Category: Mitchell Mystery Reading Group

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group September Event Announced!

7/5/2020

I think most of us can say, with understatement, that this has been an unusual year. I count myself lucky, as I am still in good health and employed, which is more than far too many people around the world can report. But all of the incidental anxieties and uncertainties take a toll, and it has been difficult to find much energy outside of the daily grind of work and coronavirus precautions for creative or holistic projects. I have become a more passive and less active human artistically – a change that frustrates me – and these days I would rather read someone else's mystery story or watch a classic movie than tell my own tale or write my own review.

I hope to change that, or at least find a balance between passive and active living. To that end I announce the next Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event: anyone interested should join us for a joint reading in September of the 1942 Mrs. Bradley book Laurels Are Poison. This story of mayhem and murder at Cartaret Women's College received the most mentions when I conducted an informal poll of 1940s titles way back in March, edging out other suggestions Death and the Maiden (1947) and The Rising of the Moon (1945). Laurels also introduces the "three Musketeers" who will make future appearances in the series, the trio of friends featuring Alice Boorman, Kitty Trevelyan, and Laura Menzies, with the latter stepping up to become Mrs. Bradley's trusted factotum through the many mystery stories recorded after this one.

As with the previous reading group titles, I would like to frame the conversation by encouraging a discussion on a set of chapters each week. Readers and contributors can certainly read through the novel earlier than scheduled, but the chapter division allows us to have a more focused exchange of ideas and observations. Those who want to offer comments only need to email them to me, and I will do my best to organize and incorporate everyone's thoughts in weekly blog updates. And if you want to read but not take part in the public forum, that is also fine.

Here are the September 2020 discussion dates for Laurels Are Poison:

Chapter 1 "Open Sesame" to Chapter 5 "Intrusion of Serpents"
Email comments to me by Tuesday 9/8 for post on Friday 9/11

Chapter 6 "High Jinks with a Tin Opener" to Chapter 9 "Evidence of the Submerged Tenth"
Comments by Tuesday 9/15 for post on Friday 9/18

Chapter 10 "The Flying Facoris" to Chapter 14 "Field-work"
Comments by Tuesday 9/22 for post on Friday 9/25

Chapter 15 "Rag" to Chapter 19 "Itylus"
Comments by Tuesday 9/29 for post on Friday 10/2

I hope you are able to join us in the group reading, and if not, I wish you well in finding another satisfying story to read or tell, as your mood dictates. Stay well and make healthy choices, and feel free to send a message to jason@jasonhalf.com if you want to connect or need to commiserate with a fellow human.

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #4

2/29/2020

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Understandably, the end of the year and the beginning of the next found many of us busy juggling family, work, and life (usually all at once). This was the case for some of our readers involved in December’s Mitchell Mystery Reading Group discussion of 1936’s Dead Men’s Morris. As I am always happy to talk Gladys Mitchell and Mrs. Bradley, I am grateful that mystery writer Catherine Dilts has shared some concluding thoughts about the book! Here are her observations, along with a few of my own, to add to the recent conversation.

NATURE AND NARRATIVE

Looking at Morris’s second section, Catherine writes: “I am accustomed to the witty dialogue in a Mitchell novel, so was pleasantly surprised by detailed description of the countryside.”

The woods were the colour of woodsmoke, and had almost the same dense obscurity; on the opposite side of the road, far off beyond fields and hedges, a line of trees, a thin straggle of windblown trunks and leafless arms, stood up on the crest of a ridge like jagged clouds in the wake of a windblown storm. The sky was grey behind them, and they were silhouetted against it, a scarecrow brood with menace in their very shapelessness.

That is a great example of visual description that certainly sets the tone and reminds us that nature is literally a fundamental element in Mitchell’s prose and storytelling. From the primeval rains and muds of The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935) to the parched, dusty Greek grounds of 1937’s Come Away, Death, this decade definitely shows GM at her most evocative regarding the natural world and Mrs. Bradley’s relationship to it. Her excellent Stephen Hockaby titles of this fertile period display the same exploration of untamable nature, sometimes placid and beautiful but often threatening and destructive to humankind.

Catherine observes that the author’s descriptions of her unique detective carry their own intriguing duality: “Depictions of Mrs. Bradley could still be harsh, but at other times were flattering.”

She looked like an ancient, benevolent goddess, wrinkled but immortal.

“I felt like Mitchell had grown to love her protagonist too much to draw her as a hideous creature. Yet other characters see her as intimidating.” Tombley, for one, is not put at ease by the old woman:

To bring this terrible little old woman into the heart of his affairs was rather like asking a shark to defend one from cannibals.

