Pageant of Murder

The dull but important little town of Brayne, situated somewhere between London and Windsor, is celebrating its new status as a borough. Among other festivities, the Council have decided to stage an historical pageant. Along with other celebrities are figured Shakespeare’s Falstaff and two English Kings—Henry VIII and Edward III.

The persons taking these parts are apparently innocent and harmless, and yet, in turn, all three are murdered, not, it seems, so much for their own sins as for the long-ago short-comings of the characters they represent in the pageant.

Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley and her secretary, Laura Gavin, succeed in unravelling the mystery, Laura by making a somewhat gruesome discovery in the little river on which Brayne stands, and Dame Beatrice by applying to the case what the immortal Jeeves would call “the psychology of the individual.”

By the same author

Dead Man’s Morris

Come Away Death

St Peter’s Finger

Printer’s Error

Brazen Tongues

Hangman’s Curfew

When Last I Died

Laurels Are Poison

The Worsted Viper

Sunset Over Soho

My Father Sleeps

The Rising of the Moon

Here Comes a Chopper

Death and the Maiden

The Dancing Druids

Tom Brown’s Body

Groaning Spinney

The Devil’s Elbow

The Echoing Strangers

Merlin’s Furlong

Faintly Speaking

Watson’s Choice

Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose

The Twenty-Third Man

Spotted Hemlock

The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

Say it with Flowers

The Nodding Canaries

My Bones Will Keep

Adders on the Heath

Death of a Delft Blue

LONDON HOUSE & MAXWELL

NEW YORK

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1965 BY

LONDON HOUSE & MAXWELL

A DIVISION OF THE BRITISH BOOK CENTRE, INC.

122 EAST 55TH STREET, NEW YORK 22, NEW YORK

Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-20725

© 1965 by Gladys Mitchell

Set and printed in Great Britain by Tonbridge Printers Ltd,

Peach Hall Works, Tonbridge, Kent, in Times ten on eleven point, on paper made by Henry Bruce at Currie, Midlothian, and bound by James Burn at Esher, Surrey