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‘thou shalt obey these laws.’4 Almost one hundred years later it would be fair to have the opinion that these rules are outdated.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)
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. 31 Freud, Sigmund, ‘The Uncanny’ 32 ibid
4 often precedes her she does need to inform those around her that she is the most intelligent woman in the room whenever the opportunity arises. In Speedy Death she reminds her son that the reason she has managed to get away with murder is because she is ‘rather an intelligent woman.’33 Mitchell when talking of Mrs Bradley also said ‘I am not a bit surprised that she annoys people, because she never is wrong.’34 Mrs Bradley may not be over valuating her mental processes as Mitchell points out
‘she is never wrong.’ The fact that ‘she is never wrong’ adds to the unfamiliar, makes Mrs Bradley an uncanny, omnipotent character that can actually scare you to death just as she did with Mrs Coutts in
The Saltmarsh Murders.35
One of the major points that make Mrs Bradley stand out from other detectives is that she is a murderer. In the first three novels she murders no less than two people; the first is Eleanor in
Speedy Death whom she poisons and the second in The Saltmarsh Murders, where she purposefully causes Mrs Coutts to die from a heart attack. Mrs Bradley seems to think that these murders were ethical murders, as she considers both Eleanor and Mrs Coutts to be dangerous lunatics that would continue killing if they were allowed to live. Mitchell in her interview said that Mrs Bradley, ‘has a god-like quality of being much larger than life, and of being so much superior to ordinary people that she can afford to be benign and kind even to my murderers, who seldom get hanged (in the old days) or suffer life imprisonment (in the later books)36.’This God like quality and grandiose attitude of superiority means that Mrs Bradley believes that she has the right to act as judge, jury and executioner. The cold manner in which she justifies these murders suggests that Mrs Bradley may in fact be the most dangerous lunatic of them all. When Mrs Bradley discusses the murder of Eleanor with her son she says that she ‘had no personal feeling in the matter, It was what one might term a logical elimination of unnecessary and, in fact, dangerous matter.’37 Surely killing with no remorse puts Mrs Bradley in the realms of being a psychopath. Her attempts to convince her son that her
33 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.309 34 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell, 35 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.272 36 Pike, B.A ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell, 37 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.308
5 killing Eleanor was not murder ‘in the everyday, newspaper, pot-house sense of the word,’38 and that she was merely carrying out her civil duty is very questionable. She makes the case that had she not killed Eleanor then there would have been a chain of deaths as she says, ‘if I did not kill Eleanor,
Eleanor would kill Dorothy, then Garde would kill Eleanor, and then the law would kill Garde.’39 While this is a possible scenario it could only occur if Mrs Bradley could not prove that Eleanor committed the first murder thus allowing her to continue killing. Mrs Bradley could easily have halted this chain of events merely by having Eleanor arrested and put safely behind bars until such time as the law decided what it would do with her. Instead Mrs Bradley revels with glee in the fact that she
Murdered Eleanor and because of her superior intelligence was able to get away with it. When her son congratulates her by raising his glass and taking a bow she ‘cackled with pleasure,’40and says, ‘It is nice to have ones motives appreciated.’41Later in The Saltmarsh Murders Mrs Bradley actually brags about the murder of Eleanor when she refers to herself as a murderer when she says, ‘I actually have a murder to my credit. I was tried for it and acquitted, but I did it boys and girls, I did it.’ 42 Once again showing not only a callous lack of remorse for her actions but the manner in which she informs her audience suggests that she wears that murder like a badge of honour.
Talking of murder and murderers in The Mystery of the Butchers Shop Mrs Bradley makes her feelings very clear when she says that, ‘all murders are committed by lunatics.’43All murderers except for Mrs Bradley as she removes herself from this stigma by stating, ‘Except me. And my outrageous sanity is in itself a kind of mental defect. I sometimes think.’44 Here it would seem that Mrs Bradley is saying that she is so sane that she has flipped the spectrum and may be psychologically flawed. From a modern point of view, we could suggest that Mrs Bradley suffered from a developmental defect such as a mild form Asperger’s or even borderline autism. The fact that she comes across as strange
38 ibid 39 ibid 40 Mitchell, Gladys, Speedy Death P.309 41 ibid 42 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.120 43 Mitchell, Gladys, The Mystery of a Butchers Shop (London: Vintage, 2009) P.221 44 Mitchell, Gladys, The Mystery of a Butchers Shop P.222
6 and socially awkward and often wearing the wrong clothes at the same time as being a genius could support this. The problem with this idea though is that such diagnoses did not exist until the mid-1940s. It is much more likely that Mitchel was exploring a concept that was gaining popularity at the time, that of the psychopath.
