Dame Beatrice Let Loose in Greece

Come Away Death by Gladys Mitchell

published 1937

 

Come Away Death is a great favourite among a sector of Gladys Mitchell fans, and is quite an unusual entry in the oeuvre. Regular sleuth Dame Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley joins some old friends in Greece to travel around looking at archaeological sites and the myths that surround them, travelling also in to Turkey/Turkiye. There is a death, but it comes very late on, which some readers object to – I don’t myself mind.

Mrs Bradley has known the core family for some time – parents and children ranging from school age to grownup – and for the expeditions they have surrounded themselves with a very Mitchell-ian collection of other people: feuding academics, lovestruck young men, driven young women, schoolboy friends, and of course people who are up to no good. There is a collection of accessories to the various trips on ox-carts – boxes, snakes, statues, a severed head.

‘We are going first to Eleusis, Beatrice; from there to Epidaurus, to see what we can do with the Aesculapius cult – the god of healing – thence to Mycenae for the Homeric offerings, then back here again before we cross to Ephesus, unless it seems better to return to Nauplia and take a boat from there. At Ephesus, of course, we revive the Artemis worship.’ 

Mitchell certainly creates a convincing world: the dusty travels, boat journeys, the primitive accommodation and rough countryside:

Mr Dick fell into the excavations and nearly broke his neck…. ‘That damned fool Dick upset the auguries by falling into that hole last night and scaring the cow’.

And other ongoing troubles:

the nonsense about the second Iacchus, and the fiasco of the snakes at Epidaurus

There are moments of glory amid the difficult times:

But at dawn, and, even more, she knew, beneath the hot noonday sun, Mycenae came into her own. Her tragedy and her greatness loomed like battle on the landscape. The walls enclosed the dead, and the great excavations, where Schliemann had kissed the gold death-mask of Agamemnon, yawned like the graves that they were.

There is a low-key fevered atmosphere of sex, if such a thing is possible.

‘I also,’ he said, addressing himself to Mrs Bradley, ‘I also am immoral with women.’

‘I have no doubt of it,’ replied Mrs Bradley, in the tones of congratulation he seemed to demand.

And all the young people are running wild:

‘I thought boys got over tobacconists’ daughters whilst they were still at college, but apparently I’m wrong, because Gelert hasn’t.’

‘He hasn’t been swine enough to tell you all about her?...I call that damnable to borrow money from his sister for such a purpose!’ [ie to pay off the young woman]

‘Oh, Ronald darling, don’t be a fool! Boys always have borrowed money from their sisters for such a purpose, and jolly glad the sisters are, too, usually.’

[Interestingly, I had just been reading Fanny Burney’s Camilla, where, exactly, a young woman gives her bro money for his similar troubles nearly 150 years before]

This next passage might be a slight

 

SPOILER

but only if you were half-way through the book. It has the true Mrs Bradley touch:

‘The thing I can’t understand is why they haven’t discovered the body before this! ….One reads these horrid stories of corpses left in luggage, and someone’s suspicions always seem to be aroused.’

‘Ah, that’s at Charing Cross,’ said Mrs Bradley. ‘Ephesus isn’t a bit like Charing Cross, in spite of all that poets try to tell us. I didn’t find the body there, although I looked for it. I found the head, as I told you. It really was all that mattered.’

The book starts with arrival at Athens/Piraeus, and I did wonder how often Mitchell was going to mention sewage [answer: 4 times in the first two pages, one more time later in the book] but things picked up after that.

Salt Research via Flickr

I enjoyed the Agatha Christie books set on archaeological digs – Murder in Mesopotamia, They Came to Baghdad – and this is of course very different (and not just because Iraq is not Greece or Turkey). But I liked the same air of the lost world of the 1930s and a more leisurely time. Nobody has any qualms or questions about what they are doing, the ethics of digging up someone else’s country and removing artefacts.

And the text meant I could find some nice pictures:

Library of Celsus at Ephesus, Salt Research

…He went to the library of Celsus, where he climbed the steps, and put his hand in the niche which once held a statue of Minerva…

And then this:

She stood before the Stele of Aristion, contemplating, not only the greaved and kilted warrior with his curled locks and long, straight feet, but the imaginary spectacle of Sir Rudri walking with torches in the dusk of the Greek evening, chanting strange hymns and sorrowful litanies to the Eleusinian gods Iacchus and Dionysus, and to the goddesses Persephone and Demeter, and to the god-king Triptolemus.

 

As ever, if you are interested in Gladys Mitchell’s books, you must visit The Stone House tribute site, a most wonderful website with plenty to say about this book and all the others – an incredibly helpful resource.

Top picture: Archaeologists Theodore and Josephine Shear with statuette of Apollo Lykeios, 1936, from the Smithsonian.