I’ve been meaning to read some Gladys Mitchell for years, and have had a couple on my shelves for at least eight years – what better opportunity than the 1929 Club, where I can encounter her detective Mrs Bradley in her first mystery.
I am familiar with some of the many Mrs Bradley mysteries through the TV series of them, starring Diana Rigg, that was on in the late 1990s. I see from the Wikipedia page that there were only five episodes made, which is odd as I remember there being far more. The first of them was, indeed, Speedy Death – though I don’t remember how accurately the script follows the original text. Something that definitely isn’t accurate is the casting. Here is the description of her, given by one of the characters:
Then there is Mrs Bradley. Know her? Little, old, shrivelled, clever, sarcastic sort of dame. Would have been smelt out as a witch in a less tolerant age. I believe she is one. Good little old sport, though.
Elsewhere she is described as a ‘playful alligator’. And every time she is mentioned, the narrative mentions her ugliness, her appalling outfits, her witchlikeness. Not necessarily somebody you’d naturally think noted beauty Diana Rigg should play?
Besides her looks, Mrs Bradley is chiefly notable for her love of psychoanalysis – very much on-brand for 1929, where Freudianism was discussed everywhere, even if it wasn’t believed by all that many people. ‘The Oedipus complex was a household word, the incest motive a commonplace of tea-time chat,’ as D.H. Lawrence wrote in 1923. Mrs Bradley is an author of books on this topic, and cheerfully cynical about human nature.
“We are all murderers, my friend,” said Mrs Bradley lugubriously. “Some in deed and some in thought. That’s the only difference, though.”
I haven’t mentioned this particular murder. It’s your classic mansion set up – a family have invited various notables to come and stay for a house party. Among them is the groom-to-be of the daughter of the house, who is also a noted explorer. Not long after everyone descends on the house, he is found dead in his bath – only it turns out that he is, in fact, a woman.
From here, things follow much as you might imagine from a Golden Age detective novel – at least in terms of plot. There are numerous suspects, there are police questionings, there is at least the possibility of more corpses along the way.
I actually found the plot a little flimsy and frenetic – things dart from one crisis to another, with not much in the way of detection happening between them. Many of the characters are similarly flimsy, though no more so than you’d encounter in many different novels. While the solution is a bit haphazard, and Mrs Bradley’s detection techniques are unorthodox, what made me really enjoy Speedy Death was undoubtedly Mrs Bradley herself. I can certainly see why Mitchell thought she should keep going with this detective, and indeed keep going for many more decades. She is larger than life, but Mitchell is brilliant at controlling that largeness – she is exuberant, ridiculous, confident but always consistent. Mitchell knows exactly what she’s doing, and deploys this bombastic character to best effect.
Perhaps later Mrs Bradley novels have a slightly more sophisticated plot, and less of a feeling that everything has been flung at it – even Agatha Christie put far too much into her debut detective novel. I’m looking forward to finding out, and re-encountering the entertaining burlesque that is Mrs Bradley.
