Book review by George S: Death at the Opera is Gladys Mitchell’s fifth novel featuring Mrs Bradley, her ferocious reptilian detective. It was first published by Grayson in 1934, and appeared as Penguin number 217 in 1939 (price 6d.)
Cover of the first edition, 1934
The title might seem misleading, since the setting is not an opera house but a school, and the key event is the murder of an inoffensive teacher half way through a performance of The Mikado. Gladys Mitchell had been a school teacher, and the observation of the closed community of teachers has the ring of truth. Brought together in a common enterprise, they have very various backgrounds, interests, and reasons for not telling the complete truth about themselves.
Poor Miss Ferris has inadvertently upset a lot of people. She accidentally ruined the art teacher’s clay sculpture; she annoyed the games Mistress by keeping a girl in detention and preventing her from playing in a vital netball match; she had stumbled on the knowledge of two clandestine romantic entanglements. Most of her fellow teachers had a grievance against her, but none of these seem sufficient as a motive for murder.
Enter, several chapters in, Mrs Bradley, called in by the Headmaster, who wants the mystery cleared up for the sake of the school. At first she is employed as a substitute teacher, but this doesn’t last long. Everyone realises there can be only one reason why the celebrated Mrs Bradley, criminologist and psychologist can be working at the school at this time, so she gives up teaching, though not without regret:
There was a boy in the Lower Third Commercial with, she felt certain, all the psychological peculiarities of the Emperor Caligula. She would like to have studied him.
Mrs Bradley is a bizarre figure with very odd dress sense. She was ‘an eyesore to all and sundry in her queer but expensive garments.’ Every so often Gladys Mitchell cheers up her regular readers with a simile comparing Mrs B. to a reptile of one sort or another, as when she ‘smiled in the manner of a well-disposed boa- constrictor’.
Mrs Bradley is a very determined detective when it comes to searching for the truth, and, though a woman in her sixties, can even resort to physical violence:
She gripped his arm between her powerful thumb and skinny first finger, so that he winced with pain and tried to draw away, but she held him fast, wagged the forefinger of the other hand in his shrinking face and, dropping her voice, said in sepulchral tones: ‘And do you know what they are saying about you in Bognor?’
The puzzle is cleverly developed, with plenty of distractions and red-herrings, which I won’t tell you too much about’ you should discover them for yourself. The characters are vivid.
The construction of the book is odd, in that three-quarters of the way through, Mrs Bradley heads to Bognor Regis to solve a subsidiary mystery. During this part, I felt some impatience to be back with the main characters whom I had grown interested in. The solution when it comes, is pleasantly unexpected, and, while not exactly plausible, does make its own kind of sense.
Mrs Bradley is very individual, even in her morality. She is solving the murder not for the sake of the police who thought it must be suicide, but for her own satisfaction and that of the headmaster who hired her. There are eventually three (extremely different) murderers in this story; only one is handed over to be hanged. He is the one who is clearly labelled as decidedly non-U, the other two are socially more like Gladys Mitchell and the readers who borrow her books from Boots Library. So maybe there’s a bit of snobbery here, but I don’t find it as annoying as Dorothy Sayers’s for instance. The one handed in is a very nasty bit of work, and the other two have reasons that are credible and even disinterested, even though one might disapprove of them. Mitchell isn’t a moralistic writer, and I think Mrs Bradley’s choices and decisions are not presented to us as necessarily right, but as something to think about.
Gladys Mitchell’s books have the virtues of the Golden Age crime puzzles (good plotting and puzzles) but they also have the advantage of a keen eye for human character and idiosyncrasy. And Mrs Bradley is terrific.
