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The Echoing Strangers

Page history last edited by PBworks 18 years, 3 months ago

Mitchell, Gladys - The Echoing Strangers (1952)

 

 

Review by Nick Fuller

5/5

The Echoing Strangers (1952) shows Mitchell in top form. Although her imagination is at its most fertile, its wittiest, its most irreverent, and its most extravagant, there is more detection and clueing than in any book since the earliest ones. Despite the bizarre trappings, the story is straight-forward and lucid. The clarification is admirably handled, the details given slowly so that the reader is prepared for the solution to the first-class plot in which all the details fit neatly together, ably assisted by some good misdirection.

 

Mrs. Bradley, as always, is the detective, here first-class: reptilian and vivid while still being human, fully in control of the situation, as “the idea of personal failure was, and had always been, absent from her consciousness”. The story opens with Mrs. Bradley going down to the village of Wetwode, Norfolk, “a hybrid little place on the River Burwater”, to visit an old school-friend. As the school-friend is away, Mrs. Bradley hires a boat, claiming that she “can manage the boat quite well so long as nothing but starting, stopping and steering are involved”, and sees a deaf / dumb mute push a woman into a river. With an opening like this, the book will either be very good or very bad. Mrs. Bradley is on the scene when the first victim, “a misanthropic naturalist named Campbell”, “a public informer and blackmailer”, is found secured to a broad sailing-dinghy, bludgeoned to death.

 

At the same time, Tom Donagh, one of Mitchell’s customary schoolmaster view-point characters, is hired to act as both tutor to the deaf / dumb mute’s twin and “opening batsman and slip fielder preferred” to the twins’ grandfather, Sir Adrian Caux. Sir Adrian, “stoutish and florid, with the profile of a cruel man and the full face of a self-indulgent one”, is a wonderful villain, a homicidal maniac with a mania for cricket (at which he cheats). Cricket practices follow, including one played against lunatics from a “big mental hospital about twenty miles from here. The eleven come in motor coaches with about fifty supporters and half-a-dozen keepers…only they call them patients and nurses nowadays. Their umpire’s a loony, too, so if he comes sneaking up behind you just as their bowler starts his run, tear down the pitch like hell. He had a silk stocking last year and nearly strangled Henry. They're all homicidal, of course. It’s a sort of second-class Broadmoor.” Finally, the big match comes up, “an annual fixture and … Sir Adrian’s way of dealing with an ancient feud” — the feud being worsened by the discovery of the visiting team’s captain’s body, beaten to death with his own cricket bat, while all the suspects have alibis. The discovery that the second victim was also a blackmailer, with possible connections to the first murder, links the two cases as much as the presence of the twins—“the octopus-arm of blackmail … writhed and twined around every aspect of the case.”

 

Although Mrs. Bradley, like Dr. Thorndyke, believes that blackmailers only receive their just desserts if someone murders them, she investigates the two cases at the top of her powers. Her dealings with the landlord Cornish (for whose death she is later responsible) and with the charwoman Mrs. Sludger are scenes of comic genius. She needs all of her powers to deal with the two most memorable characters in the book: the identical Caux twins, “both … to some degree abnormal and degenerate”, “the most beautiful youths Donagh had ever seen… tall and graceful, with a noble profile, golden hair, a short Greek mouth and large brown eyes”, effete, and super-intelligent. To Mrs. Bradley, they are the prime suspects, “inclined to think that a boy as spoilt and indulged as Derek and one as unfairly treated as Francis might be capable of criminal activities”, especially as they are the only links between the two cases. The situation becomes even more intriguing with the revelation of the fact that the two twins are interchangeable, one masquerading as the other. This fact, to which the reader is led gradually, only, like the revelation halfway through The Devil at Saxon Wall, opens more mysteries. “The incident, which should have shed light, enveloped the situation in blacker darkness” — mystification through clarification, so that the ending is both inevitable and a surprise.

 

This tale of identical twins and their homicidal grandfather is one of Mitchell’s true masterpieces: beautifully written, beautifully plotted, and subtly disturbing, the river setting as beautiful as in Death and the Maiden, and Mrs. Bradley at the top of her powers.

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