Gladys Mitchell's Mrs Bradley mysteries and Christianna Brand

[cimorene]

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) feature female murderers with basically insane motives. In general, I guess I prefer female murderers to fridges and dead bodies and virgins and whores, but there's an awful lot of women being literally villified in detective fiction when you consider what a tiny proportion of real murderers and violent criminals are women. This is my biggest pet peeve with detective fiction, actually, and I can just about stomach it in the vintage books, but it's what turned me off of procedural tv completely (not just the stuff with cops, which I also can't stand to watch at all now). 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.

Comments

[stranger]

Hmmm, interesting comments on Death at the Opera, which I've started but got derailed very early -- obvious, described-as-obnoxious stage-struck victim (also a woman) seems to be a real squick of mine. But, Mrs. Bradley as an earlier-era woman detective is something I'll try again later.

I'm theorizing now, completely off-the-cuff, that the female murderers are sometimes an attempt by women writers to include women as active figures, same as fanfic putting more female crew members on the Enterprise. The 30s writers don't always rise above their societal mindset, granted...

[cimorene]

I definitely think it's both. In this era, particularly for authors and fans active in the genre, the tropes of this style of murder are all familiar, and the more common and plausible sorts of murders and motives understandably enough probably feel boring and overplayed. This genre is also very much about both meeting AND subverting expectations, and that's a hard line to walk - originality and twists are supposed to be introduced in a way that allows the reader to keep guessing, but at the same time, they're supposed to be created with familiar tropes and motif to the extent that the reader is given the opportunity to solve the case - or solve the author, as the case more often is - spotting clues and playing the Sicilian's poison guessing game from the Princess Bride with whether it's a red herring or the author just wants you to think it's one.

All that to say, it demands novelty but circumscribes what specific novelty is allowed, and on top of that, I'm sure the authors wanted to keep themselves interested too. In the case of women novelists, they can't help but have some interest in gender issues, I think, even if their ideas about it are regressive or weird by today's standards.