dispose Books

The murder does not occur until near the end of the story. Miss Lucy Pym arrives at Leys to deliver a lecture in psychology and stays for two weeks as one thing after another drags her deeper and deeper into the lives of both the students and faculty.
The adroit style of Josephine Tey takes the reader into those same lives through the eyes of Lucy.
The ending will shock you, when chance reveals the killer after all debts have been paid.
This is a cozy in the grand manner of the Golden Age, a fine book to curl up with and not worry about being frighten, just intrigued.
Writing as a Small BusinessSins of the Fathers: A Brewster County NovelNatchez Above The River: A Family's Survival In The Civil War

Any novel by Josephine Tey is worth a second look. A much more subtle writer than, say, Agatha Christie, she recaptures in a lucid and understated style an uncomplicated vision of English life in the first half of the twentieth century. But I must admit that MISS PYM DISPOSES may be one of her less absorbing books for modern readers, because of the hermetic nature of its setting. As with many of the classic Christies, this one is set in a closed community, in this case a residential physical education college for women. But it is not easy to see much variety in this group of mainly upper-middle-class girls, who address one another by their last names, and talk in a jokey slang. Miss Pym, who has achieved a certain fame as the author of a book of pop psychology, is the only outsider.

Nor is there any obvious crime for the longest time. Most of the novel is spent building up the character relationships, as Miss Pym herself becomes fonder of the young students, and gradually extends her stay at the school. [There do seem to be understated lesbian overtones throughout, though this may well be a modern reading.] When one of the students is found dead in the gym, the school administrators think accident, but Miss Pym has other ideas. Now the closed setting becomes essential to the ending of the story, whose outcome Miss Pym, not the police, must decide. It is an unusual ending, breaking with several mystery-story conventions, and goes far to balance the artificiality of the setting.

[The reader may wish to see my much longer review of a collection of Tey novels published as THREE BY TEY, from which the above remarks are taken.]

Psychology is admirable theoretically but when put into context of practicalities its result is not as shiny - that is what Miss Pym discovers in her experience being at Leys College as a celebrity guest. The first three quarter of the book deals with the eccentricities of each student, staff, and guest at an English college for girls. In fact, most of the characters are females. My favorite is Dakers whose dialogues are imprudently gaily. No male characters play important roles in Ms. Tey's story although they do exist. Nearly at the end of the book, a mystery surfaces and its ending is of a certain meandering. My disappointment is that the accident happens too belated in the book. Especially when the back cover boasts of "A gripping mystery classic ..." and it turns out that most of the story is about a rigorous college life - quite dissatisfying. But, Ms. Tey did have a wonderful sense of humor - the proof was in her language and the amusing personalities that she created for this particular tale.

Unless you're really into whatever nostalia a girls' school might render for you personally, you should probably pass on this one and pick up "The Man in the Queue," "The Singing Sands," "A Shilling for Candles," "The Daughter of Time, " or even "Brat Farrar". This one is a really slow starter and Miss Pym is just not my idea of a "detective" (of sorts).

I'm a huge fan of Josephine Tey, but unless you're reading all her works as a project, just pass this one by and you'll not be disappointed.

This is an enjoyable book, but it's not "Daughter of Time." It takes almost 2/3 of the entertainingly descriptive book to get to the mystery. One can guess the mystery, though clues are rare, but the author presents a double-whammy ending that blows you away. Unfortunately, it's a bit disturbing. The title is key to understanding Miss Pym, so-called expert on psychology. However, I think there's another explanation for her "action." After all, she could have acted again. So, to understand the book (whether this is what Tey meant or not), consider that individuals have styles of activity including: compromise, negotiation, directive, collaborative, & avoidance in varying measure. Usually one predominates. Seems to me that the last one predominates here. From a moral point of view (let alone legal), it also seems to me that the book demonstrates the risk of playing God. I don't think I like Miss Pym after all.

This book contains 3 delightful novels (of only 8 written) by Tey. All 3 are wonderful period pieces illustrating English life with terrific characterizations, dialog, psychological discussions, & moral dilemmas. The mystery tends to take a back seat to the basic novel, however. Tey also provides some pithy comments: From Miss Pym Disposes: p. 122: As a psychologist she began to suspect she was a very good teacher of French.
From The Franchise Affair: p. 213: The Governor; to whom a tear in the eye was just a drop of H2O.
p. 295: If you see a giraffe once a year it remains a spectacle; if you see it daily it becomes part of the scenery.
p. 298: The less he knows about a thing the more strongly he feels about it.
From Brat Farrar: p. 414: If you thought about the unthinkable long enough it became quite reasonable.
While each novel is probably a 4.5 star (or close), IMHO the collection rates higher. Enjoy this fantastic collection!

