I was totally unaware of Gladys Mitchell until stumbling on The Stone House: A Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site sometime last year. Jason Half, the site’s creator, is doing incredible work with the tribute. It fully convinced me to try Mitchell, and I am not sure I would ever have prioritized her without it. It’s so unusual to find a dedicated tribute site to any Golden Age author (minus Christie) that my interest was piqued, and after reading the persuasive “What Makes Gladys Mitchell Special?”, she went to the top of my list. A series whose strengths are tone, style, and setting? Each book surprising, with diversity in style and plott? Particular emphasis on memorable characters!? Yes, please. Where do I sign up?!
Unfortunately, that wasn’t immediately clear. There aren’t audiobooks available of Mitchell’s work. (A shame, it turns out, because after just one book I think this is exactly the type of prose that would sing in audio.) I experimented with text to speech but it didn’t produce a satisfactory patter that is so crucial to bright young things of 1920s fiction. So I held on to the epub I’d bought and kept Mitchell near the top of my list even as I checked out other less prominent authors whose work has been moved to the audio format. In the time since discovering The Stone House, my eyesight has finally stabilized and improved after the surgery I had a year ago. This month, for the first time since 2019, I began to read long texts again with my eyes. I haven’t managed physical books yet, but through the wondrous accessibility of ereaders, I am once again a person who can read with my eyeballs. I started with a sprint through half a dozen nostalgia reads of some childhood favorites,* and when I felt ready to try something longer, I turned immediately to 1929’s A Speedy Death.
It didn’t disappoint! Which is a surprise: first books are often rough, and I tend to approach them with low expectations. There are issues with it, but my overwhelming experience was one of pleasure. The pacing was bad and not all of the characters were distinct, but Mitchell’s sleuth, Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, made the book leap off the page. She isn't in it much in the first half, but when she becomes more prominent, the book became just ... fun. I had a great time with it. I found myself wanting to join Mrs. Bradley in avian cackles of humor at times.
Quickly, some negatives: the pacing is rough. I'd like to call this a romp, since it is amusing, but as with so many country house murders, there were some draggy chapters where the closed circle of suspects mostly sat around talking with each other in different combinations about what happened. It doesn't feel very speedy at all so who knows where that title came from. The plot is a so-so mystery, but even with the pacing issues, it never falls into the boring swamp that I often encounter in the novels of Allingham or Marsh. The Stone House calls this plot "cluttered" and I think that is a very apt way to phrase a critique. From sentence to sentence, the writing is uneven. Sometimes it sparkles and sometimes it really doesn't. One symptom of the early novel, I presume, is a silly reliance on adverbs, sometimes presented in threes. At first I thought this was a quirk of Mrs. Bradley's speech, but it appears in the prose itself. In other places the prose is bold and confident, clever and characterful. I particularly liked at the end where chapters detailing a murder trial (oh, yes, there's a trial! this is regular law and order!) switch prose styles between the prosecution and defense. Neither is one great monologue, but Mitchell deftly quick changes her third person style to two very different lawyers. It was a delight. Seeing how Mitchell grows as a prose stylist is one of the things I'm most excited to keep reading to learn.
Hey, that was supposed to be my paragraph of negatives, and I quickly wrote myself into praise. Here's another negative that I think is less of one than it seemed at first, and this is a spoiler so stop reading and just get the book if that is a concern: the first victim, Everard Mountjoy, is apparently trans, and the stereotype of the sex-mad lesbian burbles in the background of much of the book. The discovery that Mountjoy is not biologically the adventurous man he presented is something that immediately threw up bright red flags to me. And while it's not great by any means, it's somehow less offensive than many more contemporary novels, and not at all close to the evil bigotry that has infected so much of British literary culture in the 21st century. I won't pretend it's progressive: the whole twist exists solely to titillate, it barely matters to the plot or characters, it's a pure shocker. The characters are shocked, too, and they don't know how to assimilate the new information, but not in a way that felt hateful across the board. The master of the house, Alistair Bing, frets over scandal, particularly because his daughter Eleanor was quietly engaged to Mountjoy. But that makes sense, and it is clearly a concern of the character because others react different. The first driver of the amateur investigation is not Mrs. Bradley but another houseguest, Mr. Carstairs, who is the first champion of the theory that Everard Mountjoy was murdered when others suspect accident. Carstairs' investigation and interest is motivated by a firm truth: he liked Mountjoy, and discovering that his biological sex was different from his gender presentation doesn't lessen his sadness at losing a friend or his belief that Mountjoy deserves justice. Carstairs' loyalty for Mountjoy isn't misplaced: it becomes clear throughout the book that Mountjoy was not some evil lesbian entrapping an innocent woman into a false engagement; there's no lurid backstory about why he was living as a man. Mitchell's disinterest in using the reveal as anything but an early twist weirdly makes for an almost neutral treatment of transness: Mountjoy is just some guy.
I am quite sure that it's unintentional, I'm absolutely not claiming that Mitchell was some visionary progressive on LGBTQ+ issues, especially because there's still quite a hefty background of "mad lesbianism" in the mind of Mountjoy's true murderer, and later the second victim, the unfortunate daughter of the country house Eleanor Bing. Eleanor is at once nymphomaniac and femmecidal. It's another thing that should be offensive but isn't, really, because it's just so pulpy... and because her descent into stark murdering madness is treated with some sympathy, and isn't actually triggered by discovering her fiance Mountjoy's transness, or by her very obvious sublimated lesbian desires, or even the discovery that her father and brother were having sex. Eleanor unravels through a convergence of shocks and traumas and those are among them, but Mrs. Bradley, a very fanciful sort of psychoanalyst, seems to understand Eleanor mostly as ill. So, she, uh, murders her. Yeah, in book one of a 70-odd book series, it's established that our detective and heroine is a murderer herself. What a roller coaster! I hope I don't have to say that in real life I don't think mentally ill people should be killed. But Mrs. Bradley's act of murder is presented as a mercy: there is no space in Eleanor's life and society for her to get help. Continued violence is inevitable, and that violence will only beget more, rippling throughout the family in circles of tragedy that Mrs. Bradley sees clearly and chooses to stop. One of my favorite things about Poirot is how he grapples with his own agency and place in the cycle of violence, but that's an aspect of his character that develops over so many books. I think it is terribly interesting that Mitchell went right for that jugular with her detective! But where to go from here?! I do plan to keep reading to find out.
*That’s Diana Wynne Jones: I found a podcast chronicling her work so I read the first six of her books in actually speedy succession, some with audio and some with my eyeballs. She’s not mystery, but she remains as magical and delightful as I remember from childhood!