Death Comes at Christmas

We are well under way with the annual Clothes in Books trope of Christmas in Books – seasonal scenes from random books, for no better reason than I like looking for the pictures, and I and some readers find them cheery and Xmas-y (particularly, of course, those featuring murders and other miseries)

 

Dead Men’s Morris by Gladys Mitchell

published 1936

recently re-published under the title Death Comes at Christmas

 

 

They were wearing belts round their trousers, and cricket boots on their feet. On their legs, between knee and ankle, were fastened pads of bells. The pads were made of soft leather cut up and down to within an inch of the top and bottom of the pad, to give the bells more play. The men carried handkerchiefs and Morris sticks.

 

 

Republishing old mysteries with new Christmas-y titles is an odd idea, but one I don’t wholly condemn: there is apparently a huge demand for Christmas crime – great stocking filler or Secret Santa present – and you can’t blame publishers for trying to make the most of that. But there will be people caught out by this – buying again a book they have already read. And the idea of it is misleading: Amazon says ‘cosy up this winter as Amateur sleuth Mrs Bradley investigates a puzzling Christmas mystery’ which doesn’t for one moment describe the book in any way (nor any Mrs B mystery).

Very like the Mitchell book Groaning Spinney, which is now marketed as ‘Murder in the Snow: A Cotswold Christmas Mystery’.

In both books the early part of the story IS rather Christmas-y and enjoyable, but then the investigation goes on forever. ‘Nothing much seems to happen till suddenly the solution to a rather dull mystery is announced, to nobody’s great surprise’ is what I said before. In this one you can grudgingly say that in the intervening months – and yes it is months, the matter is not resolved until Whit weekend – you can find out a lot about pig farming and Morris dancing. And the climax at the Whit dancing display is actually quite exciting.

And there is much to enjoy. In a post on Angela Milne’s One Year’s Time, I was interested in how matter-of-factly she dealt with unmarried sex – and here there is a lot of it going on. There is some disapproval, but it’s quite relaxed. These are the assembled thoughts of the mother of the flighty Linda, Mrs Ditch, who observes, ‘without noticeable regret’:

‘Our Lender, she’m a betch….trapesen and trollopsen over the country to sleep in them there pegpens and woodsheds and the dear knows what an’ all…whestlen up they boys the way we’d a’ thought ourselves trollopsen ’ussies ef ever we’d dared to do likewise! But them! They’re bold as brass, and that there Lender the boldest!’

[I normally am very resistant to any phonetic rendering of rural speech, but I actually enjoyed it here. It was all quite Cold Comfort Farm]

It is clear that casual sex is involved in this, and that it isn’t that much of a big deal.

Mrs Bradley contributes a boar’s head to the Christmas celebrations, ‘At supper the boar’s head was the centre piece at table’ - a tradition that we looked at in this blogpost, with a lot more pictures.

The Morris dancing is a big feature – this is something that pops up on the blog now and again. Mitchell was obviously fascinated by folk customs – see for example her A Hearse on May-Day – and there is another excellent guest post on folk customs (ie not by me) here. There is a post called ‘Morris dancers just are funny’ here, and a different take on it mentioned in passing here. (again, a lot of good pictures in these posts).

There is a most surprising scene where the aged Mrs Bradley has to run for help:

‘She took off her heavy coat, her hat and her skirt, and tucked her silk petticoat into the top of her knickers. Then she set off, across country and through the wood, running as hard as she could in her quite outrageous garb’

[No, I didn’t even try to find a picture to illustrate that]

Her nephew Cary – the pig farmer – is splendidly described as ‘a young man in flannel trousers so thick as to give the impression at first sight that he was wearing bearskin leggings.’

I couldn’t find that either – but I did like this picture of pig farming, from an Australian magazine.

So plenty of interest, though with the usual Mitchell strangeness.

b/w picture from English folk dance society.

Modern Morris men (colour) picture by Christopher Thomond for the Guardian.