Death Comes at Christmas by Gladys Mitchell

A murky tale of murder among the Morris men and pig farmers

The Vintage edition of 
Death Comes at Christmas

We get a glimpse of Mrs Bradley’s gentler side when she goes to spend Christmas with her nephew, Carey, who is a pig farmer, in this sixth novel about the eccentric psychoanalyst and sleuth.

Taking with her a boar’s head as a present for her host, she settles down to enjoy the festive season in Oxfordshire in the company of Carey, who seems genuinely fond of his distinguished aunt, her grand-nephew, Denis, and Carey’s friend, Hugh.

Cackling, and wearing some of her luridly-coloured cardigans, Mrs Bradley dines on, not surprisingly, lots of pork, and she entertains her fellow guests with anecdotes about murderers and unusual psychological cases she has encountered.

But then one of Carey’s neighbours, a local solicitor, is found dead near the river on Christmas Day and although he is thought to have suffered a heart attack, Mrs Bradley is not convinced that his death was the result of natural causes.

Later, a neighbouring pig farmer is also found dead, seemingly having been killed by one of his owns boars. Suspecting murder again, Mrs Bradley fearlessly tries to uncover the truth about the death, despite facing physical threats herself.

Although the first death occurs at Christmas, it takes the lady detective until Easter to unravel the complex case, but I would still recommend this novel as a good read for the festive season.

Death Comes at Christmas is enlivened by descriptions of some of the local characters. Carey’s housekeeper, Mrs Ditch, who he summons to his presence by yodeling, her Morris Dancing husband and son, and her daughter, Linda, who is frequently criticised by local people for ‘trollopsen’ about the area, all add to the bizarre humour.

Mrs Bradley and Denis discover that Carey’s house has secret passages and a ghost, and the reader gets the chance to learn a lot about Morris dancing, pig farming and heraldry during the novel, which was originally published under the title Dead Men’s Morris in 1936.

Gladys Mitchell wrote
66 Mrs Bradley novels

Gladys Mitchell wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, as well as some mystery novels under the name, Malcolm Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the name, Stephen Hockaby.

A teacher by profession, Gladys wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and over the years she built a large and loyal following for her eccentric, but brilliant, detective, Mrs Bradley.

Gladys was an early member of the Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton, and Dorothy L Sayers, but she frequently enjoyed satirising or reversing the traditional patterns of the genre.

She was interested in architecture, ancient buildings, folklore and British customs, subjects that were often explored in her novels and short stories. She also studied the works of Sigmund Freud and developed an interest in witchcraft.

In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but she continued to write detective novels and received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976. The last Mrs Bradley mystery was published in 1984, the year after her death.

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Death of a Busybody by George Bellairs

A murky tale of murder with an eccentric cast of suspects 

Death of a Busybody is the third
Inspector Littlejohn mystery

The writer of Death of a Busybody, George Bellairs, was bank manager Harold Blundell  by day. 

Blundell must have been a keen student of human nature while working at his bank in Manchester because many of the characters he depicts in this story display unusual quirks and idiosyncrasies.

The busybody referred to in the title of the book is Miss Ethel Tither, who has made herself deeply unpopular in the quaint English village of Hilary Magna, by going out of her way to snoop on people and interfere with their lives.

When Miss Tither is found floating in the vicar’s cesspool, having been bludgeoned by an attacker before being left to drown in the drainage water, the local police quickly feel they are out of their depth and call in Scotland Yard.

Inspector Thomas Littlejohn, the author’s series detective, arrives by train and finds there is no shortage of suspects in the case. He must piece together the clues quickly in order to find out who was responsible for the murder of the busybody and restore order and calm in the village.

This is the third Littlejohn novel by George Bellairs, who was born Harold Blundell in 1902 near Rochdale in Lancashire. He wrote more than 50 novels, most of them featuring Littlejohn, starting with Littlejohn on Leave, published in 1941 and finishing with An Old Man Dies, published just before his own death in 1982.

Death of a Busybody was published in 1942. While he was writing it, Bellairs was working in a bank during the day and acting as an air raid warden at night, having been exempted from military service because he was blind in one eye. He had discovered that writing a detective novel helped to pass the time during the blackout.

Bellairs was bank manager
Harold Blundell in his day job

Bellairs wrote amusing stories that gave his readers welcome light relief during the war years and in the difficult decades that followed. For example, in Death of a Busybody, one of the detectives assisting Littlejohn goes to interview a retired accountant whose hobby is bird watching and who writes about his ornithological studies. The two becomes friends and the detective also becomes a bird enthusiast. At the end of the novel, it is revealed that they have subsequently published a joint treatise about birds and have presented a copy to Inspector Littlejohn. This is an example of the author’s mischievous sense of humour revealing itself in what is essentially a classic mystery novel.

