Brat Farrar

During my October mystery month, I managed to finally read Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar. This is a wonderful, classic mystery, complete with doppelgangers, family fortunes, English countryside, extended family, and a pretty good mystery.

It reminded me a lot of Daphne du Maurier's The Scapegoat, which I read last year in that the protagonist, Brat Farrar, has to prove that he is really the person he is pretending to be, so it takes a lot of concentration on his part to remember all the details he has learned as well as anticipate or project how the other person would have behaved in a given situation.

In a nutshell, Brat is impersonating the older of a pair of twins who was presumed to have committed suicide was he was 13 but since the body was never found, only a suicide note, the family is open to the idea that he ran away after his parents died because he was grief stricken.

Although the book was fun to read, the entire plot is on pretty shaky ground--it's hard to really project how family members would really react when a lost boy shows up on the eve of turning 21 and inheriting the family estate, undercutting the expectations of his twin brother who didn't disappear, but this family seems to really take it all in stride and accept Brat pretty willingly, all things considered.

With DNA testing, this type of plot really can't work in the modern world, athough it might be fun to watch the plot gymnastics of an author trying to modernize the story.

There is a mini series from 1986, which maybe I'll try to watch this winter.

Mark Greenstreet as Brat Farrar

I'm counting this one for the Back to the Classics Challenge in the category of novella, as the edition I read was 240 pages, just under the 250 page cutoff.

The White Queen

I admit that I approached reading The White Queen with more than a little hesitation.  First, I put myself firmly in the RIII fan club, having first encountered the theory that Shakespeare might have been a propagandist for the Tudors back when I was in college.  Josephine Tey's The Daughter of Time and Sharon Kay Penman's The Sunne in Splendour simply fueled my conviction that RIII has been slandered for the past 500+ years.

Then, there is the whole issue of Philippa Gregory playing fast and loose with historical facts to suit the story she wants to tell.  Much as I admire her storytelling skills, I do like historical fiction to be accurate.

I pushed all that aside when I discovered that there was a TV series based on the Cousins War series by Gregory and that it would be shown in the U.S. starting in August.  I knew I would have to watch it and so wanted to read The White Queen first.

I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I now have a much better appreciation for Elizabeth Woodville--who she might have been, and what motivated her--and her whole family.  I never lost sight of the fact that The White Queen is told from Elizabeth's POV, which enabled me to still hold fast to my image of  RIII as a much-maligned good guy (ala Penman's version).  When Elizabeth rants about Richard I can remind myself that she didn't like him, trust him, or know him.

In a way, that is one of the things that made The White Queen work for me.  Elizabeth, the protagonist, is an unreliable narrator.  Her past, her ambition, her fears, her prejudices, her loyalties all distort her perspective so that the reader gets her version of events, which may or may not be exactly the way they happened.  As a character, she is a witness to history, not a historian.  This is brilliant on the part of Gregory and is actually aligned with my own view of history and storytelling...everyone has their own side of the story to tell, and they're all valid.  Well, maybe George, Duke of Clarence, doesn't really have a valid reason to gripe, but that's George!

I also loved the magical elements that Gregory added.  Magic and witchcraft interspered with battles and politics made the whole experience more like The Mists of Avalon, especially when you realize that being descended from the river goddess Melusine is actually more important in the long run (e.g., inheriting the ability to see the future, make charms, and curse) than being descended from Edward III.  Taking that a step further, it is a matriarchal line that descends from Jacquetta to Elizabeth I and even to James I and the Stuart kings.  The men fight the battles but the women determine who sits on the throne. Pretty heady stuff when you think about it.

I just picked up a copy of The Red Queen from the library and am eager to see whether Gregory can work her magic again and make me sympathetic to Margaret Beaufort, my least favorite character in The White Queen and mother of nasty Henry Tudor.

Miss Pym Disposes

Rarely has a mystery story made me think this much. I finished Josephine Tey's Miss Pym Disposes last weekend and just haven't been able to distill what I think about it enough to write about it. Hopefully, the act of pressing keys on my keyboard will make my thoughts gel somewhat.

Miss Pym Disposes, written in 1946, was the third mystery by Josephine Tey, aka Elizabeth Mackintosh (1896–1952). Set in a girl's physical training college (i.e., the young women are learning to be PE teachers) in England, it reminded me a bit of Dorothy Sayers' Gaudy Night in that a visitor to a female academic institution is struck by the not-rightness of the place and in the course of the novel uncovers what ambition, disappointed hopes, and talent and lack of it can wrought when left to run amok.

The basic storyline is that Miss Lucy Pym, a middle-aged woman, has recently found success and celebrity by writing a best-selling book on psychology, and has been invited by the principal of Leys Physical Training College to give a lecture to the students. The principal is an old friend, and Lucy is easily persuaded to stay on for a few weeks to witness the final examination demonstration, which consists of gymnastics and dancing, and the graduation exercises. It turns out that the girls upon graduation are placed in jobs, and the plot turns on the fact that a plumb job is handed out to a girl who no one, except the principal, feels is worthy of it.

