Ratings for a few more of Gladys Mitchell's classic Golden Age Mrs Bradley mysteries

1. Laurels are Poison (1942) 4/5 (with a bonus ♥ for favorite setting tropes) This is a great example of a classic girls' school mystery. It's not as exquisite as Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons, but I unhesitatingly recommend it to fans of the latter: it's not derivative or inferior-feeling, because it's quite interesting and original while still having a lot of girls' school stuff. I will doubtlessly be rereading it!
   
   For one thing, it's set in a normal school, i.e. a (private) teachers' training college, and so the students are young adults for the most part. For another, the setup of the mystery is quite unique, with Mrs Bradley installed as the head of one of the residential dormitories to investigate the hushed-up disappearance of its previous head, and the endure a series of sinister pranks and threats as the year goes on. This is also the book where we meet Laura, Mrs Bradley's secretary-to-be, and her friends Kitty and Alice, likeable sidekicks in the novel Death and the Maiden and probably others.



2. Faintley Speaking (1954) 3/5 No rec, but the beginning is great. The plot also deals with spies, if that's your sort of thing.
   
   This concerns a fern-smuggling ring and a missing spinster teacher and is really all pretty silly, albeit engaging to start with - the opening is fantastic, in fact (not on a par with, say, Christie's The Clocks, but definitely one of the best Mitchell openers I've read). Mrs Bradley's secretary, Laura, is a narrator, and she makes friends with a little boy who helps her investigate, then has to go undercover as a teacher at his school. The whole last chunk of the book becomes gradually more vague and formless and the end feels like a weird afterthought though.



3. Printer's Error (1939) 2/5 Nazi spies and a nasty anti-semitic book whose author is missing are the subject of this book. Everyone in the book agrees that the anti-semite's book is awful and gross, apart from one German suspect, but their attitude towards the anti-semitism (which is that it's stupid/crazy and also rude/tacky, but then they all finish with "But it's not like anybody around is/was jewish, so it wasn't/isn't that big of a deal") is still highly unpleasant, especially given the book is from 1939.
   
   Apart from this, ultimately the solution is confused. It's a bit of a double solution, as Gladys Mitchell is so fond of, but actually it ends up with more than two endings by the last page, and it actually leaves some of the solution confusedly up in the air. Not a very satisfying read, nor a particularly engaging one.



4. The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop (1930) 3.5/5 A farcical rural mystery where a corpse turns up dismembered in the local butcher's shop without its head, and then the head makes a number of disappearances and reappearances. The suspects are also kind of on a merry-go-round, which is pretty fun. The ending(s) feel kind of pastede on yey, again, though. It seems Gladys Mitchell is often more interested in the mystery as a fun ride than as a puzzle.