The Echoing
Strangers (1952)
Blurb:
<>
--My thanks
to Jason Hall.
My review:
<>The Echoing
Strangers (1952) shows Mitchell in top form. Although
her imagination is at its most fertile, its wittiest, its most
irreverent, and its most extravagant, there is more detection and
clueing than in any book since the earliest ones. Despite
the bizarre trappings, the story is straight-forward and lucid—the
clarification is admirably handled, the details given slowly so
that the reader is prepared for the solution to the first-class
plot in which all the details fit neatly together, ably assisted
by some good misdirection.
Mrs. Bradley, as
always, is the detective, here first-class: reptilian and vivid
while still being human, fully in control of the situation, as “the
idea of personal failure was, and had always been, absent from
[her] consciousness”. Laura Menzies, happily, does
not appear, being in New York—having appeared briefly, I am
told, in Groaning Spinney (1950), her last full-length
appearance was in The Dancing Druids (1948). The
story opens with Mrs. Bradley going down to the village of
Wetwode, Norfolk, “a hybrid little place on the River
Burwater”, to visit an old school-friend. As the
school-friend is away, Mrs. Bradley hires a boat, claiming that
she “can manage the boat quite well so long as nothing
but starting, stopping and steering are involved”, and
sees a deaf / dumb mute push a woman into a river—with an
opening like this, the book will either be very good or very bad.
Mrs. Bradley is on the scene when the first victim, “a
misanthropic naturalist named Campbell”, “a public
informer and blackmailer”, is found secured to a broad
sailing-dinghy, bludgeoned to death.
At the same time,
Tom Donagh, one of Mitchell’s customary schoolmaster
view-point characters, is hired to act as both tutor to the deaf
/ dumb mute’s twin and “opening batsman and slip
fielder preferred” to the twins’ grandfather, Sir
Adrian Caux. Sir Adrian, “stoutish and florid, with
the profile of a cruel man and the full face of a self-indulgent
one”, is a wonderful villain, a homicidal maniac with a
mania for cricket (at which he cheats). Cricket practices
follow, including one played against lunatics from a “big
mental hospital about twenty miles from here. The eleven
come in motor coaches with about fifty supporters and
half-a-dozen keepers…only they call them patients and nurses
nowadays. Their umpire’s a loony, too, so if he comes
sneaking up behind you just as their bowler starts his run, tear
down the pitch like hell. He had a silk stocking last year
and nearly strangled Henry. They're all homicidal, of
course. It’s a sort of second-class Broadmoor.”
Finally, the big match comes up, “an annual fixture and
… Sir Adrian’s way of dealing with an ancient feud”—the
feud being worsened by the discovery of the visiting team’s
captain’s body, beaten to death with his own cricket bat,
while all the suspects have alibis. The discovery that the
second victim was also a blackmailer, with possible connections
to the first murder, links the two cases as much as the presence
of the twins—“the octopus-arm of blackmail …
writhed and twined around every aspect of the case.”
Although Mrs. Bradley, like Dr.
Thorndyke, believes that blackmailers only receive their just
desserts if someone murders them, she investigates the two cases
at the top of her powers. Her dealings with the landlord
Cornish (for whose death she is later responsible) and with the
charwoman Mrs. Sludger are signs of comic genius. She needs
all of her powers to deal with the two most memorable characters
in the book: the identical Caux twins, “both … to
some degree abnormal and degenerate”, “the most
beautiful youths [Donagh] had ever seen… tall and graceful,
[with] a noble profile, golden hair, a short Greek mouth and
large brown eyes”, effete, and super-intelligent.
To Mrs. Bradley, they are the prime suspects, “inclined
to think that a boy as spoilt and indulged as Derek and one as
unfairly treated as Francis might be capable of criminal
activities”, especially as they are the only links
between the two cases. The situation becomes even more
intriguing with the revelation of the fact that the two twins are
interchangeable, one masquerading as the other. This fact,
to which the reader is led gradually, only, like the revelation
halfway through The Devil at Saxon Wall, opens more
mysteries—“The incident, which should have shed
light, enveloped the situation in blacker darkness”—mystification
through clarification, so that the ending is both inevitable and
a surprise.
This tale of identical twins and their homicidal grandfather
is one of Mitchell’s true masterpieces: beautifully written,
beautifully plotted, and subtly disturbing, the river setting as
beautiful as in Death and the Maiden, and Mrs. Bradley at
the top of her powers before the advent of “the
monstrously complacent Laura”.
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