Another delightful aspect of the novel is the way Bellairs depicts rural life at the beginning of the 1940s. He reveals some of the eccentricities of the local population with great humour, in a similar way to Gladys Mitchell in her Mrs Bradley mystery, The Devil at Saxon Wall, which was published in 1935.

Although his books were also published in the US and translated into other languages, Bellairs regarded crime writing as a hobby and he continued to write for pleasure rather than profit. After his death, his books became largely forgotten by the wider public, which was a great pity

First editions in dust jackets of early books by Bellairs are now quite rare and therefore collectable and fetch high prices. But now some of his books are available to new readers thanks to the British Library Crime Classics series, enabling 21st century detective story fans to enjoy his mysteries and find pleasure once again in his gentle humour.

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The Devil at Saxon Wall by Gladys Mitchell

Madness and witchcraft in a village that seems to be living in the Middle Ages

The Devil at Saxon Wall is
the sixth Mrs Bradley mystery

Probably the most bizarre Mrs Bradley mystery yet, The Devil at Saxon Wall, the sixth novel about the eccentric psychoanalyst and amateur detective, published in 1935, is the first of a number of Gladys Mitchell’s books to feature the theme of witchcraft.

The story was inspired after Gladys heard a lecture on witchcraft by her friend, the detective fiction writer Helen Simpson, and she dedicated this book to her.

Mrs Bradley has advised her best-selling novelist friend, Hannibal Jones, who has had a breakdown and is suffering from writer’s block, to retreat to a quiet, rustic village to find rest and inspiration for his work. 

Although the village of Saxon Wall might seem the perfect rural escape to begin with, Jones soon finds himself intrigued by the odd characters among the villagers and their pagan beliefs.

He also finds himself compelled to try to get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding Neot House, a place where a young couple died soon after the birth of their first child.

It is a hot summer and the villagers are desperate for rain because they are short of water. They decide the local vicar is to blame for the lack of water and Jones has to step in to defend him when their anger drives them to march on the vicarage armed with weapons.

Gladys Mitchell tells the story with
the skill that was her hallmark

Jones makes some enquiries to try to sort out what happened to two babies who he thinks may have been swapped at birth, but when a man from the village is found bludgeoned to death, he decides he must call in Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley to help him.

The strangely dressed old lady with her hideous cackle is more than a match for the angry villagers and she proceeds to root out the devil at Saxon Wall using her own unique and unorthodox methods.

At the end of the novel, Mrs Bradley expresses the opinion that the inhabitants of Saxon Wall are incapable of making straightforward statements. She thinks that this peculiarity dates back to the days of the Norman conquest when the Saxons of those parts, too cunning to tell direct lies to their overlords, resorted to maddening half statements and obscure pronouncements, which made them difficult to understand.

Although the characters and situations are bizarre, the novel presents an intriguing mystery which Mrs Bradley skilfully unravels and the story is well told by Gladys, who helpfully provides ‘End Papers’ to clarify issues for the reader.

I found The Devil at Saxon Wall entertaining and enjoyable and well worth reading.  

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Death at the Opera by Gladys Mitchell

Inoffensive’ female victim had a long list of enemies

The Death at the Opera edition
published by Vintage Publishing

Mrs Bradley uses all her skills as a psychoanalyst to find out who is guilty of the murder of a teacher during a performance of the comic Gilbert and Sullivan opera The Mikado at an experimental co-educational school.

Author Gladys Mitchell evokes the school setting very well, revealing what she thought of some of the work and the rituals she herself was involved in during her long career as a schoolteacher.

Eccentric sleuth Mrs Bradley is called in to investigate by the headmaster of Hillmaston School after a young arithmetic teacher is found drowned in a cloakroom before she can make her entrance during the opera production in the role of Katisha.  Another teacher had to take over the part at the last minute and gave a magnificent performance.

Mrs Bradley is very clever in the way she talks to both staff and pupils and persuades them to open up to her. Gladys comes up with some believable, if eccentric characters, revealing what she must have thought about some of her teaching colleagues over the years.

The author brings back the Reverend Noel Wells, who was Mrs Bradley’s ‘Watson’ in her fourth novel, The Saltmarsh Murders. He becomes Mrs Bradley's sleuthing partner again when she travels to Bognor Regis to investigate the murder victim’s past. At one stage he puts his own life in danger to test one of her theories.

