowy mood of this section, the story coming not from an objective analytical observer (Mrs Bradley) but instead from a subjective author of fiction (David Harben).

Erin Cordell reports that she “tended to get a little lost” during the presentations of past and present – one of the challenges of this book even for seasoned GM readers – but that “some of the passages were really intriguing.” Lynn MacGrath observes, “The main point about these chapters is the tension (no wonder I read so quickly last time!) especially in the scene where Harben is attacked while swimming. There are also pathos, humour and insight; pretty impressive for a thorough-going adventure story.”

THE WAR AND THE WRITER

Researcher and scholar Chris B. has once more provided fascinating historical and geographical details for the group, and I find myself wanting to share all of his information because the context is so enjoyable. A sincere thank you for offering these insights, Chris. First up, some acronym education.

Chris writes that “the ARP abbreviation used by Stephen Woods in Chapter 12 stands for Air Raid Precautions, the general name for the civil-defence operation, comprising thousands of volunteer Wardens, that supervised response to air raids: sounding alarm sirens, organising evacuations, enforcing blackout, issuing gas-masks, guarding bombed buildings.” By the way, ARP manuevers, and a body discovered in an ARP reserve water tank by fun-seeking boys, kicks off Mitchell’s earlier high-spirited, war-set mystery, 1940’s Brazen Tongue. You can spot the initials on the headlines of the original UK dustjacket, behind a suitably reptilian Mrs Bradley.

Chris explains that in Sunset over Soho, “Stephen seems to be working on what he calls ARP firefloats – i.e. floating fire-engines, a long-standing resource of the London Fire Brigade on the Thames, and much needed in the Blitz because the London Docks were a prime target of the Luftwaffe. In this case, though, he would have joined the Auxiliary Fire Service rather than the ARP.”

Chris also gave careful consideration to Lynn Walker’s question in the previous post. She wondered whether Gladys Mitchell might have visited London during the Blitz and experienced an air raid, as the author wrote so vividly and knowledgeably about this moment in time. Here is his reply.
“We don’t have her direct testimony, and there’s a career-break gap in her CV for 1939 to 1941, attributed to unidentified ill-health. It’s conceivable that she left for some rural location (an Oxfordshire pig-farm, maybe?) along with other evacuees; but if we assume she was still living in Brentford, where she would resume teaching in 1941, she would, without needing to visit central London, have experienced multiple air raids, although not as heavy as those suffered by the East End.”

Chris continues: “Her home town, although legally distinct, was in effect a western riverside suburb of London, regularly visited by German bomber crews following the Thames in search of secondary targets; the entire riverside of Brentford, easily identifiable as an industrial zone from its Gasworks to its own Dock, was such a target. A total of 90 bombs landed on Brentford during the Blitz, one of them hitting a corner of the Gasworks, another the football stadium. The high school that Gladys had as a girl attended in nearby Isleworth was also hit. (The locations are all now mapped on the website Bomb Sight: Mapping the WW2 Bomb Census.) Gladys was not to know this when she wrote Sunset, but the first of the German V2 rockets to strike London in September 1944 would, quite by chance, land on a row of houses in Chiswick, about a mile east of the novel’s mystery house.”

Chris adds persuasively that “the carefully detailed description of the Rest Centre in the opening chapters also suggests strongly that she did personally visit the real Baptist Church shelter in St Giles with notebook in hand, although presumably by daylight when it was safer to do so. This further suggests that she was not evacuated to a pig-farm during the Blitz, nor visiting the Canary Islands, but was still somewhere closer to central London, most likely at Brentford.”

THE NUNS AND THE ORPHANS

Joyka describes the memorable introduction of some new characters in the cast this way: “A procession of boys and led by nuns marches back and forth in front of Harben’s tub, and any reader of GM knows this cannot be ignored!” In this moment, Joyka reports, “we learn that war has been declared, the orphans have been evacuated, and no one wants to take in inner city orphans. David Harben offers his boat and then his help to find housing, which leads him to a black-haired, skinny woman with a beaky mouth and a crocodile grin who is a very generous hostess. And, not inconsequentially, the very person David needs as a confidante.”

