Blood and Thunder

I know I have drivelled on about crime novels before, but I would like to draw your attention to one particular exponent of the genre, Josephine Tey. Miss Tey’s real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh. She was from Inverness, and in addition to crime novels written as Josephine Tey, she wrote historical dramas under the pseudonym Gordon Daviot, the surname taken from a village in the East Highlands, frequently visited by her family in her childhood.

For modern readers of crime fiction, it is easy to underrate the influence of Josephine Tey. How many readers of Ruth Rendell’s A Sleeping Life appreciate that the idea of a male and female character who actually turn out to be same person being the explanation for an otherwise impossible mystery originated with Miss Tey in To Love and Be Wise? There is no reason why readers of The Wench is Dead by Colin Dexter, in which Inspector Morse solves a historical murder mystery from his hospital bed should know that the idea originated with Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.

She had a really clever line in distraction. In A Shilling for Candles, a woman is drowned on exactly the day that her death has been predicted by an astrologer. Such is the writer’s sleight of hand that the reader (or at any rate this reader) never twigs that the person responsible for her death is the astrologer who predicted it. In this, as in all her crime fiction, Tey is scrupulously fair to the reader, giving all the necessary clues, but somehow the distraction works and the reader is fooled. Or maybe it is just me. Smart boy wanted, as Flann O’Brien would say.

Perhaps her most famous novel is The Franchise Affair. In this book, a teenage girl accuses an elderly mother and grown-up daughter, living in a rambling, gone-to-seed, mansion, of abducting, imprisoning and beating her over a period of several weeks. The story is told in the third person, but concentrating on the point of view of Robert Blair, the solicitor representing the accused women. Based on a real case two hundred years previously, it turns out that the young woman’s story is a cover for her own absence when she was up to no good with a man, would you believe? During the course of the events, Blair falls in love with the daughter.

The story is brilliantly told and the twists and clues whereby it becomes clear that the accusations cannot be true are ingeniously woven into the narrative. However, despite one’s admiration for the author’s skill and ingenuity, it is difficult for the modern reader not to feel some distaste for the tone of class prejudice that pervades the novel. The accuser is a shameless, working-class hussy, and the accused are blameless, upper-middle-class ladies. It is clear that the author’s sympathies, along with the lawyer’s, are wholeheartedly with the accused women. Almost all of her crime fiction is shot through with snobbery and conservatism. There is a convention on the left that Scottish conservatives are the most reactionary of the lot, and some of Josephine Tey’s work seems to bear this out. One is reminded of the title of Colin Watson’s treatise on British crime fiction, Snobbery with Violence.

Sarah Waters, a highly successful novelist of the late 20th and 21st centuries, was particularly offended by The Franchise Affair, despite being impressed with the plotting. In response, Waters wrote a very powerful novel, The Little Stranger, about a similar mother-daughter couple living in a rambling old stately home, all peeling stucco and faded grandeur. The protagonists are persecuted by what can only be a supernatural entity, and it is clear that they have a guilty secret. Although I cannot find the text, I do have a recollection that somewhere, Waters said that she wanted to give these toffs something to cry for.

Tey never married and was a very private person. As with all famous women who kept their personal lives personal, theories about her sexuality abound. It is thought, partly due to some of the themes in her fiction, to her mannish appearance and to her other career as a physical training instructor, that she was homosexual. In relation to her non-literary occupations, it should be said, to her credit, that she also did voluntary work as a nurse.

Josephine Tey has a fan in the person of Nicola Upson, a high-achieving Cambridge author who has given Tey a fictional life as a sleuth, and has given her a lesbian love life. There are now around a dozen of Upson’s Josephine Tey novels in print, and one in particular stands out for me: Nine Lessons. This brilliant novel combines a revenge tragedy using the ghost stories of MR James (see previous blogs- I am a big fan of these) to provide grisly ends for those being punished, with a transplantation of the unsavoury story of the Cambridge rapist from the 1970’s to the 1930’s. I was a student in Edinburgh when the Cambridge rapist was active, but I recall some of the nastier details which came out in the news at the time, and Upson fictionalises the horrible episode brilliantly. I don’t know if it was intentional, but I feel it also conveys the sense of shame that one has when something terrible happens in one’s home town or home country. No spoilers. Read it yourself.

The female novelists of the Golden Age of detective fiction include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and Josephine Tey. John Dickson Carr, another reactionary and ingenious crime writer, characterised them rather patronisingly as lady waltzers: ‘these ladies waltzed gracefully, waltzed well; but they always waltzed in the arms of Inspector Brace or Reginald du Kink.’ Well, sorry Mister Carr, but when reaching the end of an Aggie or a DLS, or as noted above A Shilling for Candles, by Josephine Tey, the reader reflects in surprise, ‘I should have thought of that.’ That is a sure sign of success in a detective story.

 

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