Mitchell, Gladys - The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

Review by Nick Fuller

4/5

This is one of Mitchell's better books in the late period, with a startlingly beautiful evocation of landscape. Landscape is the Holy Grail for the narrator of the first half, the author Colin Palgrave, suffering, like Hannibal Jones in the earlier classic The Devil at Saxon Wall, from writer's block - often in the Mitchell novels of the 1960s onwards, setting, not plot, is the inspiration. It is thus fitting that no characters are introduced until the landscape has been introduced. Among the characters is the nymphomaniac Camilla Hoveton St. John, later found drowned, having unwittingly prophesied her death in the following words: "Moonlight on the sea makes me crazy. I could die for the sheer, crazy joy of being drowned in it." She has her wish, interrupting the novel-writing, as Palgrave is suspected by the police. The death later unleashes artistic talent - in the thirteenth chapter, it seems as if ghosts have taken possession of Palgrave and are writing the novel for him. Dame Beatrice arrives in the second half, and we follow her interviews with fishermen, holiday-makers, and so on, before she unmasks the killer, in a rather poetic denouement. Good one.

More conventional than most Mitchells and refreshingly unsentimental about Seventies sexual morality. The investigation is slow but steady, and most readers will have recognised the killer long before the unmasking by Mrs Bradley.

Jon.