Q&A with Gladys Mitchell from ‘In Praise of Gladys Mitchell’
published in the Armchair Detective, Volume 9 No. 4, October 1976

Q. Dame Beatrice, your detective, is a marvellous imaginative creation – how did she come about? Was it evolution or sudden total inspiration, pure invention or was she based on someone? Has she changed at all since 1929?
A. Physically – that is to say, in appearance – Dame Beatrice is based on two delightful and most intelligent ladies I knew in my youth. Her mannerisms and costume and her formidable brains are entirely my own invention. When I began to write Speedy Death I had no intention of making her my detective. She simply ‘took over’ and I became so superstitious about her that I would not dare to have another detective! Personally, I should hate to meet her in real life.

Q. You were a member of the Detection Club (a founder-member?). Have you any specially happy or picturesque memories of the Detection Club, its meetings, its ritual, and your fellow members?
A. Apart from the brilliant, witty, charming and highly intellectual Helen Simpson, I liked Freeman Wills Crofts and Anthony Berkeley best of the early members, and later the delightful boy (as I thought and think of him) Edmund Crispin, always so courteous, happy and kind. I myself was one of the earliest members of the club, though not a founder. The main rules, according to the ritual, were that we should furnish all necessary clues to our murderers, ignore sinister Chinamen and poisons unknown to science, promise never to steal other people's plots, whether these were disclosed to us under the influence of drink or otherwise, and (as it began as a dining-club, although we had premises later) not to eat peas with a knife or put our feet on the dining table. I remember that at one annual dinner some important ‘prop’ or other for the initiation ceremony had been left at the club rooms to which, of course, nobody had thought to bring his or her key, and we took an Assistant Commissioner of Police with us to break into the house. He was a co-opted member, but did not seem to be exactly delighted to join us in committing the crime of breaking and entering, particularly as there were other daytime occupants of the building besides ourselves.

Q. Dame Beatrice's omniscience annoys some people. How often is she wrong? Do knowing readers delight in pointing out her (or your) mistakes?
A. I am not a bit surprised that she annoys people, because she never is wrong. Besides, she has a god-like quality of being much larger than life, and of being so much superior to ordinary people that she can afford to be benign and kind even to my murderers, who seldom get hanged (in the old days) or suffer life imprisonment (in the later books). People who write to me usually do so to point out errors of fact. A Scottish lady told me that one cannot put a car on the train from London to Glasgow, an Irish priest pointed out my misuse of Hibernian dialect, and a very irate Scotsman complained that no elderly female could perform the feats I attributed to Dame Beatrice. As, at the age of seventy-four-plus I can perform most of them myself, including throwing a knife, and hitting a postcard ten times out of ten at twenty-five paces with a rifle (a thing I don't believe I have ever mentioned as being one of her accomplishments, as her favourite weapon is a revolver), I think the gentleman is wrong.