"One of the Big Three Women Detective Writers". So wrote the London Observer about Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell (1901-1983). Now, twenty years after the posthumous publication of her final novel and seventy-five years after the first appearance of Mrs. Beatrice Lestrange Bradley (called by the Observer "by far the best and most vital English female detective"), comes a new collection of short stories. The stories were first published in newspapers in the 1930s and 1950s. Most of them, however, have not appeared in book form before, and all of them bear the unmistakable stamp of Gladys Mitchell. Nicholas Blake wrote in The Spectator "I have considered her to be one of the half-dozen best detection-writers in this country. Not only has she created that unforgettable sleuth the eccentric, flamboyant and witch-like alienist, Mrs. Bradley: she is also witty and ingenious; she carries her load of erudition with the utmost grace; and she likes the detective story to be full-blooded fantasy with no nonsense about it."