Penguin no. 954: Tom Brown's Body by Gladys Mitchell

Quite a reasonable proportion of the first 3000 Penguins have green spines, which identifies them as crime novels. They are the kind of books that it would never occur to me to read if they weren't part of the collection, except perhaps the Sherlock Holmes stories, and that would reflect an interest in Victorian London rather than in crime fiction. But herein lies the wonderful thing about collecting and reading vintage Penguins. I have found a number of books that I would never have otherwise read but which I have enjoyed immensely, such as The Innocence of Father Brown  by G.K. Chesterton (no. 765), The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (no. 652), and several Ellery Queen novels. In general these books belong to an earlier era, when crime fiction wasn't concerned with the graphic, shocking and brutal aspects of death. The only exception I can think of is  Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (no. 2682), but that dealt with an actual crime which was particularly gruesome. Typically these novels are exercises in problem solving and share the same set of basic elements: a problem with an unknown solution, a closed solution space, and a set of constraints imposed by the plot. They could be about anything, but the format requires that the problem be posed by a crime, typically a murder.

In this book the unsolved problem is posed by the murder of an unpopular school master, a bully who torments selected students and colleagues, and who has affairs with married women. He is a man with a lot of enemies, but nonetheless his world is defined by the school community and the local village, so that the number of potential suspects is restricted to the school pupils, the rival masters, the three women the victim was romantically involved with, his fiance's father and a local farmer. Various people hold particular grudges and various people have witnessed incriminating scenes, all of which act in concert to both reveal and obscure the true solution. It's all fairly typical stuff. But the interesting fact revealed by reading a series of these crime novels is that even within this fairly constrained format, each author has a distinguishing voice. A different way of doing the same thing. So far, Gladys Mitchell's approach has been my least favourite.

Ms Mitchell has a sleuth named Mrs Lestrange Bradley, and she solves her crimes using witchcraft and Freudian psychoanalysis. She is unbearably smug and supercilious, without even the slightest doubt in the effectiveness of her grab bag of psychoanalytical tools. She divines everything in advance: what each witness will say, where each clue will be revealed, and how the crime has been committed. No deductive reasoning required, and hence no challenge to the reader.