Catherine notes that “in many cozy mysteries, the victim is unlikable. The author does not want the reader to be emotionally involved with the victim, and gives other compelling reasons why the murder must be solved. Typically, it is to free the wrong suspect from suspicion. In Dead Men’s Morris, the two murder victims are without redeeming qualities.” She offers up this amusing exchange as evidence of Gladys Mitchell’s approach:

[Mrs. Bradley:] “You know, Selby, Fossder was a greedy, grasping, and rather foolish old man, and Simith was a nasty, bad tempered old man. Why should we bother who killed them?”

“Morbid curiosity on your part; a sense of civic duty on mine,” said Sir Selby, grinning.

CLASS AND CONSCIENCE

Regarding the Third Figure and the final section of the book, there is this positive comment: “I was enthralled with the story, to the point that I didn’t slow down to write up notes.” One exchange gave her pause, however. Catherine writes that near the end of the book “there is a startling revelation of the social attitudes of that era that stopped me in my tracks. Carey asks Mrs. Bradley, ‘But how could [the murderer] reconcile with [his/her] conscience the murder of Priest, if that had come off?’ Mrs. Bradley replies, ‘On the principle that to the average European the slaughter of coloured people is not a matter of conscience in the same way that the slaughter of whites would be.’ Carey continues, ‘You mean that just because Priest was poor, and a country man, and uneducated—'”

Catherine concludes, “The manner in which Mitchell presented this conversation made me believe it was her commentary on an unpleasant situation, not approval of the attitude. She seems ahead of her time as an author, but is not in-your-face with her beliefs.” I agree with this interpretation, and also understand the reason for the shock. It’s a moment that directly exposes an ugly Colonialist ideology, and the British Empire is not the only nation whose citizens were quietly (or vocally) complicit in the genocide of indigenous people to promote nationalist expansion.

The parallels between European class consciousness and its corollary of racist contempt in United States history is an interesting and unappealing one. England, with its masters-and-servants divisions and a lack of belief in upward mobility, is historically different from the American view, which has always been predicated on the shakily idealistic premise that one can go from rags to riches if one only worked hard enough. America’s ugly division, historically speaking, is not as much about class as skin color, and who has power over whom, in the past and in the present. Regarding the potential murder of the uneducated laborer Ditch, I believe Mrs. Bradley has a point: the killer can dismiss the act by rationalizing that the death of a menial is not of great concern. Catherine also smartly notes that Mrs. Bradley “distanced herself from that prejudice with the phrasing ‘to the average European the slaughter of coloured people is not a matter of conscience.’ We know Mrs. Bradley is not average.”

THE VERDICT

Catherine’s final thoughts on Dead Men’s Morris below bring joy to my heart, and I look forward to future conversations with her and other group readers as we continue to discuss Gladys Mitchell’s many books!

“The closing explanation of the murder and clues was a bit long, but the convoluted plot required this, in my opinion. And at the end, I wanted to start re-reading the novel. After reading Dead Men’s Morris, I am a confirmed Mrs. Bradley fan.”

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #3

12/30/2019

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And then there were two: Joyka and I are responding to the final chapters of Dead Men's Morris in this post. Martyn and Catherine may be sharing their thoughts in the days to come, and I will be happy to add their observations in an additional post. This was my first Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event to take place in the month of December, and traveling, visiting families, and the holidays likely do not encourage weekly reading and responses for many.

Still, there are some interesting topics to explore as Gladys Mitchell's Christmastime mystery now jumps forward to Easter (in Chapter 15) and the men prepare for the village's Whitsun Morris dance. Maurice Pratt, we are told, has improved, and the usually taciturn pigman Priest will play the Fool and collect coins from the audience. The final chapter also places both Mrs. Bradley and a second target in jeopardy as the murderer of Fossder and Simith is flushed out.

Joyka writes that "characters are very important to me in a book, second only to use of language. Gladys Mitchell hits all of my buttons. I have to say, however, when she is ready to wind up a story, it moves fast. If you want to know more about Carey, Jenny, Denis and the Ditches you will need to read more books. As for the murderer, don’t expect to know the ultimate outcome. Mrs. Bradley has already moved on!"

All of this is true, and yet the ending of Dead Men's Morris, for me, is somewhat atypical of the author's usual choice of presentation. I refer to the moment that serves as climax, where an attempt at a third murder – rather quixotically telegraphed through multiple clues by the clever but apparently mentally imbalanced villain – is a rare in-the-present scene of suspense and revelation. Many of Gladys Mitchell's stories are concluded with a dialogue debriefing from Mrs. Bradley rather than a situation where the reader is invited to be witness to action and arrest, so the Morris dance mayhem here feels both satisfying and novel. The psychoanalyst still gets the opportunity to talk in the final pages, but she also physically sidesteps an attempt on her own life and thwarts the attack of another in the previous scene. Personally, I like the choice, and it helps allay my earlier complaint (see Post 2) that the reader is kept at a distance from moments of important action, such as the murders of Simith and Fossder.