One of the great pleasures of reading classic English mysteries is the indulgence of a gentle nostalgia for a bygone world. In defiance, perhaps, of the changes presaged by the First War and brought about by the Second, they represent an England that is still predominantly rural, held together by custom and civility, and where everybody understands his or her place in the social order. There are also technical reasons for this, in that the classic mystery requires stability as a backdrop for mayhem. These books are typically set within relatively closed communities; Agatha Christie, for example, focused on the inhabitants of a country village in her Miss Marple series, and in more extreme examples featured guests at an isolated house party, passengers on a Wagon Lits coach, or tourists on a Nile cruise. Although the genre has largely been swept away by the police procedural and its gritty derivatives, a few more recent writers still continue the tradition, such as PD James, Colin Dexter, or Elizabeth George. Only the tradition of the amateur or at least private detective seems to have dropped out, although all three authors mentioned go to some lengths to give their policemen a private life which makes them as different as possible from the stereotype.

The three novels in this volume were written by Elizabeth MacKintosh in the years immediately following WW2, and published under the pen name of Josephine Tey. They are all, in their way, hymns to a vanishing England; they all have rural settings, and deal with a relatively restricted community; and although there is a peripheral police presence in some of them, the detective figure, if any, is an amateur. But you don't read these books primarily as whodunnits; Tey was less ingenious in plot construction than Christie; indeed she confessed to having difficulty in writing original stories, and two of these novels are based on historical events. But she is a far better writer, with a feel for the countryside, a fine ear for dialogue, a straightforward style, and a nice sense of humor.

MISS PYM DISPOSES (1947), the earliest book of the three, literally inhabits a closed community, a residential physical education college for women. Miss Pym, who has achieved a certain fame as the author of a book of pop psychology, is the only outsider. The artificiality of the setting cannot be denied, and the conversations among the students, referring to one another only by last names, seem strange to modern ears. But the relative isolation from outside laws is essential to the ending of the story, whose outcome Miss Pym, not the police, must decide. THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR (1948) also features an isolated house, but this one is bleak and forbidding, set behind walls some distance from a market town. It is the kind of place to start rumors, and indeed its current inhabitants -- an older woman and her adult daughter -- are accused of kidnapping and maltreating a young girl. But the main focus of the book is the interplay between these outsiders and the locals; the go-between, our reluctant hero and eventual detective, is a fortyish country lawyer, hitherto set in his ways and approaching a comfortable middle age of his own. An isolated country house also forms the main setting for the third and best book, BRAT FARRAR (1949). But, in contrast to the Franchise, this is a centuries-old horse farm in the South Downs, and the book as a whole is a luxuriant celebration of the traditions of English country life.

Seen purely as mysteries, all three books have unusual qualities. The ending of MISS PYM DISPOSES is strikingly different from that of most crime stories; I should not say more. The death does not occur until three-quarters of the way into the book; most of the novel is spent building up the character relationships, as Miss Pym herself becomes fonder of the young students, and gradually extends her stay at the school. But because these characters are the hardest to translate into the modern world, this book is now the least effective of the three. The crime in THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR is not a murder, but at first it seems an open-and-shut case, and one of the most interesting things about it is the length of time that the question of guilt and innocence hangs in the balance. Technically, BRAT FARRAR is even more audacious. It is the story of a long-lost son come back to claim his inheritance; the boy had gone missing in his early teens, apparently drowned in the sea, whether by accident or suicide; but the death could also have been faked by a determined runaway. The young man who presents himself, who now uses the name of Bratt Farrar, closely resembles the surviving twin brother. Yet the reader knows very early on that the claimant is in fact an impostor, coached by an unscrupulous neighbor who hopes to share in the inheritance. So where is the mystery? Ah!

Classic mysteries, finally, often contain an element of romance. These three Tey books, however, are unusual in the form the romance takes. In THE FRANCHISE AFFAIR, the most normal of the three, the attraction develops almost against the intentions of the people involved, but the story takes an unexpected twist where you might expect a conventional ending. The ending of BRAT FARRAR is even more oblique; but given the incestuous overtones of the growing feeling between a young woman and a man who claims he is her brother, it is amazing that Tey can extract herself from the erotic morass with the delicacy that she does. MISS PYM DISPOSES is the strangest of the lot; although there is no overt romance between any of the characters in this all-female cast, a faint hint of Sapphic affection is palpable throughout, and it is hard to imagine that the author was not aware of this (though perhaps this may just be a post-modern deconstruction).

Josephine Tey's novels are dated, yes. But there is much charm in their idealized vision of what was in reality a rather gray period. And, whether as an author of mysteries or explorer of emotions, Tey's writing is more complex and personal than the outer appearance of her novels might suggest. Definitely worth another look!

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