A review of Death and the Maiden by Gladys Mitchell – 230301

Not all of Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley series are available in a format priced at a level to ensure that the kids’ inheritance is not seriously depleted. Perhaps it is a ruse by the publishers to ensure that the reader’s patience and sanity is not too sorely tested as Mitchell, to be charitable, can be a perplexing writer, one willing to bend the conventions of detective fiction to a point when they creak at the seams. Nevertheless, I am trying to read what are available in chronological order, but found to my horror a little while ago that I had overlooked her twentieth, originally published in 1947. Poor sleuthing on my part but the error has now been rectified.

In many ways Death and the Maiden epitomises Mitchell’s approach to crime fiction. There is no doubting that it is beautifully and elegantly written with no little wit, some memorable scenes and many a pithy sentence that stick long in the memory. It is an active book with Mrs Bradley and her accomplices – the book sees a reunion of the Three Musketeers, Laura, Kitty, and Alice, whom we met in Laurels are Poison – shuttling back and forth between London and Winchester and the south coast. And then there is the Naiad, reports of the sighting of whom brings the four suspects to Winchester in the first place.

The book is undoubtedly a love poem to the beautiful city of Winchester and the River Itchen, Mitchell’s descriptions especially of the water meadows hitting a level of lyricism that confirm her at her best as a fine, technical writer. They are a delight to read. However, she also imbues her books with a somewhat, at least by modern standards, a wonky moral compass. When this book is boiled down it is about the brutal and senseless murder of two youths, but the horror associated with the deaths seems undercooked, playing a distinctive second fiddle to the more labyrinthine enquiries into what was the grand plan behind deaths of two from the lower order begotten of feckless parents that were seen as little more than dress rehearsals for the real thing.

Avarice, sheer hatred, and an overpowering protectiveness are tried and tested motives for murder, but vanity, an unattractive quality for sure, or, at least, its pricking, is hard to imagine as something which would drive someone to commit murder most foul. The determination of one of the protagonists to pin the blame on one of the other suspects leads to the case against them being fatally undermined but justice of sorts is served offstage when the two are gripped in a fatal and titanic struggle. Among the clues are a pair of sandals, each found in separate locations, a Panama hat, a hole used by tramps, and a pair of gloves, while a large geranium plant leads to the clearing of the suspect whom the police have charged with the first boy’s murder.

The suspects are Edris Tidson, who has left Tenerife where he grew bananas so seriously financially embarrassed that he has to live off his cousin, Priscilla Carmody, but he has high hopes of coming into an inheritance, his wife, Crete, and to complete the foursome who come to stay in Winchester as Tidson hunts the Naiad, Miss Carmody’s sulky niece, Connie. Only one can have murdered the boys and whilst it is fairly obvious whodunnit, Mitchell does her best to hide the clues with a shoal of, given the book’s freshwater fishing leitmotif, red trout.

While the mystery itself might not live long in the memory, the episode of the four black eyes will. There is a dead dog, dunkings in the river, the redoubtable Laura, who snares a fiancé in the shape of Inspector Gavin, skinny dipping, secret passages and priest holes, a ghost dressed as a nun who squeaks, escapades on rooftops and much more. It is great fun and Mitchell is on form. For all its oddities and imperfections, it is almost the perfect Mitchell story.