Josephine Tey: The Singing Sands (1952)

Edition: Pan, 1959
Review number: 1031

In this Alan Grant detective story, the last to be published in Tey's lifetime, the Inspector is forced to take a reluctant holiday for health reasons. He goes to stay with his cousin and her family, aiming to spend a relaxing time trout fishing in Scotland. However, he discovers a body on the Scottish sleeper train, and though it appears that Charles Martin died an accidental death while drunk, there is something which intrigues him - odd things like a French citizen doodling a poem in English on the margin of his newspaper.

The Singing Sands - a line from this poem - is not the most striking nor the most ingenious of Tey's novels, but remains an interesting detective novel by any standard.

Josephine Tey: To Love and Be Wise (1950)

Edition: Pan, 1959 (Buy from Amazon)
Review number: 1019

I would defy anyone to work out the solution to the mystery in this novel, unless they have this particular Pan edition - it has an extremely poorly thought out cover picture which gives the whole thing away. (Therefore, no cover picture.)

American photographer Leslie Searle turns up at a London literary party, seeking out popular broadcaster Walter Whitmore, with whom he claims mutual acquaintances. Staying with him in the country, Searle makes quite an impression on the local community, especially on Whitmore's fiancée. Despite the jealousy this causes, the two men decide to collaborate on a book about the local river, travelling from its source to the sea by canoe. When Searle disappears, he is thought to have drowned in the river, his body lost; it looks like murder with no shortage of suspects, even if Whitmore is the main contender.

Tey's detective, Alan Grant, is shared between five of her eight crime novels, and is a neglected great of the genre. In this novel, his usual character seems to have been overcome with something of Campion, though this is partly because the setting is very reminiscent of Allingham - an artists' retreat in Suffolk (Orfordshire, as it is called here).

Josephine Tey: Brat Farrar (1949)

Edition: Penguin, 1980
Review number: 1007

Tey's famous novel takes a theme common in Gothic fiction, impersonation of an heir, and creates a mystery story which more or less renders the idea unusable in the future without reference to her writing. Brat Farrar is a foundling who has been working on a ranch in the States; returning to the England where he grew up, he is accosted by a stranger. Alec Loding at first believed him to be his cousin Patrick Ashby, the heir to the family estate who had gone missing seven years earlier. Now he would be about to come of age, and once Loding believes that Brat (a corruption of Bartholemew) is not Patrick he comes up with an audacious plan to train him in every aspect of Patrick's life so that he could turn up and take the farm from his younger twin brother Simon.

While most of the Ashby family accept Brat as Patrick, Simon seems certain that he cannot be, not because of his resentment or because he has caught him out but for some other reason which seems to Brat to be not just menacing but slightly ominous, clearly connected to the reason for Patrick's disappearance. Brat's feelings about this are contrasted throughout the novel with his growing appreciation of becoming part of a family, and this is one of the reasons why Brat Farrar is so successful.

The reader knows from the start that Brat is an impostor, and so the interest of the novel lies in two areas: we want to know what happened to the real Patrick Ashby, and we want to know if Brat can carry off the deception. It is a far fetched story, but Tey makes it fascinating and believeable; and that is why this is a great thriller.

Josephine Tey: The Franchise Affair (1948)

Edition: Penguin, 1951
Review number: 991

The Franchise Affair may be Tey's best known novel (it is probably a toss up between it and Brat Farrar). It takes a famous eighteenth century crime and updates it into the twentieth century, and it may well be the most famous crime novel which doesn't involve a death.

The Franchise is the name of a house which stands on its own on a main road, and which is inhabited by the Sharpes, mother and daughter. Their quite life is suddenly interrupted when a sixteen year old girl makes a serious accusation against them - that they kidnapped her and imprisoned her in their attic, where she was systematically beaten over a period of a month. Her story is corroborated by her knowledge of the interior of the Franchise, a house which the Sharpes say she has never entered.

The story is told from the point of view of the Sharpes' solicitor, who is more used to the duller kind of work which would be expected of a small market town solicitor, mainly wills and conveyancing. It is thus assumed throughout that the girl is lying and that the aim is to prove it, by showing what she was doing in the missing month and how she came to know about the interior of the Franchise. Tey comes up with ingenious solutions to both of these problems though they have the flaw that they rely on twentieth century technology and so couldn't solve the equivalent problems for the eighteenth century version of the mystery.

One of the major themes of the novel is how it is impossible to know the truth about what is reported in the media, illustrated by the way that a tabloid takes up the girl's story and the misinformed comment in a liberal magazine which follows. While Tey takes things a little far to make her point - surely there must be some causes of this type which deserve to benefit from media publicity (child abuse scandals in children's homes are perhaps an obvious example) - it is difficult not to agree that much journalism panders to the prejudices of the lowest common denominator.

