Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley mysteries and Christianna Brand

When I was investigating less-known golden age detective writers I read a novel and short story collection (I think it was called Buffet for Uninvited Guests) by Christianna Brand that I liked a lot - the novel had a memorable posh clothing boutique setting (Death in High Heels, maybe?). I think I liked the stories too, but I tried another collection of her short stories last week called Brand X that I found very offputting. A bunch of the stories weren't mysteries, which was one thing, but overall it was just the messages and worldview behind it that were so bad. Usually in a misogynistic way, but not even just that. Maybe another of her full-length novels would be better, I don't know.

I read one of the Mrs Bradley mysteries a few months ago - one of the most famous and not the first, called Death at the Opera. I didn't love the ending, and there's a lot of midcentury psychology strewn around because that's the series gimmick, that Mrs Bradley is an expert psychologist, and also that she's an unattractive little old lady who creeps everybody out. Midcentury psychology can get hard to stomach at the best of times, but at least for the most part its bad points are familiar. I'm bothered by the author's tendency to revel in descriptions of Mrs Bradley's purported ugliness, and the kind of imagery she uses for that matter (yellow and green skin, withered, reptilian - all stuff with antisemitic overtones and plenty of resonance to standard shit about aging women) even though any imagery wouldn't be exactly great because it seems weird and creepy to focus so much on the attractiveness of little old ladies regardless. Now, Mrs Bradley is the hero of this series, so it's not like she doesn't have value to society in her creepy little gremlin-ness: on the contrary, the author portrays her as intelligent and essentially civic-minded. I think it could be argued that part of the point is that women's value is completly divorced from how beautiful they are, in fact, which is great, in itself. If not for the fact that the descriptions keep getting so weird. They're still less horrible about Gender than plenty of the author's contemporaries, like Christie and the far worse Patricia Wentworth... I think. Both Death at the Opera and Speedy Death (the first novel in the series, which I read yesterday) ( spoiler )

So it's really the combination of the psychology nonsense and the Gender nonsense that is throwing me off, here. I did just start a third one, but it's on probation.

When Last I Died by Gladys Mitchell (1941; Mrs Bradley #13)

This book has an unusually complex story structure, which was really fun! There's a semi-epistolary portion, where Mrs Bradley is introduced to the cold case by a journal kept by the purported murderer (who was later acquitted, then committed suicide). There's a haunted house and a couple of spiritualists, a disputed inheritance, a mysteriously reclusive sister with a tragic past, and two missing teenaged boys who ran away from a juvenile correctional facility. There are multiple cold cases, in fact, and the records of a past murder trial, and then there's another murder trial.

The portions of the book devoted to reproducing the journal, a published book, and a later diary aren't most of the book, as is the case with, for example, Dorothy Sayers's stunning The Documents in the Case, but they aren't just short excerpts, either. I liked those bits a lot, but I loved how varied this novel is - the document portions, the interviews with rambling old ladies and paging over antique photo albums, the court scenes, the action scenes, some episodes of espionage, and playful dialogue with Mrs Bradley's family and her grandson, who accidentally supplies the impetus for the plot.

There definitely IS gender in this book, and in many ways it contains ideas about gender that are of its time, but the book is definitely about femininity and female life - clearly interesting subjects to Gladys Mitchell - and I think the ideas on the page are earnest and complex for the most part, not moralizing or Highly Unfortunate like some of the overtones of Speedy Death and Death at the Opera. 5/5, maybe? Higher than 4/5, for sure.