MITCHELL MYSTERY READING GROUP - Come Away, Death - Post #1

Our traveling troupe is considerably smaller this time around, compared with the number who toured The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop. That works out fine; April is a rather busy month, and the choice for this Mitchell Mystery Reading Group event, 1937's Come Away, Death, may have less interest for casual readers and mystery fans than other titles. New members are welcome to join in the coming weeks – we will be discussing Chapters Six through Ten next, with observations corralled and sent to me on or about Monday, April 8 for a midweek post – and there's still a lot to discuss and expectations to be surpassed or dashed.

Come Away, Death finds Mrs. Bradley on a tour through the temple ruins of ancient Greece, where guide Sir Rudri Hopkinson is eager to recreate the Mysteries of Eleusis, rituals designed to appease and invoke the Hellenic gods.

Mitchell scholar and academic archaeologist Nick Fuller provided me with a lot of great information on the Mysteries and their actions. This is what the dogmatic Sir Rudri attempts to recreate, and I offer up Nick's research here (with more to come in future installments):

THE ELEUSIAN MYSTERIES

There are two sets: the Lesser Mysteries (an annual ceremony, involving purification) and the Greater Mysteries (held every four years). The participants are referred to as mystae and are initiated into the cult of Demeter and Persephone.
Greater Mysteries – Sequence of events (based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Way)

• Day one: Initiates gather in Agora (Athenian marketplace); fast; parade to the Eleusinion (sacred precinct of Demeter)
• Day two: Ritual cleansing in Bay of Phaleron
• Day three: Initiates sacrifice a suckling pig
• Day four: Cults of Asklepios (Latin, Aesculapius, god of medicine) and Hygieia (goddess of health) join celebrations in Athens; god visits initiates in dreams.  (Mitchell's tour group visits Asklepios' centre at Epidaurus, one of the great hospitals of ancient Greece.)
• Day five: Procession along Sacred Way from Athens to Eleusis; visit temple precinct at Daphni
• Day six: Pannychis - women with torches dance by night
• Day seven and eight: Visit Demeter's temple at Eleusis; myth of Demeter and Persephone enacted; initiates receive sacred vision; priest holds up a grain of seed reaped in silence
• Day nine: Initiates return home

Nick adds, "Mitchell assumes that her readers have a general idea of the Mysteries; she wrote in an age when educated people still took Latin and Greek as a matter of course… There was much esoteric interest in the Mysteries in the late 19th / early 20th century (Theosophy et al).  In 1910, Aleister ("I am the Anti-Christ, the Great Beast ... lend me a fiver") Crowley performed the seven Rites of Eleusis on seven consecutive Friday evenings at Westminster's Caxton Hall.  He suggested that all gods were dead but the great god Pan."  (See E.F. Benson and Arthur Machen.)
 
FIRST IMPRESSIONS

I had not read Come Away, Death in more than 15 years, and it was quite interesting to find how much of the tone and atmosphere of this book that I recalled, if not necessarily the details of plot. What struck me then strikes me now: Mitchell delivers this Mrs. Bradley tale in a very subdued and sober reporting style, and it is a world quite removed from the mannered farce found in Mystery of a Butcher's Shop. Gone, too, are those pesky adverbs littering her earliest stories, and most notably perhaps is the change in approach to her reptilian detective. Mrs. Bradley is not out to shock or cackle and feels at ease as an observer; the constant reminders of her more grotesque attributes are not here. But she seems, also, quite one with the sun-baked, dry, and dusty landscape that the group explores.

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And that evocation of place is perhaps my favorite aspect of this book. In no way is this Greece a welcoming, attractive tourist spot. The land is hostile, and Mitchell constantly draws the reader's attention to just how uncomfortable it is to inhabit. Sleeping occurs on rocky ground, on hard museum floors, or in cramped cars, and shade and water are at a premium. This world is remarkably, consistently inhospitable throughout, and it quite brilliantly helps define the flared tempers, strained relationships, and feelings of isolation felt by the characters. I'm familiar with cosy mystery stories set in welcoming, bygone English villages and others that use storms and moors to tap into Gothic dread. But here, Gladys Mitchell delivers a setting that feels both authentic and stifling, and connects it to the psychology of her characters.

