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Breaking the Rules: Gladys Mitchell's Psychopathic

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Breaking the Rules: Gladys Mitchell's Psychopathic Breaking the Rules: Gladys Mitchell’s Psychopathic Detective In 1928 the very popular American Crime Fiction writer S.S Van Dine published his ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.’1 The following year the mystery writer Ronald Knox penned his ‘10 Commandments of detective Fiction.’2 Both writers demanded that these rules must not be broken. Van Dan states that, ‘for the writing of detective stories there are very definitive laws—unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding: and every respectable and self-respecting concoctor of literary lives up to them.’3 Later Knox would add that, ‘thou shalt obey these laws.’4 Almost one hundred years later it would be fair to have the opinion that these rules are outdated. That most, if not all of these rules have been broken, not by hacks or poor writers but by the very greatest and most respected Detective Fiction authors that the genre has to offer. Agatha Christie, for example, broke all of Van Dine’s rules throughout her seventy two mystery novels. One example that is ‘there must be but one culprit’5 in The Murder on the Orient Express6 published in 1934 when she has almost everyone on the train as the murderer. The trophy for the most rebellious and prolific of these law breakers has to be given to Gladys Mitchell and her bizarre detective Mrs Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley. We are first introduced to this odd creature in Mitchell’s first detective novel, Speedy Death, a novel that breaks two of the rules directly. In the first instance there is more than one murderer, and secondly because one of those murderers is the detective Mrs Bradley. This does seem rather a big rule to break on a first outing for a detective and suggests that Mitchell is doing more than just breaking Van Dine and Knox’s rules. She is, in fact, breaking all the conventions of what we would expect from a fictional 1 Van Dine, S.S ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ The American Magazine (New York: Crowell-Collier, 1928) 2 Knox, Ronald, Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandments-of-detective-fiction , (1918) 3 Van Dine, S.S ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ 4 Knox, Ronald, Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction 5 Van Dine, S.S ‘Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories’ 6 Christie, Agatha, Murder on the Orient Express (London: HarperCollins, 2001) 1 detective. The first rule being that the character should be likable, the second that they are not a cold blooded killer, and lastly not a psychopathic lunatic. Mitchell introduces Mrs Bradley as ‘dry without being shrivelled and birdlike without being pretty.’7 She also goes so far to say she is ‘Pterodactyl’8 like and that she ‘possessed nasty, dry, claw like hands, and her arms, yellow and curiously repulsive, suggested the plucked wings of a fowl.’9 Aesthetically Mrs Bradley is certainly found wanting she is described as animal like throughout the sixty five novels that she appears in. Later she is described as a ‘freak’10 and ‘a deadly serpent’11 even by those that the reader presumes like and respects her. Her clothes are styled ‘as odd and in some cases positively hideous’12 she ‘cackles’13 and ‘screams with satanic mirth’14much like a pantomime villain. Her facial expressions are said to show an ‘inhuman malignity’15 and she ‘had the evil eye according to William.’16 All these devices thrown together make for a rather nasty and annoying character that is nearly impossible to like. In an interview with B. A. Pike for ‘the Armchair detective magazine,’ Mitchell says ‘I can understand why some critics don't like her. Personally, I should hate to meet her in real life.’17 To understand why Mitchell would do this it is worth exploring the few positive qualities that Mrs Bradley does have. Her voice for example is described as ‘slow, mellifluous, and slightly drawled; unctuous, rich and reminiscent of smooth treacle.’18 She is also described as a very intelligent woman, a psychoanalyst and one at the top of her field. Pike in his article brings to our attention that she is ‘one of the most famous of modern women, preeminent in her sphere, and of commanding intellect and erudition. She is the Mrs. Bradley, a psychiatrist and consulting 7 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death (London: Vintage, 2014)P.8 8 ibid 9 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.9 10 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders (London: Vintage, 2009) P.48 11 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.49 12 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.48 13 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.168 14Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.133 15 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.8 16 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.24 17 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell,’ published in the Armchair Detective, Volume 9 No. 4, October 1976. 