The killer's personality remains, by the end of the book, rather inscrutable, and we are invited to literally take Mrs. Bradley's psychological profile of the culprit as the unquestioned truth. I keep returning to the tantalizing comment Mitchell once made about not knowing exactly who the murderer will be when she sets out to write, and that her choice of villain may change as the book forms. Interestingly, the physical clues that point – some would argue that they point too obviously – to the murderer's identity here are established in the first chapters, and no other characters fit the bill quite so well. Yet there is a feeling that, narratively, the killer could have been revealed as one of the other male characters and a few of the female characters as well, and the climax would have been just as, or more, effective than the printed one.

Both of the book's victims, lawyer Fossder and farmer Simith, receive cards before their deaths showing heraldic crests. So it is a tense moment when we see, prior to the dance, both Mrs. Bradley and Priest receiving similar cards. (The image accompanying this paragraph is a scan of the illustrations found on the endpapers of the Michael Joseph edition.) Such a decorative and genealogical plot development is not a surprise, since Gladys Mitchell has always celebrated history and setting in her mystery stories. From the Scottish Border Ballads that feature heavily in 1941's Hangman's Curfew to the Neolithic-era Rollright Stones at the center of 1980's The Whispering Knights, GM loves to incorporate UK history and topography elements, and Morris – with its ritual dance traditions and its Oxfordshire countryside exploration – is a good example of this.

Joyka was not satisfied with the author's use of the crests and their meanings. "The heraldic crests as part of the solution are a mystery to me. They seem a minor clue at best then all of a sudden they assume a major role. Maybe you need to be English to understand what they are and what they mean. I found them a confusing addition." On the other (sinister?) hand, I did not find their meaning problematic, but their use as a calling card to signal the recipient's doom feels unbelievably ornate. This returns us to the earlier point that you either accept Mitchell's sketch of the murderer's psychosis – that he is in the grip of an academically inclined mania – or you do not.

Another observation from Joyka: "My classical literary education sadly pales next to not only Mrs. Bradley, but also Mrs. Templeton, Priest’s landlady. I have no idea which young man pushed a volume of Aristotle’s philosophy down the boar’s throat to escape death. And Mrs. Templeton is a philosopher in her own right, 'Supper first, and gals come later.'"

If additional conversation arrives about Dead Men's Morris in the days to come, I will certainly report it in a separate post. I am grateful that I chose to revisit this story, as it was in some ways more satisfying and thought-provoking than the previous group reading title, 1937's Come Away, Death.

Joyka offers this suggestion for the next reading event: "I think Laurels are Poison (1942) would be a good follow-up book. We meet Jonathan, Deborah, Laura, Kitty and young Alice. And there is a brief Christmas gathering with Carey, Jenny, the Ditches, Denis, Ferdinand, and his wife, Caroline, who has been renamed. I have always thought this book was a pivot point for Gladys Mitchell." I will definitely consider it, and will announce both book choice and reading month once I have settled on them. September or October might prove agreeable, but December will likely be avoided… Happy New Year to all!

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #2

12/22/2019

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Pictured, left to right: Martyn H., Jason H., Joyka. Front row: pigs.

This second group discussion of Gladys Mitchell's Dead Men's Morris is posting a little late, as I bounce back from a bout of food poisoning. (Not from Oxfordshire boar, but likely from Wensleydale cheese.) It is just Martyn Hobbs, Joyka, and me covering the second section of the book, Figure 2: Shotover Simith, Chapters 7 through 12.

Instead of organizing the conversation loosely by topic, I will let each reader have their own section, and I will throw in my own observations where they are suitable. All of us have found much to discuss and highlight in Gladys Mitchell's prose, so this installment will feature quite a few direct quotes from the lively text.

Joyka, who confides that she "could write pages on this book," begins with a reference to the previous week's note on the narrative following the form of a Morris dance. "I am grateful to Martyn for pointing out the interplay between the story and the dance. I was feeling the movement in the story but had not made the connection. It is interesting to see almost every interaction happens between pairs: Carey and Mrs. B, Fay and Jenny, Tombley and Simith, Tombley and Fay, Priest and Lender, Mrs. Ditch and Mrs. B. There are very few group scenes in this book."