Rock Shop Mysteries author Catherine Dilts was also back for a second Mrs. Bradley outing, after being introduced to GM and her detective in the last group reading event. She writes, "I love the story so far. Unlike the previous read, Mystery of a Butcher's Shop, we don't yet have a body by the end of Chapter Five. There are strong hints that amateur archaeologist Sir Rudri Hopkinson and his rival Alexander Currie are angry enough to - possibly - kill one another. And some deserve to die, like the photographer Armstrong, who is prone to kicking children. I am happy to ride along with the tour for now, as I try to follow the hints and clues dropped along the way for what I assume will happen soon."

JF Norris of Pretty Sinister Books is not enjoying the pageant thus far. I will present his chief complaint soon, but this is his reaction to the opening chapters: "I'm not intrigued by any of this. I don't know which characters to side with, everyone seems arrogant, stupid, flighty or selfish. This better improve and become something resembling a detective novel instead of an odd fantastical travelogue with mythological allusions."

JF continues, "I don't know what to make of this one frankly. It's clearly meant to be a send-up of something. I thought maybe she was sticking it to her fellow Detection Club member Agatha Christie, who had just published Murder in Mesopotamia in 1936. Mitchell's book comes so close on the heels of Christie's detective novel that I'll have to admit that it is probably not a response to the Grand Dame's archeological murder mystery.  But the two books have a quite a lot in common."

Martyn Hobbs was impressed by the evocative brevity of the prose and the allusion in the title: “There’s something rotten in the isles of Greece. In three well-wrought paragraphs made up of only four sentences (eat your heart out, Henry James), Gladys Mitchell gives us a whiff of the modern human-engendered pollution that has come to the Greece of Homer, Sappho and Aristophanes; and pollution, whether physical or moral, was no laughing matter for the Ancient Greeks.

“And then there’s the title, which comes from a song in Twelfth Night:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid.
Fly away, fly away, breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.

“There are plenty of cypresses in Greece under which corpses can be laid. It doesn’t augur well.”

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS AND LACK OF A CORPSE

I have always enjoyed the travel mystery, and Gladys Mitchell provided her fair share of variations on this type of story throughout the decades. Mitchell imbued her detective with the same physical energy and interest in exploring new landscapes that she herself shared, and it appears to be curiosity (both for the Greek rituals and for the eccentricities of those in the assembled party) that attracts her to the trip.
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From Martyn: "The most striking thing for me in this story, so far, is the quality of her writing. It’s quite wonderful. There is her usual highly-sprung, witty prose, full of humour, social comedy and sharp observation but, at least for me, there’s a different tone to Come Away, Death. She composes lovely sculpted sentences and paragraphs, chiselled, shaped, and many-layered, with an architecture to them, where information is carefully positioned and balanced. At the risk of getting too high-flown for my own good, it’s as if the forms of Ancient Greece have insinuated themselves into her prose like the serpents of Aesculapius were said to do in dreams. It has a music, too. I found I often had to read passages a second time to both get what she had said, but also to appreciate the shape of sentences. Here’s one example among many. It needs to be quoted at length:"

‘She stood before the Stele of Aristion, contemplating, not only the greaved and kilted warrior with his curled locks and long, straight feet, but the imaginary spectacles of Sir Rudri walking with torches in the dusk of the Greek evening, chanting strange hymns and sorrowful litanies to the Eleusinian gods Iacchus and Dionysus, and to the god-king Triptolemus. She could see him, dogged idealist and romancer, proceeding ploddingly the while along the petrol-haunted, dusty Sacred Way which now led, in the age of progress, the world no longer young, from one Greek slum to another.’