Tracy found this “a lovely sequence where David Harben discusses religion, faith and belief with the younger of the nuns.” It is indeed a nicely drawn scene, and serves to humanize both Harben and Sister Mary Dominic as they form a bond through conversation and theological debate.
Erin wrote that “Harben's discussion of God with the nun intrigued me… Murder mysteries don't often go into belief of a deity.” She asks whether “the author had religious conflicts or was she a devoted believer sneaking in a plug for religion?”

It is my view that Gladys Mitchell was a student of life, interested in exploring all the perspectives and paradoxes that humanity offered. Her books show that she is comfortable presenting characters with convincingly firm Christian religious beliefs – her beloved sister took the orders to become a Dominican nun – but she is also fascinated by pagan and occult rituals. In Soho as with so many other GM titles, there is also an ancient respect of Nature and the elements that provide a religion for the community. 1935’s The Devil at Saxon Wall is a shining example of this, and her Stephen Hockaby stories like Marsh Hay (1933) and Gabriel’s Hold (1935) also find characters interacting with a fickle Nature that can alternately bless and destroy with its power.

As for the orphans, they are not delineated as characters through the same attention the author gives the nuns who oversee them. However, their presence provides energy and a reminder that the war and displacement affects youth and adults alike. Lynn M. comments that “as usual, Mitchell writes wonderful children. The exchange between Harben and the orphans is so convincing; as in real life, the children see more than adults give them credit for!” Young people – and their attendant energy and wisdom – become colorful confidants to the elderly detective in several Mrs Bradley stories.

THE RIVER AND THE SIREN

From Tracy: “Some of the descriptions in these chapters are just wonderful. The river and its surroundings were brought alive for me in this book.” She singled out a few passages that were especially effective, including this one from Chapter Eleven:

The wide, shallow steps from the garden went down to the bed of the river. Almost beside them, less than three yards to the left, a cut had been made in the bank and a very small boathouse built. Just as he came to this boathouse the sun came bright, and the mist began to roll off the face of the garden and, hanging about the trees for a minute or two, was swept away on a breeze.

As David Harben spends much of his time in the river, navigating it with his tub, stripping and swimming the cold waters to the river bank, and even dodging a deadly attack by two men in a boat, Gladys Mitchell uses her impressive skills as a writer to evoke a tactile landscape constantly in flux between its churning currents and its swirling mists. Like the eerie house at twilight, it is another ethereal setpiece in Sunset over Soho designed to occupy a space between dreaming and reality, between fact and fiction. Even the sunset found in the title recalls an event transitioning between two states of being.

To orient us better, Chris has useful information about the specific geography. He writes that “the small riverside town of Helsey Marsh, where David meets the nuns and then Mrs Bradley in Chapter 8, is fictional. It appears to be somewhere not far from Windsor. The location of the mystery Chiswick house becomes clearer in Chapter 12, as David finds himself ‘between the bridge and the first of the riverside houses’: he is on Strand-on-the-Green, the riverside road just to the east of Kew Bridge, where the Chiswick almshouses, first mentioned in Chapter 4, are still to be found.”

The Bell and Crown today, riverside view.

Chris continues, “The ‘inn’ he visits is almost certainly The Bell and Crown (est. 1751), the first of three pubs east of the bridge. Looming over the western side of the bridge are the Brentford Gasworks (for which Gladys Mitchell’s father had once worked). Until they were demolished in 1965, they were a notoriously ugly landmark dominating both the riverbank and the main road entrance into Brentford.”

David Harben’s elusive mermaid-like love interest remains unknowable in these chapters, and this aspect of the story is the one Joyka finds least satisfying. She explains that, for her, “this book has none of the depth of characterization that I like in other Mrs Bradley novels. Harben seems trite and unexceptional. Leda is unemotional and juvenile. I think Inspector Pirberry agrees with me.” She writes that these characters are uninteresting and fare poorly when compared to some Mrs B adventures where the players are drawn with more life. Joyka references the same year’s The Worsted Viper as a contrast: “In Viper, the menace of those characters jumped off the page.” With Soho, the story takes on a “surreal” quality, and she thinks that might also contribute to her lack of engagement here.