18 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.11 2 psychologist to the Home Office.’19 As a detective Mrs Bradley is both a professional due to her having ‘degrees from every university except Tokyo,’20 and yet at the same time is an amateur detective. Yet, ‘she is immensely distinguished, her services in constant demand, her reputation, both in her professional and amateur capacities, wide and unquestioned.’21 Mrs Bradley with her superior diction and communication skills along with a superior intelligence has both power and authority, something that is rather unusual for a woman in the late 1920’ and early 30’s22 When we think of Psychoanalysis during this time period we cannot help but be drawn to the works of Sigmund Freud. Mitchell confirmed in an interview with Pike that she ‘had read some of Freud's work before I thought of Mrs. Bradley, but Freud has no influence, so far as I know, on my characters.’23 This statement is a little hard to swallow as by her robbing Mrs Bradley of any feminine qualities and replacing them, not with masculine ones but instead with sheer intelligence. Freud in his lecture on ‘Femininity’ discusses the roles of Gender and questions the publics views on the masculine and the feminine as he states ‘when you say, 'masculine', you usually mean 'active', and when you say "feminine", you usually mean "passive".24 Freud found this problematic and advised that ‘It seems to me to serve no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge.’ Mrs Bradley could never be described as passive. Like Freud, Mitchell’s detective questions the norms and conventions that we consider masculine and feminine. Paul Peppis in his paper ‘Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell’s Speedy Death and Popular Modernism,’ when discussing Mitchells work says, ‘Mitchell’s innovations expose repressive ideology, especially its enforcement of compulsory heterosexual marriage, bourgeois gender roles, and respectable (hetero)sexual identities.’25 This is true of Mrs Bradley as there is nothing of the feminine or 19 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell, 20 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell, 21 ibid 22 This pertains to her earlier novels as Mitchell did say that Mrs Bradley evolved into something softer and more palatable in later works. 23 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell, 24 Freud, Sigmund, 'Femininity. New Introductory on Psycho-Analysis Lecture III', (1933) <https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e67a/c2906e1c189d012a5596f2a5b42c237e920d.pdf> [accessed 2018] 25 Peppis, Paul, 'Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell's Speedy Death and Popular Modernism', Journal of Modern Literature, (2017), 120 3 masculine about her. Her intellect is far superior to all those around her. Freud also brings our attention to how the roles of male and female differ in the animal kingdom and how gender roles are blurred when it comes to different species. Spiders are a good example where the female is usually the more aggressive or ‘active’ than the male or species of birds where the male nurtures the young. This could explain why Mitchell constantly describes Mrs Bradley as animal like. This, in a way dehumanises her. It means that she does not fit into any stereotypical category. She is not the female detective that we see in other Crime Fiction novels of the time. Peppis discusses that ‘As a psychoanalyst, well versed in Freud’s theories, Mrs. Bradley possesses a modernist understanding of psychology and sexuality that allows her to recognize the significance of “queer facts” that others do not.26 Mrs Bradley cannot draw on any feminine traits to help her. Although she has been married a number of times she is not appealing to the opposite sex. ‘Mr Bransome Burns says of her you don’t tell me any man not under the influence of dope ever married her.’27 Mrs Bradley in fact falls into the realms of what Freud would call ‘uncanny’28 or least the ‘unfamiliar.’29 Freud uses translations of these words in his lecture on ‘the uncanny’ to conjure up an image of what we consider aesthetically uncomfortable. Words such as ‘uneasy, gloomy, dismal, ghastly, sinister, demonic, gruesome and strange,’30 are all used to describe the uncanny. This is the same imagery that we come across throughout Mitchell’s texts when describing Mrs Bradley. The fact that one of her forenames is Lestrange is of course a direct approach to this. Mitchell from the very beginning set out to create a detective unlike any other. Freud also points to another example of the uncanny when he talks about the principle of an ‘omnipotence of thought.’31 He explains this as ‘the subject's narcissistic overvaluation of his own mental processes.’32 While Mrs Bradley’s reputation 26 Peppis, Paul, 'Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell's Speedy Death and Popular Modernism'P.125 27 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.47 28 Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’, http://commapress.co.uk/resources/online-short-stories/the-uncanny-sigmund-freud/ edn, 2018 vols (Arts Council England, ) 29 ibid 30 All these words have been taken from Freud’s lecture ‘The Uncanny’ but are not a direct quote.
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