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

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.
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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.)

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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:

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"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.
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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!