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When the wit’s sly and the plot delicious

Josephine Tey’s writing is evocative, her dialogues smart and her characters deftly detailed.
Last Updated 30 April 2022, 20:30 IST

It is her book about Richard the Third, the last of the Plantagenets and one of Shakespeare’s most famous villains, that is considered Josephine Tey’s masterpiece. The book, The Daughter of Time, is a historical mystery unlike any written before or since. It sets about solving the mystery of the Princes in the Tower and their fate almost six centuries later. It’s an imaginative tour-de-force, a book that many come to read in their adolescence and through it, develop a lifelong love of history, detective fiction and the quiet joy and satisfaction of solving puzzles.

While newcomers to Tey can find their way to her work through The Daughter of Time, I’d make an argument to start with her second book. Tey’s sleuth, Inspector Grant, made his debut in her first novel The Man in the Queue, but eight years later, she returned to crime writing with A Shilling for Candles, published in 1937.

The story starts with the discovery of the body of a beautiful young woman at the bottom of sea cliffs one morning. Since the area has a reputation for suicides, it’s initially considered to be another such tragedy but soon the unfortunate victim’s identity is discovered — she turns out to be a film actress named Christine Clay. Eventually, suspicions are aroused by the yellow press ferreting around for scandal and Scotland Yard in the form of Inspector Grant gets involved.

As with all Tey’s works, the great pleasure of reading this book is in its deftly detailed characters, the sly wit of the dialogues and the deliciousness (there’s no other adjective that would be apt) of the plotting.

Christine Clay’s antecedents are mysterious — Grant’s subordinate Williams gives him the gossip gleaned from various publications: “She wasn’t fond of being interviewed. And she used to tell a different story each time. When someone pointed out that wasn’t what she had said last time, she said: ‘But that’s so dull! I’ve thought of a much better one.’ No one ever knew where they were with her.”

It’s interesting that this reinvention of persona is given to Christine Clay in A Shilling for Candles because Tey herself was fond of obscuring her own biographical details and greatly valued her privacy. Josephine Tey was the pen name of Elizabeth Mackintosh — in fact, it was the second pseudonym she’d taken up during her writing career. Mackintosh was Scottish, born in Inverness in 1896 or 97 and trained to be a PE teacher. She started out writing plays (the theatre would be a lifelong love) using the name Gordon Daviot and it was only later that she pivoted to writing mystery fiction as Josephine Tey. She never married and had no children and on her untimely death in 1952, left her entire estate to the National Trust.

Writing screenplays for films and working with actors (she became good friends with the great John Gielgud) meant that she was able to portray the cinema and theatre arts with great authenticity in her fiction. An impeccable ear for dialogue meant each character was distinct and memorable. The solving of the crime is the satisfying closure to detective fiction but what puts Tey’s work above so many others is the smart writing and the evocation of a period of time long gone. So find your cosy reading place and crack open A Shilling for Candles. You won’t regret it.

The author is a Bengaluru-based writer and communications professional with many published short stories and essays to her credit.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great. Come, raid the bookshelves with us.

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(Published 30 April 2022, 20:17 IST)

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