A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY
Rediscover Gladys Mitchell - one of the 'Big Three' female crime fiction writers alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
When a pair of ramblers, lost in the English countryside, stop at a country house to ask for directions, they are most astonished to be ushered in to dinner. It seems they've been invited as a necessity by the superstitious lady of the house, to avoid thirteen guests sitting down to dinner. But the thirteenth guest never arrives, and his headless body is discovered in a wood the next day.
Fortunately, numbered among the original dinner guests is a rather extraordinary psychoanalyst, and sometime detective, by the name of Mrs Bradley...
Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell - or 'The Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin called her - was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. 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.
Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the detective heroine of a further sixty six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers.In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.
Title: Here Comes a Chopper
Author: Mitchell, Gladys
ISBN: 9780099582243
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 2014-04-17
Number of Pages: 352
Weight: 0.2801 kg
Crime writing's best kept secret * Scotsman *
If a relaxing diversion is of the essence for a good holiday, a Gladys Mitchell novel is a must...a crime writer who, in her day, ranked with Christie and Sayers * Daily Mail *
The Great Gladys * Philip Larkin *
There are many other good detective writers...there is Gladys Mitchell with her fascinating Mrs Bradley, ugly as a toad and armed with the latest up-to-date theories of psychology -- Agatha Christie * Guardian *
Particularly delightful... I am delighted to have made Mrs Bradley's acquaintance -- Nicholas Lezard * Guardian *
