Mitchell, Gladys - The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

This is fresher Mitchell than had been written for quite some time. Mitchell is evidently trying to return to the classic ages. We have cackling and reptilian Mrs. Bradley instead of the blander Dame Beatrice, a rural background, and a murder committed in the 1920s — and no Laura.

The narrator is one Jessica Denefield, a young woman obsessed with the greenstone griffins. Like Capella Babbacombe-Starr in The Whispering Knights, she associates a certain group of objects with a mystical world of the imagination and fairy-tales. The death of an old woman in a burnt-out summerhouse was caused by the griffins; and the griffins killed the squire's only son in a shooting accident while being used as target practice. So, at any rate, says her childhood imagination. It is when she is an adult that the griffins begin to influence her own life. An antique shop — The Greenstone Griffins — is burnt to the ground, and she finds the dead body of a mysterious French blackmailer bludgeoned to death with one of the griffins. Jessica purchases the flat in which the corpse was found, but is forced to resign from her job as a school teacher in the village of Willowford (read Brentford — it is obvious that Jessica is Mitchell herself). Jessica makes the acquaintance of Mrs. Bradley ("a practising psychiatrist ... and holder of all the doctorates I've ever heard of except that of Doctor of Divinity"), whose curiosity and compassion lead her to take up Jessica's case.

The emergence of the killers is well-handled, but there are a few loose plot ends: the burning of the antique shop, the history of the greenstone griffins, and why Bond the grocer was crawling around the attic, although the reader should be able to supply answers to these questions himself. Since this book was the final Mitchell to be published during her lifetime, it is reasonable to believe that had she been healthier she would have corrected these errors. Apart from these small problems, Griffins is a fine last hurrah for Mitchell.

Strikingly good for an 82-year old. The early chapters have an autobiographical feel to them - one wonders how much Mitchell was calling upon her own childhood.

Jon.