They encounter a man who has been acquitted in court of murdering his wife and Mrs Bradley, showing no fear, offers herself as bait in order to see what he is capable of. With the help of Noel, she ends up solving a different murder.

Author Gladys Mitchell keeps the
reader guessing until the final pages

Death at the Opera, originally published in 1934, is written in a very elegant and witty style and Mrs Bradley is presented as a more rounded person and less of a caricature than she was in the earlier books.

The detective cleverly draws up a list of people with a motive, and a list of those with the opportunity to commit the crime. She eventually dismisses all the people with a motive and all the people who had the opportunity. She then makes a list of all the attributes the murderer must have had to commit the crime and not give themselves away. This helps her to solve the case.

Mrs Bradley also solves the offstage murder of a woman who has drowned in an ornamental pond in the grounds of a mental hospital, who had been the wife of the music teacher at the school.

Gladys keeps the reader guessing until the last pages of the book, when she produces an incredible surprise.

I would agree with a review in the Observer newspaper, which said: “Mrs Lestrange Bradley is by far the best and most vital English female detective.” I think her fifth outing in Death at the Opera shows her at her most bizarre and brilliant.

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The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell

Sleepy village provides interesting material for Freud follower Mrs Bradley

The Saltmarsh Murders was
the fourth Mrs Bradley mystery

The Vicar’s maid is strangled only a few days after giving birth to an illegitimate baby that no one has ever seen in The Saltmarsh Murders, the fourth novel to feature the psychoanalyst and amateur detective Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley.

Conveniently, Mrs Bradley is staying at the Manor House in the village of Saltmarsh, as a guest of the local squire and she is only too happy to lend a hand with the murder inquiry.

As a professional psychiatrist and follower of Freud, Mrs Bradley finds a wealth of interesting cases in the village to test her theories on. She encounters a female resident who believes everyone in the village is some kind of animal and meets the bizarre inhabitants of a remote bungalow who have imprisoned their neighbour in the crypt of the church.

The story is told from the point of view of the young curate, Noel Wells, who lives at the vicarage and is in love with Daphne, the Vicar’s niece.

Mrs Bradley adopts Noel as her ‘Watson’, asking him to introduce her to some of the families in the village and also to provide her with secretarial assistance.

Noel is both terrified and fascinated by Mrs Bradley. He admires her brains and beautiful voice, but he hates being prodded in the ribs by her yellowed talons and is unnerved by her sinister cackle. Seeing Mrs Bradley through his eyes, when he does not completely understand her theories or why she is behaving the way she does, is amusing and also a clever device by Gladys Mitchell to keep the mystery going until the end of the book.

Some of the Mrs Bradley novels
were adapted as a BBC TV series

Mrs Bradley’s investigation uncovers a smuggling racket and involves a corpse going missing, the vicar being locked up in the village pound and an exhumation being ordered, before peace can be restored to the sleepy village of Saltmarsh.

The book reveals a lot of interesting detail about life in England at the beginning of the 1930s. As a schoolteacher, Gladys is able to portray children and young people very well and, as in her first three books, she uses them as main characters.

Gladys wrote 66 novels featuring her amateur sleuth, Mrs Bradley, as well as mystery novels under the pen name Malcolm Torrie, and historical adventure novels under the pen name Stephen Hockaby.

She got off the mark in 1929 with Speedy Death, which introduced Mrs Bradley, and she never looked back, writing at least one novel a year throughout her career and gradually building a large and loyal following for her eccentric but brilliant detective.

Gladys was an early member of The Detection Club along with Agatha Christie, G K Chesterton and Dorothy L Sayers, but frequently satirised or reversed the traditional patterns of the genre in her novels.

In 1961, Gladys retired from teaching but continued to write. She received the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger in 1976.

The last Mrs Bradley mystery was published in 1984, the year after the author’s death in Corfe Mullen, a village in Dorset.

The Saltmarsh Murders by Gladys Mitchell was first published in 1932 but has been republished by Vintage Books and is now available as a paperback or Kindle edition.

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The Longer Bodies

How an athletics competition for an inheritance ends in murder

The Longer Bodies was the third
of 66 Mrs Bradley mysteries

Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, an unusual psychoanalyst with a flair for sleuthing, manages to appear at exactly the right time and in the right place to be in on the murder investigation in this third novel by Gladys Mitchell.

She is staying as a house guest in the village of Little Longer, where two mysterious deaths have occurred. When she is told about what has happened, she seamlessly becomes part of the investigation.

