Part of Series
Dame Beatrice Lestrange Bradley, taking shelter from the rain in the British Museum, encounters a middle-aged archaeologist named Ronald Dick whom she last met in Greece many years previously. He persuades her to join another expedition in that country to visit various shrines and temples dedicated in the Golden Age to Apollo, who was the son of Leto by Zeus. The party turns out to be an ill-assorted one and, of the ten people who form it, only the leader is seriously interested in its object. Six of the members are young and, on the whole, frivolous; and, in any case, harmonious relationships are jeopardized by a selfish woman novelist whom almost all the others would soon like to see dead. In the end one of them kills her and it takes Dame Beatrice to work out the identity of the murderer.
Author
Aka Malcolm Torrie, Stephen Hockaby. Born in Cowley, Oxford, in 1901, Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell was the daughter of market gardener James Mitchell, and his wife, Annie. She was educated at Rothschild School, Brentford and Green School, Isleworth, before attending Goldsmiths College and University College, London from 1919-1921. She taught English, history and games at St Paul's School, Brentford, from 1921-26, and at St Anne's Senior Girls School, Ealing until 1939. She earned an external diploma in European history from University College in 1926, beginning to write her novels at this point. Mitchell went on to teach at a number of other schools, including the Brentford Senior Girls School (1941-50), and the Matthew Arnold School, Staines (1953-61). She retired to Corfe Mullen, Dorset in 1961, where she lived until her death in 1983. Although primarily remembered for her mystery novels, and for her detective creation, Mrs. Bradley, who featured in 66 of her novels, Mitchell also published ten children's books under her own name, historical fiction under the pseudonym Stephen Hockaby, and more detective fiction under the pseudonym Malcolm Torrie. She also wrote a great many short stories, all of which were first published in the Evening Standard. She was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976.
