MRS BRADLEY - Better known at the Home Office as Dame Beatrice Lestrange, and once played by Diana Rigg on TV, this clever and eccentric psychiatrist’s detecting career was featured over 50 years in 65 novels by Gladys Mitchell, many of which have recently been republished. Best begin with THE SALTMARSH MURDERS. Quirky, clever and cosy.
Noel Wells, curate in the sleepy village of Saltmarsh, likes to spend his time dancing in the study with the vicar’s niece until one day the vicar’s unpleasant wife discovers her unmarried housemaid is pregnant and trouble begins. It is left to Noel to call for the help of sometime-detective and full-time Freudian Mrs Bradley, who sets out on an unnervingly unorthodox investigation into the mysterious pregnancy, an investigation that also takes in a smuggler, the village lunatic, a missing corpse, a public pillory, an exhumation and, of course, a murderer.
Mrs. Bradley is easily one of the most memorable personalities in crime fiction and in this classic whodunit she proves that some English villages can be murderously peaceful.
'The marvel is that although Miss Mitchell has been so prolific, she has also been so good' Edmund Crispin
Author
About Gladys Mitchell
Gladys Mitchell was an English schoolteacher and the author of over sixty novels featuring her unconventional heroine, Mrs Bradley. An early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K Chesterton and Dorothy L. Sayers, she was awarded the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Her hobbies included architecture and writing poetry. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and her interest in witchcraft was encouraged by her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.
Maxim Jakubowski's view on MRS BRADLEY...
Better known at the Home Office as Dame Beatrice Lestrange, and once
played by Diana Rigg on TV, this clever and eccentric psychiatrist’s
detecting career was featured over 50 years in 65 novels by Gladys
Mitchell, many of which have recently been republished. Best begin with
THE SALTMARSH MURDERS. Quirky, clever and cosy.
