The Mystery of a Butchers Shop - Gladys Mitchell

This mystery was first published in 1930 which puts it at the heart of the "Golden Age" of British detective fiction. The sleuth, amateur of course, is Beatrice Lestrange Bradley and they do not come any Lestranger than our Beatrice. With her outrageous clothes, cackling laugh and clawlike hands she sounds like one of the witches from Macbeth but nonetheless she homes in on the murderer. In this mystery a rather repulsive businessman, who may also have been a blackmailer, is last seen in the company of a cousin whom he intends to cut out of his will before ending on a series of hooks in a butchers shop. An open and shut case one may think but this is a detective story. Gladys Mitchell presents a fine array of typical middle class English Village characters and provides a neat and meticulously documented solution. The writing is vastly different even from those modern novels set in the thirties which to me is one of it's attractions. The strogest swear word is "damn", such a refreshing change from the gutter language of most modern detective novels.