No Winding-Sheet

After more than fifty years of crime-writing, Gladys Mitchell died in July 1983 at her home in Corfe Mullen, Dorset. No Winding-Sheet, which went to press shortly before her death, is set in the school surroundings that she knew so well from her many years of teaching. It is her 66th crime novel.

Mr Pythias, the geography master at Sir George Etherege school, fails to reappear for work at the end of the Christmas holidays. Also missing are several thousand pounds collected for a school trip to Greece. Pythias is suspected of having absconded with the money, but police inquiries at the school and the master’s lodging-house draw a blank.

The mystery deepens when a dead body is discovered buried on the school premises and two boys disappear from the school. Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and her intrepid assistant Laura Gavin are called in to track down the boys and solve the riddle of the vanishing schoolmaster.

‘Gladys Mitchell was a much-admired member of the great sisterhood of English detective writers from the late 1920s onwards, headed by Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie. They all avoided unnecessary violence and concentrated on the whodunnit puzzle.’

—Daily Telegraph

Gladys Mitchell’s first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929, and she continued to write until just before her death, building up a devoted following. Her style and originality received consistently glowing praise. She spent over forty years as a schoolmistress, and several of her books are set in a school environment. She died at the age of 82, in July 1983.

First published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph Ltd

44 Bedford Square, London WC1,1984

© 1984 by Gladys Mitchell

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Copyright owner

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Mitchell, Gladys No winding-sheet

I. Title

823'.912[F] PR6O25.I832

ISBN 0 7181 2399 9

Composition by Allset, London

Printed in Great Britain by Hollen Street Press, Slough, and bound by Hunter and Foulis Ltd, Edinburgh