Death at the Opera

FOREWORD

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In any gathering of crime fiction enthusiasts, mention of Gladys Mitchell (1901-1983) will produce an instant reaction. ‘Ah, Mrs Croc!’ will be purred in delight, or in rarer cases gasped in exasperation, on recall of her central serial character. She is a writer one devours with an exuberance responsive to her own, or who has one marvelling at the lengths to which imagination can be stretched within the whodunnit’s recognized limits. Her roller-coaster storylines touch peaks of creative genius and depths where one wonders how she dare demand of her readers such suspension of disbelief.

Death at the Opera, published in 1934, is a teasing title seeming to promise the brilliance of Covent Garden or the Scala, Milan. It concerns instead a young woman teacher found dead during her school’s pre-Christmas production of The Mikado. To an on-stage cast of suspects, delicately caricatured and readily recognizable from real life, the Headmaster, suspecting murder but fearful of further scandals, introduces as private sleuth Mrs (later, Dame) Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, Home Office Psychiatrist, formidable, eagle-eyed and a monstrosity of healthy extroversion.

The school background offers the author an opportunity for gently sly observations on the educational climate, on disapproval of competition, on the problem of mixed-sex staff-rooms and classes. As in depicting her main character, Gladys Mitchell happily equates ‘freaky’ with ‘fascinating’. At thirty-three, she herself is in her thirteenth year as a secondary school mistress teaching history, with English and some games.

With two short breaks from school life, she pursued parallel careers until retirement from teaching at sixty, then continued writing until her death in 1983, producing in all a prodigious sixty-eight crime novels under her own name, six as Malcolm Torrie, five as Stephen Hockaby, almost a dozen children’s books and over two dozen short stories.

Death at the Opera was her sixth crime novel and already displayed many of the characteristics of the superb series of her later years, when the eccentric Dame Beatrice’s shrewd intelligence was balanced by the good-humoured practicality of her Scots companion-secretary Laura Menzies, a young woman of physical toughness and laconic delivery, with a taste for the great outdoors. Laura was to marry a rising CID officer in London’s Met, conveniently adding a further authoritative dimension to their cases.

In Death at the Opera, however, the inventive Gladys had yet to supply Laura and a supporting cast of chauffeur, chef and personal maid. Here, instead of the later semi-royal progress by limousine, the psychiatrist-sleuth visits distant witnesses by train and taxi, but already calling on the willing services of her extensive family and young friends.

Behind a front of witch-like posturings, her method consists of mixing freely with the disconcerted staff and pupils to list those ‘temperamentally capable of the crime’, her angle more Behaviourist than Freudian. It is then that, beset by countless apparent irrelevancies and complications, she consults her copious notes to consider the practical factors of opportunity and means.

It is tempting to speculate how far the outrageous persona of Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley represented a natural exuberance which in everyday life her schoolmistress author was obliged to suppress. Not that the liberated, elderly psychiatrist ever quite becomes a creature of farce. Apart from her ‘eldritch screech’, ‘harsh cackle’, and ‘hoots of laughter’ which greet the wilder opinion of those whom she interrogates, her voice is rich and deep; her manner can be dangerously persuasive. Her smile—which, due to her peculiar cast of features, becomes a leer—is not so sinister as to mask her energetic intention to set right things which have clearly gone wrong.

Mitchell’s clothing of a quick and humorous mind in a grotesquely witchlike figure with hands that are ‘yellowed claws covered in rings’, who dresses ‘in queer but expensive garments’ of clashing colours, and is frequently likened to various toothy amphibians—is less likely to repel than to make one embrace her eccentricity with the delight of a child in a beloved stuffed cayman. The test of the reader’s sympathy is whether that eternal child’s response is there to be invoked.

As Mrs Bradley makes each fresh discovery, suspicion swings like a ship’s lamp on a stormy sea. But in Gladys Mitchell’s skilled hands the storyline sails us safely home with no nerves shredded, no sensibilities overshocked. The fun trip has been brisk, an entertainment full of the unexpected, and certainly exercising for the mind. If the sceptical reader is afterwards conscious of strained credulity, this is met by Mrs Bradley’s confident claim: ‘Nobody can say without fear of contradiction that any motive for murder is too trivial.’ And, considering life around us, can you fault her?

Clare Curzon

Clare Curzon has written over thirty novels, half of them under her earlier pseudonyms of Rhona Petrie and Marie Buchanan. All, except a few concerned with paranormal psychology, are works of crime fiction. She lives in South Buckinghamshire, where the Thames Valley Force provides inspiration for her police procedurals with serial detectives Superintendent Mike Yeadings and DI Angus Mott.

THE BLACK DAGGER CRIME SERIES

The Black Dagger Crime series is a result of a joint effort between Chivers Press and a sub-committee of the Crime Writers’ Association, consisting of Marian Babson, Peter Chambers and Peter Lovesey. It is designed to select outstanding examples of every type of detective story, so that enthusiasts will have the opportunity to read once more classics that have been scarce for years, while at the same time introducing them to a new generation who have not previously had the chance to enjoy them.