of London’s prestigious Detection Club in the 1930s, and with nearly eighty books to her credit, Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell (1901–1983) should be as familiar as her contemporaries, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers, with whom she was once ranked as “one of the Big Three women mystery writers” of the Golden Age, but that hasn’t been the case for many years.
One of the biggest problems for the lack of popularity may be that Mitchell’s series character, Dame Beatrice Bradley, who appeared in sixty-six novels and several short stories, is so reptilian in tone and appearance that people are surprised that she doesn’t have a forked tongue. Mitchell often denigrates conventions of the genre, notably when she parodies Christie’s novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) with The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1929). Additionally, many of Bradley’s cases are heavily laden with Freudian psychology, and it is suggested in the books that she is descended from a long line of witches, so it is no surprise that the supernatural often plays a role in her adventures—not a particularly welcome element for many readers of detective stories.
Mitchell worked as a teacher for more than twenty-five years, first out of economic necessity, then during World War II because of England’s shortage of teachers. She had tremendous enthusiasm for the teachings of Freud, so made Dame Beatrice a psychiatrist with her own practice as well as a psychiatric consultant to the Home Office. Enviably, Bradley remains the same age in the last novel about her, The Crozier Pharaohs (1984), as she was in the first, Speedy Death (1929).
“The Case of the Hundred Cats” was originally published in Fifty Famous Detectives of Fiction, edited anonymously (London, Odhams Press, 1938); it was first collected in Sleuth’s Alchemy: Cases of Mrs. Bradley and Others, edited by Nicholas Fuller (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 2005).