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Death and the Maiden

Page history last edited by PBworks 16 years, 6 months ago

Mitchell, Gladys - Death and the Maiden (1947)

 

There is also a book with this title by Q Patrick. The original quote comes from Sweeney Agonistes by TS Eliot: Death and the Maiden dance above/ And Sweeney guards the horned gate.

 

 

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

‘This seems the place for naiads. It certainly isn't the spot for two murders, is it? I do think Cathedral cities, and these water-meadows, ought to be immune from horrors, and policemen, and nasty little brutes like Tidson.’

 

‘…These murders are not native to the place. They have been planted here by the devil, or some of his agents.’

 

The blurb of Death and the Maiden calls the plot an “astonishing tangle of crime”—a description justified by the events of one of Gladys Mitchell’s half-dozen masterpieces, a tale at once witty, imaginative, original, and full of incident. Yet this complexity — a veritable symphony of complexity — seems neither cluttered nor convoluted, such is the considerable skill with which the author unwinds her yarn.

 

The setting is the cathedral city of Winchester, where a naiad has been seen in the River Itchen (and is later heard to quote The Frogs of Aristophanes — sheer Mitchellian genius), “which ordinarily offered a habitat to nothing more sinister than a pike, more beautiful than the grayling or more intelligent than the brown trout”, a locale which Mitchell evokes with her customary lyrical grace — and, “in a city which harbours a naiad in a chalk stream, anything may happen”. Edris Tidson, a retired banana-grower recently arrived from the Canaries with his beautiful half-Greek wife Crete, and staying with his cousin Priscilla Carmody and her niece Connie (much to their discomfort, for Tidson is by way of being a parasite), is much attracted by the idea of the naiad, and moves to the Domus Hotel, Miss Carmody paying the bills for the four of them. The characterisation of the four suspects is particularly sharp, although, as Mrs. Bradley reflects, “the Carmody household, comprising, as it did, the fantastic Mr. Tidson, the astoundingly beautiful Crete, the discontented Connie and her troubled, respectable aunt, appeared to have something more in common with the surreal than with the real”.

 

Mrs. Bradley is asked by Miss Carmody to vet Tidson, whom she believes to be mad, and whom the natives of the Canaries feared as having the evil eye — and finds herself in particularly strange territory, even by Mitchell’s standards. Although Tidson is clinically sane (if undeniably eccentric), Mrs. Bradley is suspicious of Tidson’s interest in the naiad, feeling that “a middle-aged gentleman of slightly eccentric mentality could cause a naiad to cover a progressive multiplicity of actions, including quite a number of sins. It was a fascinating field of surmise, in fact, to work out what sins in particular the naiad could help to screen”. Connie Carmody is disturbed during the night by the squeaking ghost of a nun, which Mrs. Bradley feels may have been created for human reasons (the hotel porter, Thomas, a masterpiece of comic invention, argues that “hotels are not made to be haunted. The guests, maybe, couldna thole it. Ghaisties wadna come whaur they werena welcome”), and which she believes may have entered Connie’s room through that Mitchell trademark, the secret passage.

 

A small boy is found dead by the river, perhaps drowned by the naiad, perhaps (as the police believe) murdered by one Potter, who found the body, and with whose foster mother he was believed to be having an affair. Miss Carmody differs, however, and, believing Tidson to be guilty of the crime, asks Mrs. Bradley to begin her enquiries, which she does in an absolutely superb way, disquieting suspects left right and centre, and giving vent to her customary eldritch cackle: “not a mirthful sound, and Laura, who had learnt to regard it as a war-cry, looked at her rather in the manner of stout Cortez regarding the Pacific”. Laura Menzies (who meets and becomes engaged to Det. Insp. Gavin, disguised for most of the story as an angler) and her two friends, Alice Boorman (who discovers a second dead boy) and Kitty Trevelyan, ably assist her, and, for once, the Three Musketeers are an integral part of the story and not dragged in for reasons of sentimentality. As her investigations proceed, Mrs. Bradley finds herself “more and more interested in the strange little man (Tidson). His potentialities, she felt, were infinite. She longed to ask him, point-blank, whether or not he were a murderer, but she felt that this would ruin their friendly relationship and defeat the object of the question, which was, quite simply and unequivocally, to find out the answer.” Her suspicions are justified. Tidson’s guilt is suspected early on, and stated halfway through; this is one of those stories where the detective interest lies in piecing together motive (Mitchell juggling several possibilities, including practice makes perfect, gain, and revenge in the air) and method, and in finding proof - of which there is plenty of psychological proof, but “no material proof whatsoever”, despite a plethora of sandals, black eyes (a brilliant touch, this), rafts, wills, illegitimacy, secret passages, and finger-prints. The problem is further complicated by the suspicious behaviour of other characters, especially Connie Carmody.

 

The ultimate solution to the mystery is particularly ingenious: a devilishly subtle motive relying on bluff, double-bluff and triple-bluff. Although all the clues to the mystery are provided, it will be an intelligent reader who finds the true solution before Mrs. Bradley chooses to reveal it. Although every act is attributable by the end, and the solution quite logical, there are a few points improperly explained: why was the evidence planted when the individual in question knew Mrs. Bradley had already searched the hole? How did the Tidsons hope to make people infer that the dog had been killed by a sadistic lunatic by throwing a boot into the river? Why (and Jason Hall has already pointed this out in his excellent review) was Crete Tidson naked when drowned, why were her clothes hidden in the river, and why was she placed in the river? There are a few minor signs of carelessness: the boy’s age in the paper on pp. 40 and 43; Connie’s whereabouts on pp. 75 and 76; and the victim’s name changing from Hugh to John Biggin.


A letter to a newspaper reports that a naiad has been seen at Winchester; so middle-aged sponger Mr. Tidson sets off for a holiday there with his improbably beautiful wife Crete and two female relatives. But it appears the letter has been planted, and perhaps by Tidson himself, so what is he really there for? Is he just a tiresome lecher, or does the visit have something to do with the discovery of a dead child by the River Itchen?

 

Tidson's Aunt Priscilla calls in Mrs Bradley, who cheerfully drops everything and prepares to spend large sums of money and the best part of a month investigating these appalling people, in which she is aided by Laura and her two ex-schoolfriends. At first the conventions of detective fiction are observed; but by the halfway mark it is clear that we are well into Mitchell-land, and motivations have parted company with common sense on the other side of the border. Heavy going for a GAD fan! The book is well written and occasionally funny, and Tidson is convincingly devious; but the 'explanations' which occur and recur in the latter part of the book seemed to me utterly arbitrary. If Mrs Bradley had demonstrated at the end that the culprit was George, the chauffeur, I would have been no more convinced -- or interested. And three secret passages in one room is well in excess of canonical regulations.

 

Mitchell fans will probably know already that this is the volume in which Laura meets and becomes engaged to Inspector Gavin. Apart from this the Inspector has little to do; this is a book dominated by its female characters, and the men who do appear are generally weak, evil, or both. For enthusiasts only.

 

Jon.

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