Mitchell, Gladys

(British, 1901–83)

Mitchell was born in Cowley, Oxfordshire. She worked until 1961 as a schoolteacher in the suburbs of west London where much of her idiosyncratic crime fiction is set. Begin with Dead Men's Morris (1936), in which Mrs Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, psychiatric advisor to the Home Office and quirky detective-heroine of some seventy books, investigates a series of apparently accidental deaths in rural Oxfordshire. In Three Quick and Five Dead (1968), Mrs Bradley's esoteric learning enables her to track down a mass-murderer who pins a cryptic note to each of his victims. The impersonation of a man who has been dead for five years is discovered in Late, Late in the Evening (1976), providing Bradley, now in retirement and elevated to Dame, with the key to a double murder.

Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, John Carr  DH