Gladys Mitchell

• Born: April 19, 1901
• Birthplace: Cowley, Oxfordshire, England
• Died: July 27, 1983
• Place of death: Corfe Mullen, Dorsetshire, England

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; cozy

Principal Series: Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, 1929-1985

Contribution

It is tempting to compare Gladys Mitchell, the creator of Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, to her contemporaries, Agatha Christie, the creator of Miss Jane Marple, and Patricia Wentworth, the originator of Miss Maud Silver. All three began writing mysteries in the 1920’s with novels that featured eccentric female sleuths who occupied their spare time with knitting. There the similarities end, for in Dame Beatrice Gladys Mitchell created a far more complex and controversial character than either Christie or Wentworth imagined. In her fifty-year career, Dame Beatrice turned into the sleuth many readers loved to hate.

Gladys Mitchell’s personal interests are clearly reflected in those of her female sleuth: Dame Beatrice is, among other things, a psychoanalyst and is reputedly the descendant of a woman executed for witchcraft. This intermingling of modern psychoanalytic theory and the supernatural in Mitchell’s fiction has made her books either maddening or absolutely intriguing depending on the biases of her readers.

An extremely literate writer, Mitchell constructs plots that are, at their best, exceptionally intricate and filled with digressions on various subjects (such as transvestism) and, at their worst, improbably convoluted. At times it is difficult to decide whether she is writing serious crime fiction or attempting an arcane spoof of the genre.

She was, however, nothing if not prolific, having written more than sixty novels in her fifty-four-year career as a mystery novelist. Her fiction is quirky and eccentric, in keeping with the fictional sleuth she created in 1929, but she is never dated. In fact, Mitchell’s greatest strength lies in her originality and her attempts at contemporaneity.

Biography

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell was born on April 19, 1901, in the village of Cowley, Oxfordshire, the daughter of James Mitchell and Annie Julia Maude Simmonds Mitchell. After attending Goldsmith’s College, University of London, from 1919 to 1921, from which she received a diploma in history in 1926, she became an elementary teacher, a career that lasted for more than a quarter of a century. Although she first began teaching out of financial necessity, her foray into the field of detective fiction in 1929 soon made her financially independent. During and after World War II she continued to teach because of the national teacher shortage.

Conservative in political philosophy, agnostic in her religious beliefs, Mitchell pursued her career as an educator until 1961; at the same time, she produced at least one mystery novel every year, writing under her own name and the pseudonyms of Stephen Hockaby and Malcolm Torrie. She was a member of the Society of Authors, the Crime Writers’ Association, and the Detection Club. She was also a fellow of the Ancient Monuments Society. In 1976 she was awarded a special award from the Crime Writers’ Association in recognition of her having written more than fifty mysteries. She died at her home in Dorsetshire on July 27, 1983, at the age of eighty-two. She was still writing mysteries at the time of her death.

Analysis

Speedy Death (1929), the first novel featuring perennial sleuth Mrs. (soon to be Dame) Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, set the tone for Mitchell’s half-century-long career as a mystery writer. In this novel Mrs. Bradley commits justifiable homicide (much as Hercule Poirot does in Agatha Christie’s last book to feature the Belgian sleuth). Mitchell’s refusal from the very outset of her career to make her villains totally villainous or her heroes and heroines totally heroic partly explains the difficulty critics have in coming to grips with her as a writer of detective fiction. It is ex ceedingly difficult to decide—since Mitchell consistently refused to give her readers direction in this matter—whether she regarded herself as a serious practitioner of the craft of crime writing or whether she wrote with tongue in cheek.

Considering the female sleuths created by Mitchell’s contemporaries Christie and Wentworth, Dame Beatrice is a model of the liberated woman. Although she knits, she is more similar to Madame Defarge than she is to Miss Marple and Miss Maud Silver. Not only are marriage (at least two and possibly three husbands exist in her past) and motherhood (she has at least one son, the eminent barrister Ferdinand Lestrange, possibly two) part of her experience; she is a woman of the world par excellence. It is not by coincidence that the first novel in which Dame Beatrice appears revolves around the question of transvestism, one of many subjects in the treatment of which Mitchell was ahead of her time. In the early novels Speedy Death and The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929), for example, Dame Beatrice professes a belief in the necessity of birth control. Dame Beatrice is highly educated, sophisticated, and worldly wise. She is a psychoanalyst, soon to become psychiatric adviser to the Home Office, an amateur expert on the occult, and the recipient of too many academic honors to count.

Dame Beatrice’s intellectual sophistication is matched only by her fascination with the occult. Like her creator, she values her purported descent from a witch. As the series progresses and Dame Beatrice ages, her appearance becomes more and more witchlike. The relationship between madness and the supernatural is underlined by the titles of many of Mitchell’s books: Convent on Styx (1975), Merlin’s Furlong (1953), The Rising of the Moon (1945), Uncoffin’d Clay (1980), and Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982).

Many of Mitchell’s early novels verge on being spoofs of the genre in which she became so firmly entrenched as a writer. Even Dame Beatrice’s ubiquitous knitting of unidentifiable objects serves as a parody of the fluffy pink items that Miss Marple’s needles produce or the practical baby clothes that result from Miss Maud Silver’s endeavors. In contrast to the limited perspectives of these two single women, Dame Beatrice’s intellectual breadth and worldliness seem to represent an attempt at deliberate satire. One thing Dame Beatrice can never claim to be (especially after committing homicide in Speedy Death) is innocent.

