Late, Late in the Evening

Rating:
Summary: Late, Late in Mitchell's Career
Review: This is Mitchell's 50th book - a memorable jubilee, especially as she was to write 16 more books - many of which are at least as good as Christie and Sayers - especially Sayers (badly-written and snobbish). Mitchell has always been a more distinctive, more original writer, than any of her contemporaries. At her best she ranks with John Dickson Carr, and many of the best writers (Edmund Crispin, Nicholas Blake, H. R. F. Keating, P. D. James) hailed her as one of the greatest crime writers of all time.

This one deals with the discovery of a dead body in a hole, and the dead body of a girl dressed as a dinosaur at a garden party - both have been bludgeoned to death with a shovel. Mrs. Bradley (demoted for the 50th novel) is called in to investigate, and investigate she does. There are only two suspects, but the reader's mind is kept wondering which of them actually did it. The murderer isn't revealed until the very end (in Mitchell's work of the 1960s and 1970s a use of minimalism led to the murderers being known early on), and, despite only 2 suspects, it is a surprise. The plot is good, and the use of the children and the setting very much recalls The Rising Of The Moon, but also her earlier (little-known) masterpiece, The Devil At Saxon Wall (a book which ought to be on every bookshelf and in every bookstore).