A Lesser-Known Work By One of the Greatest
Shirley ROSS
Mystery Writers of the Golden Age
This is the first entry of our website’s blog. On a periodic basis, we are planning to share some of our favorite books, books that we think you might enjoy. We hope you find this first discussion of interest!
For the mystery-lovers among us, this week we would like to discuss an early, lesser-known work of Josephine Tey’s, Miss Pym Disposes. Josephine Tey was among the greatest mystery writers of the Golden Age. In 1990, her novel A Daughter In Time was selected by the British Crime Writers' Association as "the greatest mystery of all time." It is puzzling that Scottish author Tey is not as well known as she should be; her writing is much better than Christie’s. Although the size of her body of work cannot compare to the scope of Christie’s, Tey left us some gems that many mystery fans would love to see more widely known and appreciated.
One place to find Miss Pym Disposes is in the collection A Cup of Tey, and for fellow fans of Golden Age mysteries, this collection is a find. In addition to Miss Pym and A Daughter in Time, it includes Brat Farrar, an enthralling work that is also considered a great Tey classic.
Miss Pym Disposes will likely be a delightful surprise the first time you read it - the well-written prose, the interactions among the characters, the reflections of the main character. Tey turns out finely-drawn characters, not just character “types,” as Christie, Marsh, and Allingham do (the worldly actress, the ingenue, the tedious spinster). No stock characters here. And the plot! Tey is not so formulaic as you would expect from the English-countryside setting - the plot keeps us guessing until the last quarter or so of the book, when all her elements fall in place. But you must read to the end, the very end, the last page. I’m a veteran (and somewhat jaded) mystery fan, and I was flabbergasted. As with the best mystery writers, once revealed, the solution is so logical…and here the pieces fit together perfectly. I was shaking my head in admiration.
Tey does not build so much on plot devices or physical evidence; these are minor details in her puzzles. Instead, the characters are center-stage - their personalities, resulting motivations, and behaviors, all of which proceed as naturally from one to another as do the behaviors of our good friends and relatives - flowing naturally from what we know about them.
It is one of those unexpected small pleasures in life (which all of us can certainly use after the last couple of years) when an ending is so satisfying. Unlike some of Christie’s endings, which have often left me flat and disappointed (the “getting there” is the fun of Christie’s stories), Tey gives us a whopper of an ending. Logical, and proceeding meticulously from the characterizations - it sent me scrambling back into the book’s pages to piece together for myself what I should have seen - and the pieces are all there!
Whether in this collection or in some other venue, we hope you will take the time to read a Tey work or two, and if you are already familiar with her, we hope you will have an opportunity to re-acquaint yourself with her splendid novels.
New hardbound copies of this volume are uncommon, and a few years ago, we were fortunate in finding several new copies. We have only two left; the dust jackets have some shelfware imperfections as shown in the photos, one with two small closed tears, but both are otherwise pristine. Each protected by a Brodart cover. As of this writing, we have the best price for this volume on AbeBooks. Whether a novice to the genre, or a serious fan of mysteries of the Golden Age, we think you will agree this is a stellar collection.