Catherine underscores something that definitely draws me to Golden Age Detective fiction: its depiction of another era with, often, very different perspectives than we currently carry. “I enjoy the historical aspects of the story - the 1930s, not ancient Greece. This was a time when amateur archaeologists could go on digs. It's a little alarming to watch this troop of mostly untrained people rampage through historical sites. Yet that was the reality of the time. Another reality is the political incorrectness of Mrs. Bradley and crew's views of modern Greeks and "red Indians." Mrs. Bradley, and author Mitchell, seem like enlightened women for this era. These comments are racist by our modern sensibilities, yet in other ways Mrs. Bradley seems remarkably comfortable operating in harmony with other cultures and among varieties of people.” 

But it’s also true that, certainly in the first five chapters of Come Away, Death, Gladys Mitchell breaks the unwritten genre rule that a murder has to occur early to get the plotline started. Sacrilege or mere playing with form? It depends what experience you’re looking for. While I remembered the dry and dusty atmosphere of this book from my long-ago prior reading, I was surprised that the sacrificial victim (for story’s sake) had not yet arrived by the end of this section. What I tracked instead – to my enjoyment – was the mounting acrimony and incident between the travellers, and how secrets and grudges are revealed one at a time.

JF was frustrated with this breach of convention as he continues to ask: “Where’s the murder?” The characters also fall short here for him, and he writes that “the two squabbling antiquarians seem more like children than the trio of boys who want nothing more than to play pranks. Mrs. Bradley is relegated to a sort of nanny/babysitter/pal to the boys. At least they all get decent lodging when she insists they get decent beds at a hotel in Athens. When Cathleen is forced to reveal her secret marriage, Mrs. Bradley becomes an advice giver even if that advice amounts to absolutely nothing. This is like an anti-action set of chapters.”
 
THE BOYS

I found many of the characters intriguing, with tour guide Sir Rudri not as unhinged as I recalled him to be (although a later chapter does find him eyeing the youngest in his party with thoughts of human sacrifice). Those youths, a trio of precocious boys consisting of Kenneth, Stewart, and Ivor, scramble about and plot mischief, and I enjoyed how Mitchell allows them to share a communal energy and mindset, not unlike Donald Duck's nephews. True, they are constantly squabbling with one another, but no one child rises above the collective and they are generally agreed on their goal when there is trouble or adventure to find.

JF finds them less engaging: "The boys are fine and amusing when they aren't talking like miniature versions of Bertie Wooster. I can't believe any 12-year old would say "Most unsporting of him" after teasing a lizard that decides to escape sadistic pokes of a stick and run away under a rock. And there's too much of that  'I say...' nonsense."

Catherine had a different view, and suggested a way to cope with the vernacular: "I have decided a new drinking game can be based on Come Away, Death. Every time one of the boys says the word 'ass' [as in 'you ass'], one is required to take a shot. That being said, I love how Mitchell captures the boys' personalities."

FINAL THOUGHTS ON CHAPTERS 1-5

Catherine Dilts: "I like Mrs. Bradley better in this novel. Looking forward to hearing more of her adventures." (Catherine is listening to the audiobook during a month with much commuting.)

JF Norris: "Four chapters of exposition, three pranks to mystify and antagonize Sir Rudri, a quasi-mystery of who is pretending to be a living statue... Sigh... But where's the murder?"

Martyn Hobbs: "Gladys Mitchell must have been a glorious teacher. Mrs. Bradley demonstrates great sympathy and understanding for the boys in her charge, not least when she entertains them with her tales of the ex-convent executioner!"

I will let the book reviewer for the Sydney Morning Herald from 11 February, 1938 have the last word. Thank you, Nick Fuller, for sharing! "Gladys Mitchell’s new detective story is far removed from the type of work one usually expects in this field of fiction.  She tells a good tale and her characterisation is excellent.  There is, however, very little violence and still less detection.  True, a murder is ultimately committed.  But it does not strike one as being either particularly well handled or absolutely essential to the successful culmination of the plot."

Back next week for Chapters Six through Ten! Send observations to Jason@jasonhalf.com and I will incorporate them into the post.

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