I really enjoyed how Tey explored various ethical and moral issues here. The school is not a democracy--at best, it is a benevolent dictatorship, and the students and staff must bow to the autocratic whim of the principal even when they know she is being tacitly unfair and unjust. Lucy in the course of the story uncovers a "crime" that she decides to ignore and then learns too late that her inaction may have prevented a more heinous crime from being committed. When she discovers who committed the more heinous crime, she again plays God and decides that more lives will be destroyed as "justice is served" and it would be better to simply walk away and let the guilty go free.

Most mysteries end with the detective, amatuer or otherwise, handing over the culprit to the authorities so that the process of justice can attempt to right the wrong. Sometimes this is done reluctantly when the perpetrator is likeable or there a mitigating circumstances, but I can't think of another instance when the detective simply looks the other way. Miss Pym Disposes is really a different sort of mystery in that Lucy arbitrates justice outside of the societal processes--like the principal who handed out the jobs, Lucy Pym takes on a godlike function when she turns detective, and this is troubling, intriguing but troubling...which is a good thing!

I can't argue that Lucy was right in her analysis of the situation and I was relieved that more lives weren't destroyed so that justice could be served, but not believing in the Judicial System is a mighty big leap to take. One might argue that Miss Pym Disposes , despite its quiet, quaint, bucolic tone, is an awfully subversive book!

I was intrigued by this book--sucked in by the elegant writing and charming turn of phrase that I've come to admire in Tey's books--sucker punched by the ending--and eager to read more by Tey.

For most of the book, I kept on turning over in my mind the phrase from Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, "...man proposes, but God disposes." I take this to mean that God determines outcomes. I assume Tey had this quotation in mind as in this story, the detective, Lucy Pym, metes out justice, plays God, supercedes the judicial system.

Mailbox Monday

Mercifully, I haven't received much lately...I've been really trying to make a dent on the TBR shelf, but paperbackswap.com just makes it so easy to acquire more.

Anyway, I did receive two new books that I am eager to get to.



I enjoyed Jospehine Tey's The Daughter of Time so much that I ordered her Miss Pym Disposes. The description on Amazon sold me:

Miss Lucy Pym, a popular English psychologist, is guest lecturer at a physical training college. The year's term is nearly over, and Miss Pym -- inquisitive and observant -- detects a furtiveness in the behavior of one student during a final exam. She prevents the girl from cheating by destroying her crib notes. But Miss Pym's cover-up of one crime precipitates another -- a fatal "accident" that only her psychological theories can prove was really murder.

On another book blog I learned about Penelope Lively's A House Unlocked, and got a copy for my sister's birthday and then I couldn't get resist getting a copy for myself so that we could chat about it this winter, hopefully at Christmastime.

Again, cutting and pasting from Amazon:

Whitbread Award and Booker Prize-winning novelist Lively's latest book is a mixture of autobiography and social history. The house in question is Lively's ancestral home Golsoncott in Somerset, England, acquired by her grandparents in 1923. In 1995, when the house had to be disposed of, its familiar objects spoke elegiacally of a way of life that had changed in the intervening years. The figures on the embroidered sampler, for instance, recorded the effect of historical events like the Blitz, the Russian Revolution, and the Holocaust on the inhabitants of Golsoncott; the potted meat jars served as a mnemonic for the state of the Church; and the bon bon dish evoked a social class served by domestic servants. Lively's writing is a palimpsest of past and present on which flit scenes of England's changing mores and rituals. Add to this a narrative graced with fictional elements and felicitous prose and the result is, to borrow Lively's own phrase, "a rattling good read," as absorbing as any of her novels.

The Daughter of Time

For years people have been recommending Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time, and this summer I finally made it a priority to read it. What took me so long? It clocks in at just 205 pages, and is easy to read and utterly fascinating. Published in 1951, the premise would even be novel today.

Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is recuperating in the hospital following a nasty mishap on a case and is bored out of his skull. A friend, who knows that Alan prides himself on being an excellent judge of faces, brings him a collection of famous portraits to while away the hours. One of the portraits, unbeknownst to Alan, is of Richard III, one of history’s most infamous villains. Alan sees suffering, nobility and compassion in the face and is astounded to discover that the picture is of Crookedbacked Richard, the murderer of his nephews, the “Princes in the Tower,” and usurper of their throne.



Alan then starts reading up on RIII, beginning with children’s history books, advancing to other fictional and non-fictional accounts, and finally enlisting the aid of a student who follows up leads and tracks down original source material. What Alan and his accomplice, Brent Carradine, uncover is that Henry Tudor, aka Henry VII, is the real villain of the story, basically doing all the dastardly deeds and then creating the propaganda machine to blame them on RIII.

Back in the dark ages of my college years, I did a paper on RIII in which I explored the evidence against him, and came to pretty much the same conclusion that Alan Grant did. Josephine Tey, however, picked an absolutely perfect way to present her exoneration of RIII. I loved the murder mystery aspect of The Daughter of Time, with Grant applying 1950’s Scotland Yard detective techniques to a 500 year old mystery.