While in the early 20th century the word psychopath was synonymous with that of deranged killers and criminal delinquency, pioneers in the field such as the American psychiatrist Hervey M.
Cleckley in his work The Mask of Sanity 45 were exploring the more subtle and hidden symptoms of the psychopath. Cleckley, in fact, created a checklist of personality traits that would form the bases of what is still used today to measure whether one has psychopathic tendencies. Jon Ronson in his book
The Psychopath Test draws our attention to the current version of the test, and we can see many of the traits listed in the character of Mrs Bradley. The full list can be viewed in the appendix. Many of these have already been discussed such has her grandiose sense of self-worth, her lack of remorse and poor behavioural controls. What can be explored further is Mrs Bradley’s manipulative behaviour and penchant for lying.46 William points to Mrs Bradley’s uncanny knack to get people to do what she wants when he says in The Saltmarsh Murders ‘I don’t know why everyone obeys that little old woman.’ 47 Mrs Bradley, in fact, manages to influence the whole village into doing her bidding throughout this novel she constantly manipulates and misdirects. When giving her ‘mystery’ lecture in the village hall, Mrs Bradley almost incites a riot by suggesting that, Yorke, the black servant may have committed the murder even though she knows that he did not. The only reason she mentioned the rumour was to get poor Yorke to react as she says later, ‘Yorke is a sensitive, nervous man, and had a horror of being lynched.’48 This shows that Mrs Bradley is insensitive to others feelings and will use any underhanded tactics in her pursuits even if this includes lying without care of the consequences. Yorke could have been lynched. Mrs Bradley rebukes her assistant William for asking
45 Cleckley, Hervey M., The Mask of Sanity, (Mosby, 1955) 46 Appendix 47 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.65 48 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.260
7 honest and direct questions when she says, ‘by the way young man, if you are to be of any real assistance to me in this enquiry, you must not ask direct questions of the people I am interviewing.
You‘ll spoil everything if you do.’49 This shows that Mrs Bradley enjoyed being the only one in the know and that an honest and direct approach could never fit her agenda as she enjoyed keeping those around her in the dark so she can manipulate from the shadows.
In The Saltmarsh murders, Mrs Bradley explores almost everyone in the village and opens up every dirty secret and rumour even though she makes it clear early in the investigation that she has
‘psychological proof which is incontrovertible,’50 that it is, in fact, Mrs Coutts that is the murderer. At the same time, she constantly suggests that others are to blame so that she can see the reactions from their peers and neighbours. It could be argued that since Mrs Bradley knew Mrs Coutts was the killer so early in the novel, she had already decided that she was going to kill her. She does, in fact, say ‘I knew that I was going to cause her death I had to choose between killing her through shock, or as an alternative,’51 to ‘letting her stand trial.’52 Once again Mrs Bradley suggests that it was a moral killing and that it had to be done to preserve the safety of others in the village yet having the women arrested would have done just as well as a safeguard. This is just another example of Mrs Bradleys
‘Criminal Versatility’53 and lack of regard for the law. Her attitude towards the Lowry’s incest for example when she says ‘Biologically I believe there is no weighty reason against it,’54 shows she has little respect for the law even when the crime is fundamentally immoral. She even suggests that this taboo is only considered immoral because of some archaic ‘Jewish code of morals.’55 Her attitude toward Burt smuggling illegal pornography is another example as she only condemns the crime because Burt ‘did not even make a fortune out of them.’56 The fact that she judges Burt’s crime based on how much money he has made is rather a troubling view. Mrs Bradley even tries to
49 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.104 50 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.120 51 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.272 52 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.273 53 Appendix 54 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.275 55 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.274 56 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.122
8 convince her assistant William that murder may not even be a crime when she says ‘Murder is a queer crime, young man if it is a crime at all.’57 Her insistence that Patrick Mahon58 was an
‘unfortunate man’59 and that she then goes on to praise his cleverness, is extremely troubling as she does not condemn him for the horrifying murder and dismemberment of his pregnant mistress but instead praises his cleverness for almost getting away with it.
