The Daughter of Time (Inspector Alan Grant, #5)

by Josephine Tey

Coming at the tail end of the Golden Age of crime fiction, Tey does not escape some of the less attractive attitudes of her contemporaries: anti-Semitism, contempt for the working class, a deep uneasiness about any enthusiasm (for example Scottish nationalism) that, to her, smacks of crankiness. If Agatha Christie’s “Anthony Astor” in Three Act Tragedy is indeed a hit at Tey, then Christie targets Tey’s weaknesses squarely when she talks about “her spiritual home—a boarding house in Bournemouth,” with the implication of dreary respectability and conventionality. But that is to seize on the inessentials and to ignore the essence: Josephine Tey’s brilliant storytelling; her varied, loving characterisation; above all, her control of reader sympathies. These are evident in all her novels, whether whodunnits or more unconventional structures.

Coming at the tail end of the Golden Age of crime fiction, Tey does not escape some of the less attractive attitudes of her contemporaries: anti-Semitism, contempt for the working class, a deep uneasiness about any enthusiasm (for example Scottish nationalism) that, to her, smacks of crankiness. If Agatha Christie’s “Anthony Astor” in Three Act Tragedy is indeed a hit at Tey, then Christie targets Tey’s weaknesses squarely when she talks about “her spiritual home—a boarding house in Bournemouth,” with the implication of dreary respectability and conventionality. But that is to seize on the inessentials and to ignore the essence: Josephine Tey’s brilliant storytelling; her varied, loving characterisation; above all, her control of reader sympathies.

Grant was bed-borne, and a charge on The Midget and The Amazon, because he had fallen through a trap-door. This, of course, was the absolute in humiliation; compared with which the heavings of The Amazon and the light slingings of The Midget were a mere corollary. To fall through a trap-door was the ultimate in absurdity; pantomimic, bathetic, grotesque. At the moment of his disappearance from the normal level of perambulation he had been in hot pursuit of Benny Skoll, and the fact that Benny had careened round the next corner slap into the arms of Sergeant Williams provided the one small crumb of comfort in an intolerable situation. Benny was now “away” for three years, which was very satisfactory for the lieges, but Benny would get time off for good behaviour. In hospitals there was no time off for good behaviour.

Authors today wrote so much to a pattern that their public expected it. The public talked about “a new Silas Weekley” or “a new Lavinia Fitch” exactly as they talked about “a new brick” or “a new hairbrush.” They never said “a new book by” whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.

“Cromwell started that inverted snobbery from which we are all suffering today. ‘I’m a plain man, I am; no nonsense about me.’ And no manners, grace, or generosity, either.”