A wealthy old lady, known to her family as Great Aunt Puddequet, has invited her grand nephews to stay at her country house, accompanied by their sisters, so that the males can take part in a sporting contest to enable her to decide who will inherit her fortune.

She spares no expense by having an athletics track laid in her grounds, complete with long jump pit and practice areas for the high jump and pole vault, and she employs a German athletics coach.

But when the dead body of a man is found in the lake in the grounds, the police launch a murder  investigation. Mrs Bradley, who is staying with friends and neighbours of Great Aunt Puddequet, wastes no time in visiting the house to view the place where the man died and can’t resist dropping helpful little hints to the investigating officer, Inspector Bloxham.

This third Mrs Bradley mystery by Gladys Mitchell was first published in 1930 by Victor Gollanz. Gladys was a school teacher and athletics coach for many years and so she is able to describe in detail the highly unusual setting for the story.

Mitchell combined writing with
a career in teaching

The book is populated with a wonderful array of bizarre characters , such as the ancient, screeching Great Aunt Puddequet in her bath chair and her gentile lady companion, Miss Caddick, who takes a liking to the young German athletics coach.

There are strange clues, such as javelins dipped in blood suddenly appearing, although no one is actually training for the javelin, and Great Aunt Puddequet’s beloved pet rabbits occasionally disappear and then reappear.

After another murder happens in the grounds of the country house, the Inspector jumps from one suspect to another, while Mrs Bradley patiently tries to lead him to the correct solution, keeping a surprise up her sleeve until the very end.

Gladys Mitchell was a teacher of History, English and Games at St Paul’s School, Brentford, and later taught at St Ann’s Senior Girls School in Hanwell. Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and she continued to write while teaching, completing at least one book a year. She taught at Brentford School for Girls and Matthew Arnold School, Staines, where she coached hurdling and wrote the school play each year.

She retired in 1961 and went to live in Dorset, where she continued to write until her death at the age of 82. Gladys Mitchell wrote a total of 66 Mrs Bradley novels and published other novels under various pseudonyms.

The Longer Bodies is currently available from Waterstones as a paperback and as an e-book from Amazon.

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The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop

Second Mrs Bradley mystery is full of the unexpected

The Mystery of a Butcher's
Shop is published by Vintage

Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley seems even more eccentric in the second novel by Gladys Mitchell to feature the psycho-analyst detective heroine, with her gaudy clothes, birdlike appearance and sinister cackle.

Mrs Bradley has arrived in the village of Wandles Parva as the tenant of the Stone House at a time when the local squire has just gone missing and a dismembered human body has turned up at a nearby butcher’s shop, the joints left neatly hanging on meat hooks.

She quickly becomes involved in the investigation, irritating the police, employing the young people in the village to help her with detecting, and getting so close to the truth at one point that she narrowly avoids being shot in the head with an arrow fired by a figure clad in full Robin Hood costume.

While the young people think she is entertaining and a good sport, the adults in the village find her unsettling, with her yellow skin, claw-like hands and terrifying grin.

Mrs Bradley is presented with some bizarre clues, such as a human skull discovered by the local Bishop, which then goes missing before turning up as an exhibit in the local museum. There is also a freshly dug grave containing only a suitcase holding a stuffed trout with a note saying: ’A present from Grimsby.’

The police fix on Jim Redsey, a young man who will inherit his missing cousin’s estate, as their main suspect, but Mrs Bradley thinks the psychology is all wrong and that Jim is not creative enough to think of dismembering a body in a butcher’s shop or playing hide-the-thimble with a skull.

Diana Rigg played the eccentric
detective in a BBC TV series

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop is both entertaining and complex with a very tangled plot that Gladys Mitchell and Mrs Bradley both try to help the reader to solve. There are hand-drawn maps and the reader is treated to extracts from Mrs Bradley’s notebook as well as a timetable of events she has drawn up.

While the police remain baffled, Mrs Bradley assembles the interested parties and builds up a case against each suspect in turn and then subsequently tears it down, giving the reader all the facts to help them solve the mystery.

Gladys Mitchell, however, keeps the reader guessing right to the very last paragraph on the very last page.

The author had a long career as a teacher alongside her writing. She also studied the works of Sigmund Freud and developed an interest in witchcraft. She wrote 66 crime novels and was an early member of the Detection Club with other Golden Age detective novelists, but her writing style, characters and plots make her novels unlike anything produced by her contemporaries.

The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop was first published in Great Britain in 1930 by Gollanz and was republished in 2010 and 2017 by Vintage Books.

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