My new year launched with a hundred good resolutions, most of which will falter before long. But before they do, I wanted to tackle a book by Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983). I tried reading her work years ago and was left befuddled. Yet she was highly praised, then and now. Jason Half manages a comprehensive website on Mitchell with an annotated bibliography, reviews, a list of references, and comments from other readers. I found it instructive and can recommend it to anyone seeking more information about Mitchell: https://www.gladysmitchell.com/. Among other useful tidbits, the site offers an essay on the Detection Club written by Mitchell: https://www.gladysmitchell.com/the-golden-age.
Mitchell’s series detective was Mrs. Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, a physician, practicing psychoanalyst, and amateur detective. She appeared in more than 65 novels published during the first three-quarters of the 20th century and again in a collection of short stories published by Crippen & Landru in 2005.
In her tenth case, Printer’s Error (Michael Joseph, 1939; Minnow Press, 2007) Dr. Bradley gets pulled in midway. The story starts with young Justus Bassin, an attorney from London, visiting the country home of the Carns at Mrs. Carn’s request. Her husband has written a reprehensible essay full of anti-Semitism and he has contracted with a small local printing firm to print one hundred copies to be distributed to a select mailing list. For the past few weeks both Carns and their servants have been receiving threatening anonymous messages demanding a halt to the publication. Mrs. Carn fears violence and gives the letters and the galley proofs to Bassin for safekeeping.
Bassin wants to talk to Mr. Carn, who is expected late that day, so he returns to the village briefly to telegraph his father that he will be staying overnight. Upon his return, he finds Mrs. Carn unconscious with a serious head injury and the letters and proofs gone. Mr. Carn himself disappeared. A package with a pair of human ears and a human hand found in a print shop leaves everyone with the impression Carn is dead but no one knows who is ghoulishly delivering body parts.
Despite Bassin’s best efforts, he can find no sighting of Carn, alive or dead, nor can he identify the source of the anonymous letters. He appeals to his friend Carey Lestrange for his aunt’s assistance and thus Mrs. Bradley appears.
Mitchell wrote lovely prose but the narrative meanders, and I had a hard time following the story at times. There was nothing vague about Mrs. Bradley’s involvement with a nearby nudist colony, however, which is an amusing highlight of the story.
Written during the months leading up to England’s declaration of war on Germany in September 1939, the book has multiple references to Germany and Nazi agents and counterespionage. It’s clear that the war has a bearing on the murder and the theft but identifying the actual perpetrators is not easy.
In The Times Literary Supplement (London), November 18, 1939, in the “Tales with a Twist” column, Maurice Percy and M. P. Ashley consider Printer’s Error not as good as its predecessor St. Peter’s Finger but still readable.
Maurice Richardson of The Observer (London), November 19, 1939, in his “The Crime Ration” column says “Printer’s Error suffers slightly too much from overelaboration and obscurantism. This is a pity, because her ingenuity is considerable…. Connoisseurs who do not mind taking pains will be pleased.”
P. E. H. writes in the Daily Herald (London) November 23, 1939, “Gladys Mitchell ought to have done something very good indeed. It has a fascinating problem and is most amusingly written. But it left me puzzled. My fault perhaps. Try it and see.”
W. E. Cookburn said in the Liverpool Echo, Dec 20, 1939 “A baffling mystery. I was baffled by the plot and the solution, but I am certain Mrs. Mitchell can write. Some day I mean to try her book again—I think.”
So perhaps this book is not the place to start reading Mitchell, but students of World War II fiction and Mitchell enthusiasts will want to look into it.