Kings and Queens of Crime

Essays on major Crime Writers

Natasha Cooper on Josephine Tey

Until I started to think about this piece I had always assumed that my devotion to Josephine Tey's novels had most to do with the age at which I first read them. As an impressionable twelve- or thirteen-year-old I revelled in the gentle, unusually rational decency of her good characters and found the domesticity of her settings appealing. The elegant simplicity of her style makes her work easy to enjoy at any age and some of the novels, particularly Brat Farrar with its predominantly young cast, might well have been written specifically for teenagers.

But once I started to reread some of the novels the other day, I realised that there was more to my delight in her work. Her obsession with the masks people wear and the truths they hide is one that I share. All crime writers must be concerned with the ways in which criminals disguise themselves and are found out by their investigators, but Tey's interest went beyond that.

Her most famous novel is probably The Daughter of Time, in which it is the facade of evil that has to be removed from Richard III to reveal his fundamental goodness. In Miss Pym Disposes she plays with the idea of misread identity in several different ways in the characters of the heroine, an easily mockable spinster who happens to have written a brilliantly successful psychology textbook, and the three physical training students who provide the murderer, victim and chief suspect.

Like most of Tey's villains, Pamela Nash in Miss Pym Disposes is beautiful, successful, adored - and so full of vanity that she cannot conceive of anything (even someone else's life) being more important than her own wishes. Betty Kane in The Franchise Affair is another typical example. Her unmasking by the apparently Lackadaisical, easy-going solicitor Robert Blair is a gripping piece of storytelling that shows how effectively Tey could create high tension and a sense of evil without death or even physical violence.

There is no body in To Love and Be Wise either, although most of the investigation is taken up with the search for one. It is in that novel that Tey seems to find some kind of resolution. The potential villain, a woman masquerading as a man, is saved from committing the ultimate crime by encountering - and accepting - the goodness of one of the other characters, which leads to a painful reassessment of her past and a renunciation of her desire for revenge.

Tey played her own gender and identity games in life. Her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh and, in the persona of Gordon Daviot, she wrote a series of plays, the most successful of which was Richard of Bordeaux. It is clear from her Who's Who entry as well as the notice of her death and her obituary in The Times that she (along with the rest of the world) considered Gordon Daviot and the plays much more important than either Elizabeth Mackintosh and what The Times called 'her household duties' or Josephine Tey and the crime novels. In The Daughter of Time she even refers to a playwright working on 'one of her awful little detective stories'

She died forty-five years ago. Apart from a few inessential details and hints of the unthinking racism that was common in her generation, her books have not dated. The issues of concealment of identity and destructive vanity, as well as the dangers of judging by appearances and being blinded by affection - or loathing - are as relevant now as they were when she was writing. Unlike the Gordon Daviot plays, all her detective stories are still in print. How satisfactory!

Natasha Cooper

Natasha Cooper's latest novel Creeping Ivy is to be published in hardback by Simon & Schuster on 5 July 1998. Sour Grapes will come out in paperback on the same day. Creeping Ivy, which has a new heroine in barrister Trish Maguire, is about the disappearance of a three-year-old girl. The terror of what might have happened to her breaks her family apart as they all start to suspect each other - and her nanny - of the most heinous of crimes.