Dame Beatrice’s choice of Watsons also reflects her author’s growing sophistication. In her early novels Mitchell provided Mrs. Bradley with Noel Wells, a curate whose brain she likens to a turnip. It is not surprising that Wells’s views of Mrs. Bradley are at first unsympathetic; throughout the series, however, he comes to admire her originality and her intellect. Because he prefers old women to be soothing, Wells’s discomfiture with Mrs. Bradley’s character is all too understandable.

Laurels Are Poison

Mitchell created a far more successful companion for Dame Beatrice in Laura Menzies (later Gavin), who first appeared in Laurels Are Poison (1942). Like many of Mitchell’s novels, this one is set in a teachers’ training college, where Laura Menzies is a student. Athletic, Amazonian, given to plunging into an ice-cold bath every morning, Laura remains unperturbed in the face of whatever adventures her association with Dame Beatrice happens to bring her. In the forty years ahead of her in her role as secretary, typist, assistant, protector, and companion, Laura will need whatever sangfroid her creator can afford her. In time she acquires a husband, not without coincidence an officer at Scotland Yard, and two children, whose needs always come second to those of her employer. Her original motto is “Action! Give me action!” As Dame Beatrice’s Watson she is certain to have her desire fulfilled.

The Saltmarsh Murders

Although Mitchell’s novels feature settings with which she was familiar (girls’ schools, small villages, teachers’ training colleges), her treatment of the events that occur in them is far from ordinary. One of the most difficult aspects of Mitchell’s writings lies in the complexity of her plots and the ubiquity of her digressions. Mitchell’s personal passion for the occult, the supernatural, and the depths of the human psyche frequently interferes with the progress of her novels, much to the readers’ annoyance. The Saltmarsh Murders (1932) is a perfect example of this tendency of Mitchell to allow her own enthusiasms to baffle and confuse her readers. The vicar is an adulterer, and his wife a repressed nymphomaniac as well as a sadist. Mitchell’s preoccupation with the complexities of their psyches interferes with the action of the novel. The Saltmarsh Murders also features a young maid who gives birth to an illegitimate child, a promiscuous actress, and a closet pornographer, not to mention bodies that end up in the wrong coffins, all heady stuff for the era in which Mitchell was writing.

In the first few novels Dame Beatrice is an amateur sleuth. Not long into her fictional career, however, she is given the role of psychiatric adviser to the Home Office. Elevation to this quasi-official status undoubtedly gives her access to a wider variety of crimes. It also allows her to exhibit a degree of professionalism not available to her female contemporaries such as Miss Marple and Miss Silver. If it were not for her marriages and her children, one would think—given Dame Beatrice’s reptilian appearance—that Mitchell was trying to make her more like a male detective in the mold of Albert Campion or Roderick Alleyn.

Mitchell’s novels tackle a number of fanciful aspects of British life in the 1920’s, 1930’s, and 1940’s, most of which reflect her own wide-ranging interests. Witchcraft is foremost among them, but the topics dealt with in her many novels also include morris dancing, archaeology, pig farming (a specialty of Dame Beatrice’s nephew in Here Lies Gloria Mundy), seawater baths, and Druidism. Contrived plots concerning arcane topics were characteristic of British mystery writing during the 1930’s and 1940’s, but Mitchell continued to build her novels around them into the 1980’s.

Her writing, however, has never become totally dated. Partly because she always wrote ahead of or at least outside her time, Mitchell was, even at the end of her long career, far more adept at dealing with modern subjects than was Agatha Christie. Arcane, convoluted, quirky, Mitchell’s books will always be limited in their appeal, but they constitute a distinctive contribution to the mystery genre.

Principal Series Characters:

• Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley is a psychiatric adviser to the Home Office. Middle-aged when the series begins, Dame Beatrice ages until she has the appearance of a “benign lizard.” Formidable, witty, stylish, holding honorary degrees from almost every university in the world, she resolves cases with reference to the suspect’s psyche and the supernatural.
• Laura Menzies Gavin is Dame Beatrice’s faithful secretary and general dogsbody. In later novels, she is conveniently married to a Scotland Yard detective. She is athletic, attractive, intelligent, intrepid, and also, as the series progresses, the mother, somewhat reluctantly, of two children.
• Noel Wells is a rather dim young curate who plays Watson to Beatrice’s Holmes in the early novels of the series before he disappears in favor of the more satisfactory Laura Menzies (later Gavin).

Bibliography

Budd, Elaine. Thirteen Mistresses of Murder. New York: Ungar, 1986. Study of thirteen important British and American female detective fiction authors helps place Mitchell in context.

Craig, Patricia, and Mary Cadogan. The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1981. Extended study of British women detectives and their creators sheds light on Mitchell’s writings.

DuBose, Martha Hailey, with Margaret Caldwell Thomas. Women of Mystery: The Lives and Works of Notable Women Crime Novelists. New York: St. Martin’s Minotaur, 2000. Mentions Mitchell in connection with the other Golden Age writers and contains information on those writers that helps the reader understand Mitchell.

Hanson, Gillian Mary. City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2004. Analyzes Mitchell’s use of setting in The Saltmarsh Murders. Bibliographic references and index.

Kungl, Carla T. Creating the Fictional Female Detective: The Sleuth Heroines of British Women Writers, 1890-1940. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Study of unknown and overlooked British female detective fiction authors who, Kungl argues, were direct influences on the fiction of Mitchell, as well as that of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.

Reynolds, Moira Davison. Women Authors of Detective Series: Twenty-one American and British Authors, 1900-2000. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2001. Examines the life and work of major female mystery writers, including Mitchell.