The Echoing Strangers
A review of The Echoing Strangers by Gladys Mitchell – 230723
First, the good news. The Echoing Strangers, the twenty-fifth in Gladys Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley series and originally published in 1952, is one of her more accessible efforts, despite her efforts to muddy the waters with a plot which can be quite difficult to follow at times. It is also quite funny in parts, especially the sections surrounding a cricket game between two rival villages and the enmities and desire to win at all costs that it arouses. The non-British reader need not be put off by the fact that there is a lot of cricket as little understanding of the subtleties of the game is required.
For the fans of detective fiction there are more clues scattered around the text than in some of Mitchell’s other books and her psychologist sleuth, Mrs Bradley, attached to the Home Office, has to do more detecting than usual. The book centres around two murders committed hundreds of miles apart but the nexus is Francis and Derek Caux, two beautiful identical twins who were separated at the age of seven after their parents were killed in a car crash by their guardian and grandfather, the cricket mad Sir Adrian Caux. Francis was so traumatised by the car crash – his twin was not in the car at the time – that he is both deaf and dumb.
The book opens with Mrs Bradley on the river in the depths of Hampshire where she sees a youth walk away after pushing a middle-aged woman into the water. Mrs Bradley and George, her chauffeur, rescue the woman, Miss Higgs, who seems unusually phlegmatic over her experience and discover that the culprit is Francis. She is also on the spot when the body of a misanthropic naturalist by the name of Campbell is found fixed to the underside of a boat having been bludgeoned to death after Francis has recreated the scene in plasticine.
Meanwhile over in Norfolk Tom Donagh has secured a summer position as a tutor to Derek Caux, a pretext for employing his not inconsiderable cricketing talents during Sir Adrian’s cricket week. On the first day of the bitterly contested match between the two local villages, the opposition captain, Witt, is found dead in the dressing room having been bludgeoned with his own cricket bat. All the players have a plausible alibi except Derek Caux, whom his grandfather had ordered off the field just before the murder.
Both Campbell and Witt are blackmailers, a class of criminal that Mrs Bradley regards as worse than a murderer. After all, a murderer gets their crime done and dusted in seconds whereas the blackmailer takes sadistic pleasure in prolonging their victims’ distress and so she has little sympathy for the dead men. Nevertheless, the causal links with the Caux family and the psychological complexities that each of their characters present intrigues her that she decides to investigate with the help of Donagh and her favourite policeman, Gavin of the Yard, who is engaged to her secretary.
Mrs Bradley, once she gets her teeth into the cases, soon discovers that Francis is not deaf and dumb and that the twins play on their identical looks to pursue a vendetta against their murderous grandfather. Her encounters with the local publican, Cornish, and the charwoman she engages, Mrs Sludger, are moments of high comic drama. In the end it is a simple case of revenge and while the culprits are not difficult to spot, the interest of the book is in the way the indefatigable sleuth unravels the mystery.
The bad news is that there are some pretty unsavoury opinions, at least to modern eyes, along the way. Sir Adrian Caux is clearly a eugenist, not a characteristic that invites any particular comment, and Francis’ PTSD is treated unsympathetically. The twins, effete if not gay, are also treated as objects of fun and scorn.
Still, there are more positives than negatives and Mitchell for once has produced a mystery that is both fun and one that does not require membership of MENSA to follow.
