With World War II getting under way around them, the residents of a small English town called Willington – already quite preoccupied with the grim preparations for war and trying to protect themselves from a nightly bombing blitz that had not yet begun – suddenly endure a series of three violent deaths within the space of a few hours. Are the deaths related – or merely coincidental? The local police inspector believes they are related; many others (including some very prominent citizens) don’t want to see any linkage among the victims or similarities among the deaths. That's when Mrs. Beatrice Bradley, psychologist and psychiatrist, enters the picture, offering to help the police and discover the truth, in Gladys Mitchell’s 1940 book, Brazen Tongue. It's the subject of today's audio review on the Classic Mysteries podcast, and you can listen to the entire review by clicking here.
Gladys Mitchell wrote her first Mrs. Bradley book in 1929, at the heart of the Golden Age of Detection, and she continued to write them well up into the 1980s. Brazen Tongue was published in 1940, during the early days of the war before the German blitz really got under way. The story revolves around the sudden deaths of three people in what may or may not have been related crimes. Here’s some of the way Gladys Mitchell describes the situation, as seen by Mrs. Bradley:
“The deaths had been, as it were, topical, and their aftermath had been too spectacular to be in keeping with such a town[...]in the first two months of the war – as though reports of schools closed, children sent into the country, and descriptions (with photographs) of the new public air raid shelters, were not enough to give the paper that extra fillip which the times appeared to require – there must be a Council member poisoned with arsenic. And then[...]there had followed the sensational discovery of his body propped up in a doorway near the local cinema, this in addition to the discovery of another body, that of an unknown woman, in the municipal A.R.P. cistern in an obscure cul-de-sac at the western end of the town. Then, ‘overdoing it,’ said Mrs. Bradley to herself (an almost exact echo of the words of the inspector of police, although she did not know this until later) there was also the apparently motiveless murder of the red-haired telephonist at the Town Hall Report Centre.”
I think that may give you some idea of the story - which, I warn you, becomes quite convoluted; it takes Mrs. Bradley (and Mitchell) what seems to be an inordinate amount of time at the end to explain exactly what did happen and who did what to whom (and why). I hesitate to recommend it to new readers of Mitchell's stories, but if you're already a fan, you are likely to find Brazen Tongue an intriguing entry among the Mrs. Bradley books.
If you'd like to read more about both Mrs. Bradley and Brazen Tongue, you will find a lengthy article by Jason Half at The Stone House, which he describes as :A Gladys Mitchell Tribute Site." I'd also recommend another thoughtful review from Curtis Evans at his blog, The Passing Tramp. The book is readily available as an e-book; the only paper copies I can find are pretty expensive.
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