That couples comment nicely introduces an element I have been tracking and ruminating on since I started Dead Men's Morris. For me, this book is sometimes quite patience-testing in its approach to the detective story template, in that we are nearly always once removed from any moment of primary importance. This, of course, is traditional to any mystery puzzle, where the murder has already occurred and the sleuth must by necessity interview suspects and witnesses and try to recreate the past to understand what happened.

But Mitchell sometimes delivers stories that can feel like the theories and conjecture are dealt out too quickly to carry weight. The reader tries to keep track of all of the potential combinations and their merits, but the discussions remain between Mrs. Bradley and the person in whom she is confiding (often her nephew Carey here). The result can be quite fatiguing, especially as a particular theory is sometimes not followed up with a present action or exchange with the person under suspicion.

To this point, Dead Men's Morris still indulges in this limitation while succeeding as well as any book can do that puts dialogic theorizing in place of genuine, in-the-present suspense and plot advancement. Chapter 11 is particularly good, a twisty (if tiring) bout of theorizing about character movements and nocturnal pairings. For other examples where Gladys Mitchell uses this talk-it-all-out approach, see Death and the Maiden or the final chapter of Brazen Tongue. Her books from the 1960s on also incorporate two-person character conversations about past action to drive the plot far more often than any present action narrative scenes. (Mitchell can write marvelously in the moment as well, however: The Saltmarsh Murders, The Rising of the Moon, and Laurels Are Poison are just three examples where scenes of incident propel the present and exchanges are not relegated to discussions of the past.)

Joyka offers an intriguing hypothesis when she contrasts Mrs. Bradley's nephew Carey with the psycho-analyst's barrister son Ferdinand Lestrange. "I believe that Mitchell created Ferdinand and he turned into an intellectual stuffed shirt – no fun at all. Mrs. Bradley needed a more likeable, human relative. His mother admires Ferdinand’s brains and his cleverness but no way could one imagine this interaction with her son:

Mrs. Bradley, with a veil tied under her chin to keep her hat on, and fur-lined gloves on her hands, sat patiently in the sidecar...
“Garsington!” screamed Mrs. Bradley, above the noise of the engine. “Garsington ho!” bellowed Carey, as he turned the corner and slightly opened the throttle.

Also from Joyka: "Mrs. Ditch is my favorite after Mrs. Bradley. Her speeches are pure gold. I wonder if GM didn’t know someone who actually did talk like this. A few of my favorites in this section:

“I don’t thenk at all,” said Mrs. Ditch, eyeing him calmly. “Tes a bad ’abit, and shouldn’t be encouraged en nobody. Ef us didn’t thenk, us wouldn’t make oursen miserable. That’s what I ben sayen to our dad.”

and

“Our Lender... trapsen and trollopsen over the country...”

Mrs. Bradley does some trapsen too (if not necessarily trollepsen) as she visits a psychologist colleague and a forensics analyst in London. The latter meeting is singularly notable because Mitchell stages it at The Detection Club, the real-life gathering place for many of England's most famous authors. Martin Edwards has assembled a fascinating and informative history of The Detection Club in his book The Golden Age of Murder. Here are the references within Dead Men's Morris, taken from Chapter 9:

"Blood," said the analyst, two days later. He had met Mrs. Bradley, by appointment, at the Detection Club, of which she had been made an honorary member, and they sat in armchairs in the larger of the rooms which overlooked the street.

The brief scene continues with the analyst confirming that the blood in the soil under old Simith's body was likely pig's blood, and Mrs. Bradley explains that the local inspector in charge of the case "came to a series of popular lectures I gave at the Oxford City Y.M.C.A. a year or two ago, and we get on famously together. I teach him the art of knife-throwing and explain Lombroso's theories, and tell him why most of them are discountenanced to-day." Then, with the meeting over,

They descended the dark and ancient staircase past the haunts of industry, pleasure and mystery which made up the remainder of the house and, turning into Shaftsbury Avenue, were soon at the entrance to Piccadilly Tube station, where they parted.

Joyka finds one interview moment particularly "ridiculous": Mrs. Bradley talks with Jenny while the healthy young woman is taking a bath. "She wanted a private talk, I understand that, but surely this is way beyond normal behavior for this decade." It certainly seems an unusual choice, especially as there is nothing psychologically beneficial to the setting, such as advantageous use of power and vulnerability. Jenny here is just as amiable and guileless as Carey, and the interview could easily have waited (or have been set elsewhere). And while there is no inference in the text, either of adverb, description, or dialogue, to turn the scene sexual or voyeuristic, neither is it completely innocent, particularly when factoring in the author's probable sexual orientation. A male detective interviewing a male suspect as he showers, in the 1930s or today, would have the same strange frisson, however innocently the scene was presented.

