Gladys Mitchell: My Father Sleeps & Brazen Tongue

 

 

My reading of Gladys Mitchell had been blocked by my inability to get hold of Printer’s Error: I had read many of them, darting all over the place in the list, but was now trying to fill in the gaps. Printer’s Error seemed impossible – but my Secret Santa solved the problem.

What Went Right, What Went Wrong: Printer's Error

And now I am back on track, and today am bringing two books to the table

 

My Father Sleeps by Gladys Mitchell

published 1944

 

This is a very Scottish book. And it also deals with Campbells and Macdonalds and Glencoe – a recent interest on the blog, and with families where someone has remarried, which we also dealt with, all n this post:

Apricot sky by Ruby Ferguson + Campbells, Etiquette, Hamlet

Mrs Bradley is up in Scotland with her assistant Laura Menzies (the last name is important: Scottish you see). She is due to give a paper to a learned conference and we gather is having some holiday first. And we have Laura’s brother Ian, newly-wed and sailing in the area. They all come across a very unusual character, Hector Loudon, who claims that he or his house are being haunted, because of an old crime and miscarriage of justice.

Everybody takes off in different directions, and meets more people. The author carefully tells us where everybody is going, in some detail, but after the hundredth placename I was losing the will to live, even though I have visited quite a few of them.

There are old creak-y houses – ‘probably old Mrs McShuffie, the deceased crofter, had been the last person to kindle peat in that particular tin’.

And then:

At the same instant that the thunder died away, through the gloomy house there sounded a sibilant voice.

“They hanged me, they hanged me my son…Where rest my bones? I died like a dog, and who will speak the word to save me? Who guards the secret my son? Your father sleeps. You must wake him.’

This is the ghost speaking. Mrs Bradley ‘listens carefully’.

 

Someone is able to make a point about identification because of having read their palm: looking at a dead body they say ‘it isn’t his hand… I never forget a hand I’ve read’. I feel this was an excellently unusual point. She also says that the palm shows the man to be a criminal.

I mentioned this in my earlier post on fortune tellers:

Can you Predict which Books I will Feature? - Fortune Tellers

There was a lot of wandering around and catching up with each other and walking and getting the train and sailing. And more and ever more place names. The only book comparable with this is Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, officially the most boring book ever written – ‘the siege of Angband lasted four hundred years’, which is approximately how long it took to read it. It has at least one new proper name on every page, and I think this book does too.

 

Although published in 1944, there is no mention of the war, which is in marked contrast with the other book in this entry:

Brazen Tongue by Gladys Mitchell

published 1940

 

 

 

I do always love a Home Front book, and this one had interesting details. It wasn’t as compelling as some of her other books, though it was more straightforward.

There was a splendid bit conversation covering various different aspects of the changed world of 1940:

“Most of the shops have given up sending [ie delivering orders]. It says so in the windows.”

“They will send for me,” said Lady Selina, getting up to go to her First Aid class at which, now, she was an instructor.

 “But, Mother, that’s horribly unpatriotic. After all, there’s not much sense in saving your own petrol if you’re going to waste other people’s.”

“The tradesmen,” said Lady Selina, “do not come under the heading of ‘other people.’ I trust, Adela,” she added, “that your lunatic, when found, will be returned to her proper sphere. I don’t want her brought in to lunch.”

 

There is a long, interesting description of a shift at a Control Centre, where Wardens and volunteers monitor and write up what is going on in the local area. Someone is dressed in

a pair of navy-blue slacks surmounted by a blithe canary jumper

Which enables me to use this splendid all-purpose picture.

Lunchtime brings a few minutes of rest for these women wor… | Flickr

 - she's an American Rosie the Riveter, but stands in for all the trousered women.

During the boring moments of her shift, our heroine Sally

took out a detective story, and settled herself to read. The book was not an enthralling one, however, and she wondered, not for the first time, why the masters of the craft did not produce their detective stories a good deal more frequently than was their custom. A lazy lot, she considered them, and probably indecently opulent, so that they had no need to bestir themselves more than about once in six months for the benefit of their public.

 

Gladys Mitchell produced approximately one book a year…

YOUTH HOSTEL: THE WORK OF THE YOUTH HOSTEL ASSOCIATION IN WARTIME, MALHAM, YORKSHIRE, ENGLAND, UK, 1944 | Imperial War Museums

THE RECONSTRUCTION OF 'AN INCIDENT': CIVIL DEFENCE TRAINING IN FULHAM, LONDON, 1942 | Imperial War Museums