A Gladys Mitchell plot nearly always carries some amount of physical activity. Either the characters are trekking from one location to another, or the murderer is rather busy with his practice -- burning, burying, beheading and moving victims around with the energy of an interior decorator -- or the countryside must be combed in service of a body hunt or a nature expedition or both. In the stories of the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s, Mrs. Bradley is at her busiest. Plotlines are stuffed with happenings and several of the stories -- like Here Comes a Chopper, Hangman's Curfew, The Dancing Druids, and this one -- read more like a Buchan adventure thriller than a traditional mystery cosy (though they all have a murder to be solved, legitimizing their claim to the mystery camp). Whether you will like this mix of action and detection partially depends on your ability to overlook lapses in logic for the sake of propulsive storytelling.

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As evidenced in Here Comes a Chopper and Death and the Maiden, to name two, the murderer's motivations for his many tricks on display in The Worsted Viper are left obscure. In each of these stories the guilty party goes to tremendous lengths to achieve an effect. But why? Mrs. Bradley often makes a casual inference to motive, and Miss Mitchell leaves it at that; we can take it or add on to it if we wish. In Viper, e.g., there's the interesting question of why the killer is taking such risks sneaking onto boathouses and private islands to deposit his victims. Why that boathouse? Why that piece of land? Mrs. Bradley suggests first that the killer knows he is being watched and wants the bodies found as quickly as possible. Perhaps his arrogance is meant to taunt the police. Later, she considers that the killer may be trying to clear a specific channel of the Broads by frightening away visitors, possibly in preparation for a smuggling venture. There's also a mention that the pattern may mask one particular target, with the other victims incidental. A lot of suggestions are made, but by book's end, amazingly, Miss Mitchell fails to deliver one definite, satisfactory answer.

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Small criticism perhaps (but insurmountable for the many Golden Age mystery fans who need answers to reasonable questions like this). But there's a lot of this going on in The Worsted Viper, and maybe that's why the story moves at such a clip: to keep the reader pleasantly disoriented. Mitchell usually makes the most of her locations, and to this end Viper is a bit of a geographical tour de force, the waterways of the Norfolk Broads given more description than the villains who use it. It is also nice to see so many characters return from previous books, including students Kitty, Alice, and (future secretary) Laura; nephew Jonathan and wife Deborah Cloud; son and barrister Ferdinand Lestrange; and Detective-Inspector Pirberry, who will help Mrs. Bradley in her next outing, the complex Sunset over Soho.

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The Worsted Viper reminded me of the later entry Three Quick and Five Dead (1968), another serial murder plot notable for its lack of suspects. But Gladys Mitchell's fine pacing and assured prose (in both books) makes them much more readable than they should be. There's also a fine sense of humor, especially present in Viper, which neatly counterbalances an otherwise grim theme. Miss Mitchell even allows her witchlike detective the pleasure of crashing a Satanic ritual. Disguised in an acolyte's robes, Mrs. Bradley improvises her own incantation, "jumbled, extraordinary, poetic nonsense which she intoned in her glorious voice, standing there like a sibyl beside the prostrate body of the priest." Blasphemy for someone, I do not doubt.