You Can't Go Wrong with Josephine Tey

Another week of life during COVID, another mystery novel down the hatch . . . 

Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise-- the 4th installment featuring the calm, cool, collected, oft-times confused, always curious, and super-classy Inspector Grant-- might be better as a literary novel than as a mystery. The mystery resolves fast and furious in the final pages, but the real fun is touring the weird little English countryside village of Salcott St. Mary with Inspector Grant. The town was once full of farmers and craftsmen but is now regrettably invaded by London artists. They seek the lovely scenery of the town, which sits on the banks of the Rushmere river. 

Reminds me of Wellfleet, a similar town of locals and artists, which sits on the upper arm of Cape Cod.

When you read Josephine Tey, you'll need to look up words like "manqué" and "farouche" but you'll be treated to quick bits of characterization like this:

What made a man a bounder was a quality of mind. A crassness. A lack of sensitivity. It was something that was quite incurable; a spiritual astigmatism.

You also get a detective who is familiar with high art and culture, and thus makes allusions instead of terse, hard-boiled pronouncements . . .

But Walter pinned his worm on to a Shakespearean hook and angled gently with it, so that his listeners saw the seething legions of blind purpose turning the grey rock in the western sea into the green Paradise . . .

Tey herself is something of a social commentator:

And walking has lost face since it became universal in the form of an activity called hiking.

Inspector Grant is no Sherlock Holmes. He thinks hard about the case, runs through the possibilities, and makes his befuddlement apparent to the reader. He struggles for any kind of epiphany and lets you in on that struggle. I really like this about him. I can enjoy the scenery and the people, and then-- once in a while-- he lays out what I've missed.

The possibilities are: one, that he fell into the water accidentally and was drowned; two, that he was murdered and thrown in the river; three, that he walked away for reasons of his own; four, that he wandered away because he forgot who he was and where he was going; five, that he was kidnapped.

Inspector Grant does not completely discount the London artists, just because they aren't gritty and local. Take his friend Marta Hallard, the actress-- who he describes thusly:

He looked across at her, elegant and handsome in the firelight, and thought of all the different parts that he had seen her play: courtesans and frustrated hags, careerists and domestic doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education. In general knowledge Marta was as deficient as a not very bright child of eleven; her attention automatically slid off anything that was alien to her own immediate interests and the result was an almost infantine ignorance. He had seen the same thing in hospital nurses, and sometimes in overworked G.P.s. But put a script in her hands, and from a secret and native store of knowledge she drew the wherewithal to build her characterization of the author's creation.

She has one of the most telling takes on how to find the murderer. 

Well, I take it you commit murder because you are one-idead. Or have become one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion.

If you're looking for some sharp and entertaining prose couched within a highly entertaining mystery story, I highly recommend this enigmatic Scottish lady. Her real name is Elizabeth MacKintosh and she wrote plays as Gordon Daviot, but it's when she embodies her Golden Age detective-style as Josephine Tey that something special happens.