A VINTAGE MURDER MYSTERY Rediscover Gladys Mitchell one of the 'Big Three' female crime fiction writers alongside Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. When a pair of ramblers, lost in the English countryside, stop at a country house to ask for directions, they are most astonished to be ushered in to dinner. It seems they've been invited as a necessity by the superstitious lady of the house, to avoid thirteen guests sitting down to dinner. But the thirteenth guest never arrives, and his headless body is discovered in a wood the next day.

Fortunately, numbered among the original dinner guests is a rather extraordinary psychoanalyst, and sometime detective, by the name of Mrs Bradley...

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell or The Great Gladys as Philip Larkin called her was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. Her hobbies included architecture and writing poetry. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and her interest in witchcraft was encouraged by her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson. Her first novel,Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the detective heroine of a further sixty six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club, alongside Agatha Christie, G.K Chesterton and Dorothy Sayers.In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers Association Silver Dagger in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

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A country house party...a violent death...a classic murder mystery from one the queens of Golden Age crime fiction