A review of Spotted hemlock by Gladys Mitchell – 240225

The first thing to say about Spotted Hemlock, the thirty-first in the Mrs Bradley series and originally published in 1958, is that by Gladys Mitchell’s standards it is a pretty accessible and entertaining read. The plot is predictably bonkers, a melange of rats, more rats, cellars, hemlock, rhubarb, ghostly horsemen and mistaken identities. Whether it is convincing, especially its denouement, is another matter.

Mitchell returns to a familiar setting for her murder mystery, an educational College, this time Calladale College, an agricultural college for women, which neighbours a men’s college, Highpepper Hall. The students play tricks or rags on each other and the book opens with plans being laid by the Highpepper men to plant rhubarb and dead rats on the Calladale grounds. When the girls decide to retaliate by gathering up the rhubarb, they decide to hide it in an ornamental carriage which serves as a sign for a nearby public house, but when they open the carriage up they find a badly decomposed body wearing a Calladale blazer.

The natural assumption is that the body is that of Norah Palliser, a student who has disappeared without trace and whom Dame Beatrice, as Mrs Bradley is now known, has been called in by the college principal, Miss McKay, to track down. Even her mother identifies the corpse as that of her daughter, but there are two intriguing points that unsettle our saurian sleuth. First, the post mortem establishes that the body is of a woman somewhat older than Norah and that the victim died of hemlock poisoning which suggests murder. Oh, and while a female student was getting back to college late, she was frightened by a ghostly horseman riding by. While seemingly random, this event is germane to the murder.

Dame Beatrice is on the case, assisted by her slightly annoying secretary, Laura Gavin, and aided and abetted occasionally by Laura’s husband, Gavin of the Yard. Dame Beatrice’s investigations are languid, leisurely affairs with little sense of urgency or momentum. She even has a trip to Naples and the surrounding area to check up on the Italian aspect of the case – Norah’s mother had married an Italian who is portrayed in a characteristically stereotypical and somewhat xenophobic manner and is assumed to be both a bad hat and a lothario. His innocence comes as a relief.

The bad hat in the family turns out to be Norah’s sister who is older but very similar in looks. Norah uses this happy coincidence to carry out a light subterfuge of her own, marrying an impoverished art student, Coles, and having an affair with a lecturer, Piggy Basil, who is conveniently absent from college with a broken leg, while maintaining the fiction that she is continuing with her studies at the college. It eventually dawns on our sleuth that the wrong sister had been murdered and that the ghostly horseman was the means to remove the body from the College’s rat-infested cellars.

While there are several potential candidates to fill the role of murderer, Mitchell’s choice and motivation seems at best a little weak and possibly even random. Being pressganged into something you regret can rouse feelings of ire, but murder? And the amount by which the murderer would benefit from their crime is negligible and how they came upon their knowledge of the poisonous characteristics of spotted hemlock seemed far-fetched. The murder sets in process a complicated chain of events to cover it up and remove the body and, while Dame Beatrice’s reconstruction does fit all the key facts that she has established, it seems a tad unlikely.

Written with no little humour and with some of the erstwhile Mrs Bradley’s irritating characteristics toned down, it was a delightful romp but one in which one’s critical instincts needed to be toned down.