When Miss Ferris drowned in a wash basin during a performance of The Mikado at the Hillmaston Coeducational Day School, the police ruled  it a suicide. The school’s headmaster wasn’t so sure. He called in that grand dame of detection, the psychoanalyst-sleuth Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley. The innocuous Miss Ferris wasn’t popular among her fellow teachers, several of whom feared she would expose their guilty secrets. But these transgressions, for the most part, appeared too inconsequential to end in murder. Death at the Opera (Death in the Wet in the U.S.) is an early mystery by Gladys Mitchell, lumped with Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers by contemporary critics as one of England’s “big three” women mystery writers. Mitchell wrote 66 mysteries featuring Mrs. Bradley between 1929 and her death in 1983. Death at the Opera was filmed for British television (with a different motive, killer and method of  murder than in the book) in 2000 with Diana Rigg portraying Mrs. Bradley.

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