A review of The Twenty-Third Man by Gladys Mitchell – 231207

Well, it’s 1957 and the thirtieth novel in Gladys Mitchell’s long running Mrs Bradley series has just been published. Picking it up, her intrepid band of readers will wonder what is in store for them. Will it be a novel with an almost incomprehensible plot and solution or will it be accessible with a plot that sort of hangs together? Like me, they would have probably concluded upon reaching the final page that this is one of her more accessible novels and merits a place in the upper quartile of her better efforts.

This is another of Mrs Bradley’s foreign jaunts, to the Island of Hombres Muertos, an island that takes six days to reach by sea from Liverpool. It takes its name from a cave in which there are the mummified bodies of twenty-three kings. To add some further spice to the Gothic atmosphere of the island, there is a community of troglodytes and a group of bandits who delight in kidnapping those foolish enough to stray unaccompanied to the cave and ransom them.    

Sharing this odd holiday destination with Mrs Bradley, now characterised as Dame Catherine, are a motley crew of individuals who are either mentally unbalanced, at worst, or eccentric at best. There is a young widow and her brother, the latter who in an act of cowardice ran away as his brother-in-law was being killed, a botanist with psychopathic tendencies who is growing new species of plant on a remote island, an ornithologist who is thought to be supplying young women to the South American sex trade, a libertine, and a man convicted of manslaughter. What could possibly go wrong?

The nub of the story is that one of the guests leaves the hotel ostensibly to live with the troglodytes but is never seen again. Mrs Bradley’s suspicions are aroused when a highly precocious and unruly child, one who is allowed to follow his spirits by his lax and ineffectual parents, reports that there are twenty-four bodies in the cave. When she gets down there, she finds there are only twenty-three but that the twenty-third is noticeably taller than his companions. Is this where the body has been hidden?

Despite all the suspects being on the island, Mrs Bradley is convinced that the solution to the crime lies in England. She persuades Lucy Gavin together with infant son to come to the island to hold the fort while she, with Inspector Gavin, pursues the truth in Blighty. Of course, she gets to the bottom of what has been going, a complex web of intrigue and past misdemeanours and jealousies, not without some risk to her life, and the denouement plays out on a deserted island just off the coast from Hombres Muertos. It all makes sense, just about, but the path to getting to the truth is rather opaque. The reader just has to hang on in there and enjoy the ride.

As a character, Mrs Bradley has mellowed. There is far less cackling and screeching, the saurian references have been toned down, and her favoured method of attack is to skewer her suspects/victims verbally. There is no little humour, a ragbag of interesting characters, and an inventive plot that puts Mrs Bradley’s detective powers to the test.