While the key element of danger to the detective was missing from this murder mystery, I found the book absolutely satisfying. I liked Alan Grant’s character as it unfolded; I loved reading about how HVII hoodwinked historians in both his own time and for centuries later; and I liked the theme of how resistant society is to rejecting age old “facts” even when they are thoroughly refuted. I also really enjoyed the novel within a novel angle (i.e., Brent Carradine, Grant’s researcher at the British Museum, decided to write a novel about what he and Grant discovered about RIII and HVII).

Here’s what Carradine says about the book he wants to write:

“I want to write it the way it happened. You know; about my coming to see you, and our starting the Richard thing quite casually and not knowing what we were getting into, and how we stuck to things that actually happened and not what someone reported afterwards about it, and how we looked for the break in the normal pattern that would indicate where the mischief was, like bubbles coming up from a diver way below, and that sort of thing.”

Tey’s dialogue between the two men was a terrific way to present the evidence in the case because it required that the evidence be delivered in understandable, persuasive language rather than academic jargon. I think this would be an excellent book to introduce middle school and high school kids to the War of the Roses in general, and RIII and the Tudors in particular.

Now I have to Google and see whether Rose of Raby, the novel Grant reads about RIII’s mother, Cecily Nevill, is a real book…may have to read it if it is. I have also been wanting to read The Sunne in Splendour (a sympathetic look at RIII in novel form by Sharon Kay Penman) for years now, and I consider The Daughter of Time to be a warm up exercise for it.

Mailbox Monday

Mailbox Monday is sponsored by Marcia of The Printed Page. Click over to Marcia’s blog if you want to see what everyone else got or if you want to add a link to your post.

Here's a look at my recent acquisitions...

The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey

Josephine Tey is often referred to as the mystery writer for people who don't like mysteries. Her skills at character development and mood setting, and her tendency to focus on themes not usually touched upon by mystery writers, have earned her a vast and appreciative audience. In Daughter of Time, Tey focuses on the legend of Richard III, the evil hunchback of British history accused of murdering his young nephews. While at a London hospital recuperating from a fall, Inspector Alan Grant becomes fascinated by a portrait of King Richard. A student of human faces, Grant cannot believe that the man in the picture would kill his own nephews. With an American researcher's help, Grant delves into his country's history to discover just what kind of man Richard Plantagenet was and who really killed the little princes. From Amazon.com

For some reason, I have never read anything by Tey, though I've been told so many times that I would love her books, and I certainly love the premise of this book having written a paper in college entitled, Richard III: Villain or Saint? The paper was lost years ago when my basement flooded, destroying most of the stuff I had saved from high school and college, but I remember that paper. Maybe it's good that I can't reread it. Some things are best left to the soothing touch of memory.

The Price of Butcher's Meat by Reginald Hill.

In Hill's solid 23rd Dalziel and Pascoe procedural set in Yorkshire, Det. Supt. Andy Dalziel doesn't see much of his longtime colleague, DCI Peter Pascoe, because Dalziel is recovering from the serious injuries he suffered in Death Comes for the Fat Man (2007) in the quiet resort of Sandytown. When the charred corpse of wealthy Lady Daphne Denham turns up in a revolving basket that had been used for a pig roast in Sandytown, the two policemen pursue largely independent investigations. Much of the background to Denham's demise comes from e-mails that in spots may puzzle those unfamiliar with e-mail jargon. More deaths follow before Hill offers a final twist that's unlikely to catch experienced genre readers by surprise. The crotchety Dalziel's chafing at the restrictions at the convalescent home where he's staying provides some amusing distraction from the somewhat leisurely crime solving. Newcomers might better start with earlier books in the series. From Publishers Weekly via Amazon.com

The warning in the last line of the review quoted notwithstanding, this will be my first Reginald Hill, and I've been wanting to read it since I heard it was "inspired" by Austen's Sanditon, one of the greatest "what-might-have-beens" ever! I've been meaning to read something by Hill ever since I heard him speak at the JASNA AGM in San Francisco in 1997, where he impressed me with his sense of humor and love of Austen's Juvenilia.

Dark Quartet: The Story of the Brontes, by Lynne Reid Banks
Everybody seems to be writing fictional accounts of the Brontes these days, but this 1976 biography of Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne comes highly recommended so I'm willing to give it a try, having given up on a couple of fictional forays earlier this year.

Maria Chapdelaine: A Tale of French Canada, by Louis Hemon

Maria Chapdelaine, the quintessential novel of the rugged life of early French-Canadian colonists, is based on the author's experiences as a hired hand in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean area. A young woman living with her family on the Quebec frontier, Maria endures the hardships of isolation and climate. Maria must eventually choose between three suitors who represent very different ways of life: a trapper, a farmer, and a Parisian immigrant. Powerful in its simplicity, this novel captures the essence of faith and tenacity, the key ingredients of survivance. Translated into many languages, Maria Chapdelaine is enshrined as a classic of Canadian letters. A new introduction by Michael Gnarowski examines its relevance and provides insights into Louis Hemon's life. From Amazon.com

My mother, a native of Quebec, insisted that I read this book when I was in high school. I did, but didn't care for it as reading it meant that I had to delay reading P&P for the fifth time. Now, my mother recently gave me a copy with the strong suggestion that I give it another try. Yes, Mom!