Joyka: "The murder puzzle is a good one in Dead Men’s Morris. The use of the boars is unique as far as I know and creates an interesting conundrum: could someone who doesn’t handle boars have committed this murder? Interestingly, GM uses a boar at Carey’s farm again to kill in a later book" [in 1981's The Death-Cap Dancers, which features Carey's daughter Hermione Lestrange in her own outdoor adventure].

Next, we hear from Martyn, who shares some of his favorite literary moments. His comments this week are largely in celebration of Gladys Mitchell's wit, which, he writes, "is intelligent, playful, bountiful and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny." I quite agree – it's certainly one of the qualities that most endears me to her work. Martyn recognizes the voice of P.G. Wodehouse in Carey's reply, "If I heard pigs in trouble, I should hasten pigwards without a second thought. The whole thing is unhealthy and morbid, and strictly on the lines of the so-called maternal instinct…"

The author's descriptions of her elderly sleuth continue to be worthy of study. Martyn: "The saurian Mrs. Bradley is often compared to a boa constrictor, but these allusions become increasingly elaborate. 'Mrs. Bradley… [was] eyeing him with the maternal anxiety of a boa-constrictor which watches its young attempting to devour their first donkey.' The visual absurdity of the image is a joy. She can even include two beasts in one sentence, '…looking like a benevolent alligator and then suddenly screeching like a slightly demented macaw.'"

Martyn notes Mitchell's empathy for children and animals alike through her descriptive imagery. "Describing Nero’s discontent at the presence of humans, 'his ears were cocked like those of a suspicious, unfriendly dog, and even his tufted tail lacked that air of roguery inseparable from the appendages of pigs in general.'" Also worth honouring is the author's "artistry in depicting all registers of speech, in this case, the disintegration of grammatical laws in the sergeant’s laborious attempts at logic":

"Well, you onderstand, I can’t say in words what I mean (…) As I tell ee, u knows her work, and if us didn’t, Sir Selby do, too and all, don’t him?"

Martyn notes that Mrs. Bradley's quotation of "Proceed, moon," to her nephew is from A Midsummer Night's Dream ("and just to say, there are an awful lot of strange goings on and the misadventures of mismatched lovers in GM’s Midwinter Night's drama"). He also points to Mitchell's skill at pastiche, as the reader is treated to some "very modern verse" in the form of a pig-centric poem:

…The fat-stock prices, Oxford-on-Cam pronounced.
(Strattford-atte-Bow, quoth Chaucer)
Fie, for shame!
Hoodoo, or Voodoo – same?
Shame, same; same shame as
Eve’s.
Significant form? What else?
Squirms matter? All her dugs?

"There’s more than a hint of Pound’s Cantos here," observes Martyn of the satiric poem, "or even Samuel Beckett’s Whoroscope (1930)." To me, the fact that Gladys Mitchell includes such amusing digressions and has faith that her readers will also enjoy the joke sets her apart from her genre writing contemporaries who never chose to break convention or experiment with content. Of course, the opposite case can be made that such additions create only frustrating distractions for the puzzle-minded reader… but I have never been solely a puzzle-minded reader, as GM has never been a solely puzzle-minded writer.

Mitchell even provides those turns of phrase that make us groan, notes Martyn: a pig farmer with "piggish" eyes; the inspector declaring the case "a rare old dance." But he also points out the author's "brilliant evocation of the wintry Oxfordshire landscape, brooding, dark, low and damp." One example:

The woods were the colour of woodsmoke, and had almost the same dense obscurity… a line of trees, a thin straggle of windblown trunks and leafless arms, stood up on the crest of a ridge like ragged clouds in the wake of a windblown storm... a scarecrow brood with menace in their very shapelessness.

Martyn: "And after all the indirections, the endless discussions and possible explanations, suddenly, at the end of this section, there is a moment of real peril – with the secret tunnel inexplicably close, Carey trapped underground, and Mrs Bradley alone. The mood changes again, but for just that moment, the threat of physical danger was a welcome intrusion." This is an uncommon instance of present action rather than past-events discussion in Dead Men's Morris, to recall my earlier criticism. The good news is that the third and final section delivers a notably sharp in-the-moment finale, if memory serves.

The post for Figure 3: Parson's Pleasure will be delivered on or about December 30. I look forward to finishing the dance!

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group September Event Announced!

Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #4

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Mitchell Mystery Reading Group: DEAD MEN'S MORRIS (1936) - Post #2

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