The Twenty-Third Man by Gladys Mitchell

The Twenty-Third Man by Gladys Mitchell

published 1957

 

 

Recently the blog and its readers have been agog for discussion of compass directions – see these two posts:

Compass directions, a children’s classic, and is North best?

No Direction Home – which way is best?

… and this book contains an excellent quote which fits in well. It’s from the daughter of a hotel-owner, about why it is a good idea to stop travelling:

'That is the best thing. Nobody was clever enough, intelligent enough, good enough, to leave it at that. Always they wish to go west, further west, and more west — still. What is this madness, Senora, that makes for the west, for the sunset, for disillusion — for death?’

Our general conclusion in the earlier discussion was that the West had a good rep – nice to see another pov, and ‘the west, sunset, disillusion and death’ would make a great doom-y title for something.

Series sleuth Mrs Bradley is on her travels – she arrives by boat in what is apparently one of the Canary Islands, but imaginary:

The island of Hombres Muertos was aptly named. They sat, these dead men, twenty-three of them, around a stone table in a cave on Monte Negro, the highest mountain on the island and so called because of the dark, sculptured waves of lava which had flowed from the crater and congealed above the cavern.

These are going to feature in the book a lot – obviously, given the title.

So Mrs Bradley is staying in the main hotel, and meets the locals and residents and visitors. They are introduced in quick succession, and there are obviously troubles and arguments and feuds. Soon after, someone disappears.

There is a very funny young boy, Clement, and his difficult parents. Mitchell worked in education and knew children well, but had none of her own, and is prone to the childfree’s certainty that they would do a lot better than actual parents – see discussions in Jane Austen (yes really) and the Nannies in Dorothy Dunnett’s Johnson book, Dolly and the Nanny Bird.

Clement is very badly-behaved because his parents have too many theories, and apparently needs to go to an English boarding school (no-one deserves that, and particularly not the school in Mitchell’s Tom Brown’s Body).

He is the first to claim that there is an extra dead body in the group. so then there has to be a lot of travelling up to the cave (by mule) and counting and discussing and finding out who is missing.

There are also some rather splendid bandits, who capture Clement – and I don’t think this is a spoiler – but eventually let him go. The main two are called  Tio Caballo and Jose el Lupe: Uncle Horse and Jose the Wolf. Very fine naming.

Mrs B eventually goes back to the UK to do some more checking up, but sends her assistant Laura (complete with a small baby) out to do some checking. So most of the action is on the island and surroundings.

There is a young American girl, Miranda, who has this to say:

‘Taken prisoner my foot! He had a rendezvous with them. So Emden said, and I don’t see why it wouldn’t be true. The bandits here are sheer Oklahoma. They couldn’t kidnap a tortoise. No, I figure Emden was right, and Pop Peterhouse had a date with them.’

[I think Oklahoma here is a reference to the stage musical]

She likes a lot of slangy talk, and Mrs B thinks she has a winning riposte, and can catch her out, by saying ‘And don’t you come from Boston?’, showing her own naivete in her belief that everyone in Boston speaks in a high-toned way. She has plainly never been there, and feels this is the equivalent of saying ‘but you live in Buckingham Palace.’

Mrs Bradley’s researches take her to a lodging house in London where there are all kinds of mysterious goings-on, and it’s not clear exactly who was there with whom.

I really enjoyed this one: it combined plenty of  the usual mad Mitchell features, but also a strong and reasonably comprehensible plot, a good story and some great characters. The weird setting on the island added to the drama. The mummified figures were very spooky, the conversations absorbing, the troglodytes an exciting addition.

I had recently re-read Alexandre Dumas’s The Count of Monte Cristo, and there were certain surprising similarities – wild adventures, bandits, mysterious islands…

I am always anxious to recommend the wonderful Stone House website – first port of call for anyone interested in Gladys Mitchell.

The mummies picture (from Flickr) shows In the Catacombs at Guanajuato. That’s in Mexico in 1897, but they look good.

The second picture might be anywhere  - no date or place given – but I liked it and it is from one of my favourite resources, The San Diego Air & Space Museum archives.

And I seize any excuse to use the wonderful Eric Ravilious picture of a boarding house The Boarding Hhouse - Eric Ravilious - WikiArt.org

(recently seen on the cover of Margery Sharp’s Harlequin House from Dean St Press)