A Hearse On May-Day
A review of A Hearse On May-Day by Gladys Mitchell – 241028
Well, here is a curiosity, a novel by Gladys Mitchell that is not only accessible but also has a plot that develops in a linear fashion. Another unusual feature is that it is almost devoid, aside from a brief encounter, of the Gavins, Dame Beatrice’s Marmite-like secretary Laura, her son Hamish, and completely absent is her pet detective, Laura’s husband. Instead, Dame Beatrice, as Mrs Bradley is now known as, operates on her own with some assistance from her great niece, Fenella Lestrange. On the other hand, originally published in 1972 and the forty-fifth in her long-running Mrs Bradley series, it is reassuringly bonkers.
The book falls roughly into two parts, the former infinitely the better. Fenella Lestarnge, en route to Douston to complete preparations for her imminent wedding – she calls it off when she discovers that her intended prefers to seal a business deal than tie the knot – takes a detour to lunch at the tiny village of Seven Wells. After lunch at the More to Come she discovers that her car has been tampered with and it will not be until the next day that it will be repaired. She is forced to stay overnight at the inn.
It is at this point that Fenella enters what is almost a parallel universe. It is Mayering Eve, April 30th, which the villagers take particularly seriously. Despite dire warnings to stay in her room and bar the door, Fenella’s curiosity gets the better of her and she witnesses a bizarre ceremony in which thirteen people are dressed up in costumes representing each of the signs of the Zodiac – Pisces wears a particularly fetching hat shaped like a salmon which comes in particularly useful later – reading cards. Her intrusion leads to the group turning hostile.
Intrigued, Fenella watches more of the Mayering Eve ceremonies, including a sacrificial skeleton being sprinkled with a cockerel’s blood while the group chants a pagan fertility poem before the bones are carried to their resting place in a hillside grave. She also a man dressed as Jack O’Green with whom, unaccountably, she falls in love and quickly marries.
Dame Beatrice is particularly interested in Fenella’s adventures in Seven Wells as she has been called in to investigate the murder of the local squire, the wonderfully named Sir Bathy Bitton-Bittadon, a few days before and, to the consternation of the village and against local custom, is to be buried on Mayering Day. The second part of the book follows her progress.
The weirdness of life in Seven Wells continues apace as the landlord of the More to Come has disappeared along with his wife and three members of staff, to be replaced by a new management team. Bodies are taken from Sir Bathy’s family’s mausoleum, laid to rest in the crypt under the pub, disappear again and then three reappear in the family tomb. They are fresh victims, all coshed over the head with a heavy instrument, but they are not the obvious victims.
A slip of the tongue and the sending of a message to Sir Jeremy, Sir Barthy’s son out in India, informing him of the death of his father before he had even been killed, leads Dame Beatrice to suspect that the murder was not only premeditated but that the perpetrator was closer to home. While the resolution of the case is relatively straightforward and the culprit is easy to spot, Mitchell moves things along at an admirable pace.
The highlights of the book for me were Mitchell’s portrayal of life in a rural outpost where things have stayed the same for decades and where the locals resent any intrusion and her revelling in the bizarreness of English folk lore and customs which she uses to great advantage.
A word of warning, though. If this is your first encounter with Mrs Bradley, this is very atypical of her adventures but it is great fun nevertheless. It shows that Mitchell could write a (relatively) straightforward piece of crime fiction if she really wanted to but, to her credit, she did not often want to, preferring to test the genre to breaking point and, with it, her reader’s patience.
