Saltmarsh Murders

INTRODUCTION

‘Gladys Mitchell’s classic The Saltmarsh Murders’ (Nicholas Blake’s description) was first published in 1932. It was the fourth detective novel in a series of sixty-six; Gladys Mitchell (1901-83) increased her output from one to two books a year in the final period of her life. All her detective fiction features the same central character, the redoubtable Mrs Bradley (later Dame Beatrice), a distinguished psychiatrist who, for maximum effect as an investigator, combines ‘extraordinary pothouse accomplishments’ with an old-fashioned elegance of speech.

There is nothing ordinary about Mrs Bradley or the way she goes about her investigations. She looks like a reconstituted pterodactyl and behaves like the Cumaean Sibyl. It is her habit to keep suspects on the alert by poking them in the ribs. Her percipience is frightening and her humour prodigious. From the moment of her first appearance, in Speedy Death (1929), she imposed herself on author and audience alike. Gladys Mitchell, actually, had intended to create a male detective but in the course of writing this novel she found herself vanquished by Mrs Bradley. The irresistible old lady moved to the forefront of the action and has stayed there ever since.

The Saltmarsh Murders, like everything in the earliest group of detective novels by Gladys Mitchell, is an exceptionally stylish and high-spirited piece of work, with strong comic overtones. One of the author’s practices is to poke fun at a minor convention of detective fiction by pushing it to an extreme; in this novel she has a go at the cosy village setting from which so many detective writers gained their most pointed effects. The village of Saltmarsh, where Gladys Mitchell’s clergyman-narrator has his first unfortunate curacy, is peculiarly prone to disturbance. It is a place where the vicar may be taken for a goat and tethered to a stake in the ancient pound, while his wife remains in a state of outrage over various licentious goings-on. In certain respects it bears a resemblance to the Cold Comfort hamlet of Howling. Adultery, high jinks, horseplay, an illegitimate birth, a hidden baby, rumours of infanticide, exhibitions of lunacy, a couple of murders, a lost corpse, an illicit trade in pornography, even a spot of incest all keep things lively for Gladys Mitchell’s benighted villagers before Mrs Bradley gets to the bottom of the imbroglio.

The literary ancestry of the blithe young curate who tells the story can be traced back to Dr Watson via Captain Hastings, but Noel Wells’s mannerisms are all his own, and all agreeably ingenuous, down to the repeated use of the phrase ‘of course’. He isn’t exactly an admiring acolyte: ‘I like old women to be soothing,’ he declares, while the gnomic detective, of the eldritch cackle and outlandish actions, goes out of her way to unnerve everyone around her. In the interests of justice, naturally, as well as bedazzlement; Mrs Bradley’s integrity is never in question, any more than her wits or her wit.

It takes great confidence and aplomb, as well as technical expertise, to go in for singularity and convolution on such a scale; and Gladys Mitchell deserves credit for possessing all these qualities. Her originality cannot be too highly praised. The Saltmarsh Murders, long out of print, is wonderfully eccentric and entertaining.

Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan, London 1983