Mrs Bradley’s twisted view of crime must make her a psychopath. While it is true we cannot tick off every box on Hares psychopath test this is only because those parts of her personality have not been explored. We don’t see any ‘promiscuous sexual behaviour’60 for example yet a woman having been married three times in the 1920’s may have been seen as such. We don’t know much about her childhood in these early novels either so we cannot tick any of those boxes. That being said Mrs Bradley still scores very highly on the test. Her suggestion that Broadmoor prison is a ‘waste of public money’61 and that an instant, ‘painless death would be a far better method’ for dealing with criminals is bordering on the insane. She goes even further down this path when she says, ‘we must always have the moral courage to release from life those who are not fitted to bear life’s burdens.’62
This is indeed a dangerous view for who could decide who lives and who dies. Mrs Bradley, the psychopathic detective, could, and she would not have given it a second thought
Word Count 3561
57 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.125 58 Patrick Mahon Killed his pregnant mistress and dissected her into small pieces. He then burnt the head in his fireplace and boiled the rest of her. He was only caught because he left a bag with a knife and saw along with bloody rags at Waterloo station. 59 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P. 126 60 Appendix 61 Mitchell, Gladys, The Saltmarsh Murders P.127 62 ibid
9 Appendix
ITEM 1: Glibness/superficial charm
ITEM 2: Grandiose sense of self-worth
ITEM 3: Need for stimulation/proneness to boredom
ITEM 4: Pathological Lying
ITEM 5: Cunning/manipulative
ITEM 6: Lack of remorse or guilt
ITEM 7: Shallow effect
10 ITEM 8: Callous/ lack of empathy
ITEM 9: Parasitic lifestyle
ITEM 10: Poor behavioural controls
ITEM 11: Promiscuous sexual behaviour
ITEM 12: Early behaviour problems
ITEM 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals
ITEM 14: Impulsivity
ITEM 15: Irresponsibility
ITEM 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions
ITEM 17: Many short-term marital relationships
ITEM 18: Juvenile delinquency
ITEM 19: Revocation of conditional release
ITEM 20: Criminal versatility
Bibliography
Christie, Agatha, Murder on the Orient Express (London: HarperCollins, 2001)
Cleckley, Hervey M., The Mask of Sanity, (Mosby, 1955)
&AuthType=ip,shib&db=edshtl&AN=uc1.b3973303&site=eds-live> Freud, Sigmund, 'Female Sexuality', 11 ---'Femininity. New Introductory on Psycho-Analysis Lecture III', (1933) [accessed 2018] ---'On Narcissism: An Introduction', (1933) ---The Uncanny, http://commapress.co.uk/resources/online-short-stories/the-uncanny-sigmund-freu d/ edn, 2018 vols (Arts Council England, ) Knox, Ronald, Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction, https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/tips-masters/ronald-knox-10-commandment s-of-detective-fiction edn, 1918 Mitchell, Gladys, The Mystery of a Buthers Shop (London: Vintage, 2009) ---The Saltmarsh Murders (London: Vintage, 2009) ---Speedy Death (London: Vintage, 2014) Paul Peppis, 'Querying and Queering Golden Age Detection: Gladys Mitchell's Speedy Death and Popular Modernism', Journal of Modern Literature, (2017), 120 &AuthType=ip,shib&db=edsjsr&AN=edsjsr.10.2979.jmodelite.40.3.08&site=eds-live> Ronson, Jon, The Psychopath Test : A Journey through the Madness Industry (London : Picador, 2012, 2012) &AuthType=ip,shib&db=cat00939a&AN=bs.a2165817&site=eds-live> 12 13