Final thoughts from the group: Tracy reports that “so far, I am enjoying the story and the writing immensely. Of the three Mrs Bradley books I have read, this is my favorite.” Erin enjoys Inspector Pirberry – she calls out his feeling like “a squirrel in a cage” while exploring the riverside house – and notes that by the end of this section “Mrs Bradley is more clever that he is… always.” Lynn M. adds, “It’s been such a pleasure re-reading this story (more carefully this time!).”

And one last fun fact from Chris: “While examining maggots in the mystery house in Chapter 10, Mrs Bradley suddenly mentions ‘The Yellow Slugs... You must have read it.’ She refers to a short story by [fellow crime fiction writer] H. C. Bailey, “The Yellow Slugs” (Windsor Magazine, March 1935; reprinted in Bailey’s collection Mr Fortune Objects, 1935).

Next week we discuss Chapters 13 to 18 of Sunset over Soho! Thank you to everyone who is contributing or reading along with us.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: SUNSET OVER SOHO (1943) - Post #1

4/9/2021

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Welcome to our group reading and discussion of Gladys Mitchell’s evocative wartime mystery, 1943’s Sunset over Soho. We have five fearless travellers ready to explore the first six chapters in this post, and over the next three weeks will examine the rest of the book. Joyka begins with this encapsulation:

“Air raids, injuries, heroism and lots of detail about London during the Blitz as only Gladys Mitchell can provide. And then, that short paragraph that shoots us off into one of the most confusing GM stories I have read.” She quotes the text that ends Chapter 3 as Mrs Bradley begins an account of riverside adventure that is alternately dreamlike and nightmarish:

“I’m going to tell you a story,” said Mrs Bradley. “Some parts of it you know, but only the least important. It concerns David Harben and these Spaniards, and, to a certain extent, the body.”

Reader Lynn MacGrath also noticed the change in tone as Harben's story begins: "We then move to the almost-poetic description in the first few paragraphs of Chapter 4's 'Nymph', which seems like the preamble to a completely different work."

THE STORY

Sunset over Soho is known as an especially challenging book in the series, but for the patient reader it also has many pleasures and rewards. Lynn Walker observes that “this is certainly a different book. It seems that Mitchell is stretching her abilities as a writer, which is always interesting to see and so far, it works.” A city church has been converted into a Rest Centre for those injured or displaced due to air raid bombings, and Mrs Bradley and Detective-Inspector Pirberry speculate on the discovery of a dead man in a coffin found in the basement. Erin Cordell comments that “the problem of how the coffin appeared where it was discovered is a fun problem to solve; it is those types of out-of-place and confounding situations that I enjoy in a whodunit.”

THE SETTING

Contributor Chris B., who has shared some wonderful historical and geographical research about previous titles, offers much excellent information to orient us to this novel’s time and place. He informs us that “the initial settings are in the more interesting parts of London’s West End, either side of ‘the inscrutable Charing Cross Road with its million secrets’, on which David Harben has a room. To the east of that road is St Giles; to the west of it, Soho.” Chris explains that “the Rest Centre, based on a real shelter for bomb-displaced residents at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church at the east end of Shaftesbury Avenue, is in St Giles, not in Soho. It lies on “Maidenhead Close” (later revealed to be the historical name of the real Dyott Street, St Giles). Most other street names are real. These include, in Soho itself, Gerrard Street, where Mrs Bradley is renting rooms in a house with a Jewish tailor and two sex-workers, and nearby Little Newport Street, where she and David are both nearly stabbed.”

