cimorene

Death and the Maiden (Mrs Bradley #20, 1947). 3/5. An aging lady of independent means had been living happily with her orphaned young ward, a girl of 19, but they are imposed upon by a weird cousin who has just retired after running his banana plantation in the Caribbean to bankruptcy and moved to England to sponge off of this lady for the rest of his life, apparently. He strikes literally everyone as creepy and even his cousin has never liked him, but in Golden Age British detective mysteries it's plausible to just be driven further and further into penny-pinching because you have absolutely no method of avoiding house guests, or indeed new household members if they so choose, if they are in any way related to you, because you can't turn out family! And you also can't require financial contributions from them. He also arrives with an exotically beautiful Greek wife twenty years his junior who doesn't seem to like him at all either. In spite of her professed financiaa worries, this lady is apparently forced to take the whole household of four to a particular town when her odious cousin reads in the newspaper that a naiad was spotted in the river there, and he wants to go see it for himself. She puts them up in a luxurious hotel too, because that's where she always stays, and the guy gets a lot of fishing gear and starts lurking in the local waterways. Shortly thereafter two young boys are drowned in the village, and even though there's no connecting evidence, Mrs Bradley, consulted by the lady in question, is suspicious of this guy. But her suspicions quickly grow until she's suspecting all four of them, apparently, in various ways, but not sharing her thoughts with the readers.

There's a lot of slow, meandering plot, and weird diversions with priest's holes, hauntings, the purchase of a dog, and a Scotsman and his dialect, among other things. Overall, it felt confused, kind of silly, and anti-climactic. When I say anti-climactic... I've noticed a pattern in Gladys Mitchell of what I'll call double endings: first a whole solution a bit like an Agatha Christie scene or a confession, and then a sudden reveal that that wasn't what really happened and then an entire second solution. I've read five Mrs Bradley mysteries with double endings that they could've probably been better without (out of 6)*, but they aren't all equally awkward. This one definitely faded away generally at the end of the book, and the double ending is kind of two endings that both don't really feel logical or satisfying and become worse in combination. In spite of meandering all over, this story manages to feel both too long and too unfinished.

*Death at the Opera, Speedy Death, When Last I Died, Death and the Maiden, and St Peter's Finger. These span from the 1930s to 47.

St Peter's Finger (Mrs Bradley #9, 1938). 4/5. This book concerns the apparent suicide of an orphaned heiress at a convent orphanage school (where both of her first cousins who are also her heirs also go to school). The girl is found underwater in a bathtub she'd have to have snuck in to use, but dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, and the coroner's court rules her a suicide, whereupon the Mother Superior calls in Mrs Bradley, convinced she can prove accident because such a good girl would never commit the sin of suicide. It turns out it is also physically impossible for her death to have been a suicide. There's some interesting stuff with the other students and teachers at the convent, Mrs Bradley getting to know the nuns, etc, and I found the book really interesting actually. But it, too, has a double ending, and I didn't like (or should I say I didn't buy?) the solution. There are a lot of implausible and psychologically dubious murder motives in vintage mysteries that deal in psychology, and this is definitely one of them. In spite of that, I'd probably read it again. The majority of the book was really pleasant an interesting to follow, and it felt logical and cohesive, unlike Death and the Maiden.

Say it with Flowers (Mrs Bradley #33, 1960). 3/5. Amateur archaeologists and an interested vicar attempting to excavate what they hope to be a Roman villa in a quaint small town unearth a skeleton, at first taken for a Roman, which turns out to be a recent murder victim's. The archaeologists, a pair of eccentric dilettantes who live on a houseboat and alienate everybody they meet, turn out to be brother and sister and merely posing as husband and wife, and then things get even weirder. This one has some central psychology - the brother, for example, is heavily implied to be gay, and there's also a whole running - not really joke; theme? - where other people assume the brother seems insane and the sister totally normal and it's heavily implied that Mrs Bradley alone can instantly perceive that the brother is perfectly sane and well-adjusted and the sister is mentally ill. (This might cause some initial confusion, but Mrs Bradley explains that committing murder is perfectly possible and plausible for a sane person, so this debate doesn't clear them of suspicion.) The book sort of feels like it's never quite come together, but it doesn't have a double ending! ... Well, it's sort of halfway a double ending? Maybe she was just getting more subtle about it - and anyway, I did enjoy it. I like amateur archaology Golden Age mysteries, and I'm always interested in queer subtext. This book could probably bear a more thorough scrutiny for that.