The slightly facile psychology of The Franchise Affair (particularly apparent in Tey's recurring fascination with the possibility that criminals could be infallibly detected through their facial features) does not stop the novel from deserving its place as one of the classics of the genre.

Josephine Tey: The Daughter of Time (1951)

Edition: Penguin, 1954
Review number: 675

The idea for the setting of this famous detective novel was perhaps stimulated by a desire to imitate Mycroft Holmes rather than his better known brother. Tey was not by any means the first writer of a novel where the crime scene is never seen by the sleuth, who has to rely on reports rather than statements or forensic evidence. There is a minor series of stories by Baroness Orczy, for example; but it is Tey's novel which defines the subgenre. The Daughter of Time has been extensively admired and occasionally imitated, most notably by Colin Dexter.

Tey's sleuth Alan Grant is stuck in hospital; looking a pictures of faces to while away the time - he is interested in the reflection of the personality in the face - he becomes fascinated by Richard III, as shown in his best known portrait. Not seeing the monster who murdered his nephews in the picture, he begins to investigate, with the help of various friends who provide books, or spend time in the British Library.

The Daughter of Time is by no means the first vindication of Richard III - there is a fair amount of evidence suggesting Henry VII as the instigator of the deaths of the princes in the Tower of London - but it is certainly the best known. While never pretending to be an academic history, it does contain a lot of information, which is presented in a remarkably entertaining if somewhat one-sided manner.

The title is ironic, for the daughter of time is truth (the quotation is from Aulus Gallius, though he attributes it to someone else, saying he can't remember who), and time has tended to blacken Richard's reputation rather than reveal what many believe to be the truth. Perhaps if Shakespeare's play had never been written, it would have proved easier for campaigners to re-establish his reputation.

Josephine Tey: A Shilling for Candles (1953)

Edition: Pan, 1959
Review number: 495

One of the most conventional of all the crime novels written by Josephine Tey, A Shilling for Candles is a straightforward mystery. Inspector Grant is investigating the death by drowning of film star Christine Clay, which would seem to be suicide except for signs that she struggled. The case is interesting for the way in which everyone knows who Christine is, but hardly anyone knows anything much about her.

The plot is very well put together (though it requires unnecessary coincidences to widen the field of potential suspects), the characters interesting and their psychology convincing, but the brilliance of most of her other novels is missing.

Josephine Tey: The Man in the Queue (1953)

Edition: Pan, 1973
Review number: 472

This novel introduces detective Alan Grant, who features in several of Tey's crime stories. Like all of her novels, there is something unusual about The Man in the Queue; in this case the setting of the crime. A queue is waiting for tickets to the last performances of the phenomenally successful West End musical Didn't You Know?, but when the box office opens and the tightly packed queue begins to move, one man falls, dead, with a dagger in his back. Stabbed in front of hundreds of witnesses, but in a situation where nobody notices what has happened - and nobody knows the victim - the case is almost like a mirror image of the traditional crime novel. It is quite a challenging mystery, albeit with some features which are difficult to believe (why didn't the man cry out when stabbed?), and it is told in such a way that while we don't have complete information until the very end, we always know as much as Grant does.

Though Tey is best known for Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair, all her crime novels are well worth reading, and The Man in the Queue is no exception.

Josephine Tey: Miss Pym Disposes (1946)

Edition: Pan
Review number: 441

In her first crime novel, Josephine Tey set out some of the psychological background that makes her best novels still unique. She sows the seed from which Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair grow. Despite having a successful sleuth in Lucy Pym, she never used her again, a restraint which might have been copied with considerable benefit by other writers.

Set in a training college for the elite of the next generation of gym teachers - the quality and range of the training being so superior that it is possible for the pupils to take up medical posts as well - in the tense atmosphere of finals week, the success of Miss Pym Disposes is derived from the prolongation of the suspense to the very last minute.

The stress of the exams and their accompanying demonstration of gymnastic skill is increased by the way that posts for the Seniors completing their courses are assigned to them. The college is prestigious enough that schools and other employers write to them to ask if they have suitable candidates for vacant positions; these are assigned to individuals by the founder and principal of the college. Even as an outsider (writer of a bestselling popular psychology book invited to give a lecture), Lucy Pym senses the disquiet when an incredible job is not given to the obvious star student but instead to a favourite of the principal. This leads to murder - with only some four chapters to go - and Lucy Pym is left with the dilemma of whether or not to reveal some evidence she has discovered that might incriminate someone she admires.

This dilemma is what inspired the title, based on a phrase from The Imitation of Christ about prayer and its effect on divine planning: "Man proposes, but God disposes". Should she interfere, or not? After the build-up, the question has acquired a lot of weight, and the small space Tey allows herself makes the ending rush on the reader almost to soon -wonderfully suspense filled.