Readers were impressed at the author’s authentic rendering of this urban demi-monde. Lynn MacGrath writes that, upon her first reading of Sunset over Soho, she "was struck by the fact that 'all human life is there'. In the first few chapters, we see the realities of life in wartime London and the mind-numbing bureaucracy which kept things going." Lynn Walker notes that “it would be fascinating to know from whom she got all the descriptive details of a shelter during the Blitz. Did she ever visit London during the war and experience an air-raid?” It is a tantalizing question, and I don’t believe I have seen any interview or anecdotal information to confirm such a stay. Tracy K., who runs the great blog Bitter Tea and Mystery, adds that “the descriptions of the air raids in Soho are the best I remember reading. It makes a difference to be reading a book set during the Blitz written at the time that the war was going on.”

THE TRUTH

Mitchell achieves her verisimilitude in multiple ways. For one, the stakes seem higher here than in other Mrs Bradley stories. The tone, in my estimation, is grimmer and more sober than one usually sees, and is certainly leagues away from the winking comedy found in earlier entries like The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop and The Saltmarsh Murders. In this story, there are unsuccessful but still frighteningly violent murder attempts targeting both Mrs Bradley and David Harben, and this seems to align with the uncertainty of the times and the fragility and disposability of a human life. But there is also Gladys Mitchell’s careful attention to descriptive detail, and authenticities arise here that might be ignored or glossed over in her lighter tales. One such authentic element is a clear-eyed and non-judgmental approach to the sexual encounters described in Sunset over Soho – more on that in a moment – while another is a desire to call attention to the ethnicity of the city’s affected citizens.

Chris writes knowledgeably on this aspect: “The people sheltering at the Rest Centre are ‘of all races and classes... Jews, Greeks, Russians, French, Chinese, Negroes and English’. Local Austrian, Spanish, Swedish, Italian and Polish people are also mentioned in the first two chapters. This multi-ethnic mix is only partly attributable to recent refugees from the war. The distinctive character of Soho had since the mid-19th century been formed by its already very mixed immigrant population. The southern end of Soho around Gerrard Street more recently known as Chinatown (since the 1980s) had in the 1930s and 1940s – alongside a few Chinese and Indian restaurants – a greater variety of French, Italian and other European, including Jewish, inhabitants. It was a night-life district of pubs, cheap restaurants, night-clubs, gambling-dens and brothels.”

Indeed, from the presence of Mrs Bradley’s street-walker neighbors (unambiguously called such) to David Harben’s sexual attraction (carrying a kind of moth-to-the-flame destructive pull) to the mysterious Leda, the author here provides an unusually adult and unadorned view. It is one in keeping with an unsentimental description of a nation at war and at unglossed extremes. Tracy notes that “there is more sex in this book than in the two others I have read. It is not explicit, but nevertheless it is clear that David Harben and the girl have two sexual encounters and that he is emotionally involved.” One encounter is so striking in its forthrightness that I provide it below; while it is atypical for the author generally, it is entirely in keeping with the tactile sensuality and descriptions of willful nature found in this novel’s river scenes, full of swirling mists and flowing currents. From the end of Chapter Six:

Their bodies were cold from the river, and then, with frightening suddenness, surgingly warm, except for cold fingers clutching at shoulder and waist, and a cold mouth pressed on the living warmth of the flesh. Lean belly and rounded thigh, the pressure of deltoid and heel, strong shoulder and urgent hand, lost shape and meaning. Agony passed like a sword, effort broke out in sweat, and stars stood, shivered, and swam.

Harben recovered soonest. He pushed the wet hair from his eyes, got off the bunk, picked up his shirt, and said sadly:

"Well, that’s that. And now what the devil do we do?"

In addition to a notably modern attitude to race and sex (for 1943), Erin also recognizes in Soho Gladys Mitchell’s consistently positive view of gender empowerment. Her ageing detective and, later, her strong-willed and resourceful secretary are both women who can command virtually any situation. Erin says, “there are references in this book and in others where the author has written about equality for women: ‘Pirberry was intrigued and astonished [by this] remarkable subscription to the doctrine of the equality of the sexes.’ These sentences always jump out to me, as this is still the case among some men even in 2021.”

