What Book to Read?

I picked up this book (2009) simply because I saw the name Josephine Tey on the cover. She has long been one of my favourite crime writers of the Golden Age. Two of her books in particular stay with me; The Franchise Affair is one of the best pieces of fictional detection I know of, and The Daughter of Time showed me for the first time how the historical record  – in this case the guilt or otherwise of Richard III – can be manipulated by the victors. And here she is, a character in a book – which turns out to be the second in a series.

Josephine Tey has gone to stay on the family estate of her friend Inspector Archie Penrose in Cornwall so she can get on with her next book.  But the peace of the village is disturbed by the recovery of a body from a lake on the estate. Accident, suicide or murder? Who knows more than they are telling? Everyone seems to have a secret. As one character says: ‘It gets complicated, doesn’t it, trying to remember who knows what. Sometimes it’s easier not to say anything at all, just to be sure you don’t make a mistake.’ When a second death occurs, Archie becomes professionally involved. He finds a ‘complex web of misplaced certainties and false logic’ – as does the reader.

Josephine Tey acts very much as an observer and sounding board for Penrose; she does not display any particular detective qualities herself. She is, however, a version of the real Josephine Tey (which was actually the pseudonym of Elizabeth Mackintosh, who also wrote as Gordon Daviot). Her relationship with Archie – who somewhat resembles Tey’s Inspector Grant – seems to have been more fully discussed in the first book in the series. Upson says that her character blends ‘some of what we know’ about Elizabeth Mackintosh, and some of the personality ‘which emerges so strongly’ from her crime stories. You can read more detail about Mackintosh, and how she might have reacted to being used as a character in a book, on Upson’s webpage here. In this story, she is starting to write the book that became A Shilling for Candles (1936), and it is probably no coincidence that a horse that plays an important part in this story is called Shilling. I found the information about Mackintosh interesting, but if I’d never heard of Josephine Tey, I doubt if having her as a character would actually add anything to the story.

The setting in Cornwell, which is lovingly described, is real, the estate being now the property of the National Trust. The book is set in 1935, but apart from the absence of modern forensic technology, there is nothing much to date it, apart from references to World War I. Some of the social attitudes seem more modern than I thought would have been the case in rural England in the 1930s, but maybe this estate really was a special case. It doesn’t come alive for me as history.

The setting in the 1930s and presence in the story of one of the writers of the Golden Age of crime writing lead to an expectation that somehow this story will resemble a classic puzzle mystery of that period. But this is not really the case. Indeed I think it falls between two – or even three – stools. The mystery is not solved by detection, but rather by the unfolding of events. So it’s not a classic puzzle which the detective – and the reader – can solve. Though one of the main characters is a policeman, it is not a police procedural, where the detective catches the criminal after following series of clues. It has more in common with some modern psychological thrillers – but because everyone has a secret, their inner thoughts cannot be revealed, leaving the whole question of motive very under-developed. Perhaps what lies behind the events could have a psychological truth to it, but certainly I don’t find the presentation of it convincing. The story potentially has elements of tragedy – but the writing, while perfectly competent – isn’t strong enough adequately to convey it.

Still, having said all that, it was quite an enjoyable book. And I do get overly picky about how the crime or mystery is resolved. The first Josephine Tey book in the series, An Expert in Murder (2008) was praised by PD James as marking ‘the arrival of a new and assured talent’, and coming from her, that’s a strong recommendation. There are now several more books in the series.

You can read more about Nicola Upson here. Some of the real Josephine Tey’s stories are available through the Gutenberg Project if you can’t find them in a library; here is Daughter of Time (1951).