Josephine Tey

[adawritesfic]

The Daughter of Time

Inspector Alan Grant "solves" a 400-year-old "mystery," flat on his back in hospital, with the help of a woolly-lamb researcher. The premise and motivation are unique: the rehabilitation of Richard III from a hospital bed.

I love Marta Hallard. "She picked a bunch of narcissi out of a glass that was much too large for them, dropped them with one of her best gestures into the washbasin, and proceeded to substitute the lilac."

Brat Farrar

This novel sets two types against each other: one is careless and selfish and charming, and the other is strong and silent and an old soul. They're nearly identical and both beautiful--blond and fair and male--and twenty/twenty-one. There's an inheritance at stake. There's a mystery.

Tey is a snob of the first order but I love her for it.

Miss Pym Disposes

Speaking of Tey's snobbery. We tolerate the discourse of taste in Jane Austen, but there are no murders in Austen, no "face-reading," no all but explicit claim that the life of an unattractive, smarmy girl who cheats on exams is "not worth" the life of a contrarily intense, proud, and brilliant girl who is "too fine to throw away"--a girl whose level eyebrows and bone structure inspire Miss Pym to the meditation that "it was round faces like that that history was built."

But I've loved this book since I first read it. Tey's wonderful knowingness, which she embodies in this novel in the graceful Brazilian Teresa Desterro; her clever humor; her appreciation of fineness which is the light that casts the shadow of snobbery—I love these.

To Love and Be Wise

I love this one for the extraordinary, preternatural, disconcerting beauty of one character and its descriptions—"something of inhuman beauty that had walked out of some morning of the world beyond our remembering"—"'You middle-west Lucifer!'"—"a left-over from Eden, an escapee from Atlantis."

The Singing Sands

Zoë Kentallen is lovely because she's simple and unselfconscious (Grant's, Tey's, and my appraisal); and Grant's matter-of-fact reflection that he's been "saved" by a matter of hours from falling in love with her is delightful.

The Man in the Queue

Clunky, compared to Tey's later work. The first third or half, alternating between cogitation and description (of different parts of London at different times of day) was tedious.

But the description of Ray Marcable on stage was worth the price of admission: she steals the spotlight with absolute, unerring, ruthless, and—unless you're Inspector Grant—undetectable deliberation.

And then there was the suspicious fact that she had had three leading men in the two years, whereas the rest of the cast had stayed the same. Could her friendly air, her modesty, her—there was no other word for it—her ladylikeness be camouflage? Was London’s fragile darling hard as nails underneath? He visualized her as he had met her “off,” unassuming, intelligent, eminently reasonable. No parade of temperament or idiosyncrasy. A charming girl with her head screwed on the right way. It was hardly credible. He had known among crooks many women of the fluffy type who had no softer feelings whatever in their makeup. But Ray Marcable’s was a sweetness that had no fluff about it, a sweetness that he could have sworn was genuine. He watched her closely now, trying to disprove for his own satisfaction—he had liked her enormously—that suggestion which his mind had thrown up involuntarily. But to his dismay he found his suspicions, now that they were acknowledged and made the subject of investigation, being slowly confirmed. She was keeping the man out of it. When he looked for the indications they were all there, but they were done with a subtlety such as Grant had never witnessed before. There was nothing so crude as trying to share or divert his applause, or even cutting his applause short by an intrusion of her own. All these would have been recognizable for what they were, and therefore, from her point of view, not permissible. It occurred to him that she was not only too subtle to use such a method but too potent to need to. She had only to use her glowing personality with unscrupulousness, and rivals faded out as stars before the sun. Only with Gollan she was powerless—he was a sun as potent as herself, if not more so—and so she suffered him. But with her leading man—good-looking, amiable, and a very fine singer—she had no difficulty. They had said, he remembered now, that it was impossible to find a leading man good enough for her. That was why. He did not doubt it now. There was something uncanny about the clearness with which he suddenly read her mind, untouched by the glamour that surrounded him. Only he and she in all that intoxicated crowd were aloof, were poised above emotion and looking on. He watched her play with that unhappy wretch as coldly and deliberately as he would have played a trout in the Test. Smiling and sweet, she took what would have been a triumph from his hands, and tacked it on to her own dazzling outfit. And no one noticed that the triumph had gone astray. If they thought at all, they thought that the leading man was not up to the mark tonight—but, of course, it was difficult to get one good enough for her. And after having absorbed his worth she would at the end of a turn with a Machiavellian acuteness drag him forward by the hand to share the applause, so that every one in the building thought, Well, he didn’t deserve much of it! and his inferiority was accentuated and remembered. Oh, yes, it was subtle. This play within a play became for Grant the absorbing entertainment of the evening. He was seeing the real Ray Marcable, and the sight was incredibly strange.

tl;dr

I love Tey for her sensibility and knowingness and wit.