And Lynn MacGrath observes another impressive strength of the author, and one that I agree with regarding her entire Mrs Bradley series. Lynn writes, "One of the aspects of Gladys Mitchell's work that I especially enjoy is the way she gives us technical and mechanical information, but in such a way as to enhance the story and make us feel more at home there, without blinding us with science."

THE RIVER

From Joyka: “In Chapter 4, I feel GM started her novel all over again, this time featuring not Mrs Bradley but David Harben and his tub which he ‘clings to rather than loves.’ We learn early on he is a moderately successful novelist so a vivid imagination would be expected, no?”

Indeed, David Harben’s story, about meeting a beautiful woman one shadowy night aboard his tub, and finding a dead man in a house along the river shore, begins in Chapter Four, which Mitchell designates as the start of Book Two – The River-God’s Song. One of the challenges for readers of Sunset over Soho is undoubtedly this story-within-a-story narrative device, made more confounding by the notion that we can’t really trust what we are learning, as novelist Harben may be lying to protect himself and others. Detective-Inspector Pirberry certainly takes this view, and as the book continues, we hope that Mrs Bradley will be able to separate the truths from the lies.

Chris provides this astute observation: “While the first three chapter-titles are functional, the next three are fabulous or mythological, indicating that the enigmatic ‘story’ here told by Mrs Bradley belongs to some realm of unreality distinct from the realism of the first three chapters.”

Chris also comes through with excellent historical commentary regarding both landscape and author biography. He writes: “Chiswick [pronounced ‘Chizzick’], is part of Brentford & Chiswick, at that time a proudly independent suburban municipality (the novel is dedicated to its current Mayor) just outside the then western borders of London, subsequently swallowed up into Greater London in 1965. It sits on the north bank of the River Thames, upriver from Westminster, and opposite Kew. Just west of Chiswick is Brentford, where Gladys Mitchell had lived since the age of eight, and where she still lived in 1942 and ‘43, working as a teacher at the local Senior School for Girls. She would soon make it the recognisable although unnamed setting of her novel The Rising of the Moon (1945). Chiswick is where the riverside house of Chapter 5 is located, and where David’s boat is at that point moored.”

THE PEOPLE

Let us conclude with a few thoughts on Mitchell’s construction of her characters in this book. Personally, I find David Harben an interesting and a satisfyingly real and flawed potential protagonist. It helps that Mrs Bradley shows an affinity for – or at least an interest in – the young man in a tight spot, as the reader can then do the same. Lynn says that “characterization is always a strong point” with Gladys Mitchell, and that there is much of interest here. Erin singled out a description of the Rest Centre’s Supervising Officer as someone who ‘might die for a theory, allow himself to be martyred for an idea.’ She feels this is “a perfect commentary on the time the book was written. Britain was fighting for its life, Germany was fighting for the idea of domination and revenge.”

Lynn M. singles out the memorable "low comedy of the description of the furnace-man's monologue" in Chapter 2, and such vivid characterizations with just a few lines of description or idiom is another Mitchell strength. Here, Lynn says that "he doesn't speak but we know exactly how he sounds." The brief interview concludes this way:

There had been no coffin on the premises before Saturday, which was the last day on which he had seen the arches. He wanted to keep extra coke down there, not coffins, and but for the idiocy of the L.C.C. in blocking all possible coal-shoots from the street, he would have had another five ton put down there, ah, that he would, chance what! They could do with it, come the winter. As for coffins, he thought their place was underground.

I have to agree with Chris, though, that GM’s “over-characterisation of the Supervising and Welfare Officers (Godfrey and Edith, oddly without surnames) as truly wonderful human beings” is a narrative misstep, as it pulls the reader’s focus inorganically towards two characters who are ultimately insignificant within the story. Adds Chris: “The clumsy method is a clear case of telling instead of showing. This looks like Gladys paying private tribute to two personal friends of hers.” And she may well have been.

Thank you to all the contributors, and to everyone who might be reading along with us! Next week, we will look at Chapters 7 through 12, as the novelist and the psychologist are pulled deeper into the story. If you wish to share your comments, please send them by Tuesday, April 13 to jason@jasonhalf.com .

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