When Last I Died

Table of Contents

About the Author

By the Same Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Chapter One THE DIARY

Chapter Two REACTIONS OF AN ELDERLY SERVANT

Chapter Three COUNSEL'S OPINION

Chapter Four THE WIDOW'S MITE

Chapter Five THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Chapter Six THE DEAR DEPARTED

Chapter Seven THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Chapter Eight THE WIDOW'S MITE

Chapter Nine COUNSEL'S OPINION

Chapter Ten REACTIONS OF AN ELDERLY PSYCHOLOGIST

Chapter Eleven THE DIARY

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WHEN LAST I DIED

Gladys Maude Winifred Mitchell – or 'The Great Gladys' as Philip Larkin described her – was born in 1901, in Cowley in Oxfordshire. She graduated in history from University College London and in 1921 began her long career as a teacher. She studied the works of Sigmund Freud and attributed her interest in witchcraft to the influence of her friend, the detective novelist Helen Simpson.

Her first novel, Speedy Death, was published in 1929 and introduced readers to Beatrice Adela Lestrange Bradley, the heroine of a further sixty-six crime novels. She wrote at least one novel a year throughout her career and was an early member of the Detection Club along with G. K. Chesterton, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. In 1961 she retired from teaching and, from her home in Dorset, continued to write, receiving the Crime Writers' Association Silver Dagger Award in 1976. Gladys Mitchell died in 1983.

ALSO BY GLADYS MITCHELL

Speedy Death

The Mystery of a Butcher's Shop

The Longer Bodies

The Saltmarsh Murders

Death at the Opera

The Devil at Saxon Wall

Dead Men's Morris

Come Away, Death

St Peter's Finger

Printer's Error

Brazen Tongue

Hangman's Curfew

Laurels Are Poison

The Worsted Viper

Sunset Over Soho

My Father Sleeps

The Rising of the Moon

Here Comes a Chopper

Death and the Maiden

The Dancing Druids

Tom Brown's Body

Groaning Spinney

The Devil's Elbow

The Echoing Strangers

Merlin's Furlong

Faintley Speaking

Watson's Choice

Twelve Horses and the

Hangman's Noose

The Twenty-third Man

Spotted Hemlock

The Man Who Grew Tomatoes

Say It With Flowers

The Nodding Canaries

My Bones Will Keep

Adders on the Heath

Death of the Delft Blue

Pageant of Murder

The Croaking Raven

Skeleton Island

Three Quick and Five Dead

Dance to Your Daddy

Gory Dew

Lament for Leto

A Hearse on May-Day

The Murder of Busy Lizzie

Winking at the Brim

A Javelin for Jonah

Convent on Styx

Late, Late in the Evening

Noonday and Night

Fault in the Structure

Wraiths and Changelings

Mingled with Venom

The Mudflats of the Dead

Nest of Vipers

Uncoffin'd Clay

The Whispering Knights

Lovers, Make Moan

The Death-Cap Dancers

The Death of a Burrowing Mole

Here Lies Gloria Mundy

Cold, Lone and Still

The Greenstone Griffins

The Crozier Pharaohs

No Winding-Sheet

GLADYS MITCHELL

When Last I Died

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ISBN 9781409076803

Version 1.0

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Published by Vintage 2009

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Copyright © the Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1941

Gladys Mitchell has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work