Jammy consigned them all to perdition, and went out to find a tobacconist who kept his brand of cigarettes. What did the Yard want to take it like that for?

Everyone knew that what you wrote in a paper was just eye-wash. When it wasn’t bilge-water. If you stopped being dramatic over little tuppenny no-account things, people might begin to suspect that they were no-account, and then they’d stop buying papers.

And where would the Press barons, and Jammy, and a lot of innocent shareholders be then? You’d got to provide emotions for all those moribund wage-earners who were too tired or too dumb to feel anything on their own behalf. If you couldn’t freeze their blood, then you could sell them a good sob or two.

That story about Clay’s early days in the factory had been pure jam—even if that horse-faced dame had led him up the garden about knowing Chris, blast her. But you couldn’t always rise to thrills or sobs, and if there was one emotion that the British public loved to wallow in it was being righteously indignant. So he, Jammy, had provided a wallow for them. The Yard knew quite well that tomorrow all these indignant people wouldn’t remember a thing about it, so what the hell! What was there to get sore about?

That “hounding innocents to death” was just a phrase. Practically a cliché, it was. Nothing in that to make a sensible person touchy. 

A lesson in journalism. Or not.

The level to which Tey fleshed out her characters in this one is simply amazing.

 

What a way for Tey to drive home a point (at least in my appreciation of this book) about the use of cliche, image and stereotype in popular media. 

A famous movie actress is found dead, washed up on the shore of Kent. The only thing to indicate it might not have just been an accidental drowning is that the police found a button from a dark overcoat tangled in her hair. But, virtually no one knew that the actress was at this isolated cottage, save for her husband, apparently a fellow actor, and the young man she picked up off the street to spend some time with her (but all on the up and up: no funny business, so to speak).

Inspector Alan Grant from Scotland Yard gets the case. He is showered with red herrings, but gets his person (one needs to be gender neutral in these things, right?) in the end.

Not a great story, and some of the action doesn't always make the best sense. But the characters are well drawn and the overall story line is engaging enough to keep one's interest the whole way through.

After reading Josephine Teys mysteries, I thought I'd post some of my thoughts about them.

First the positives:

They're free.
They're well written in general.
They're really good mysteries.
The minor characters are mostly nice and interesting.
To me, they're historic, though I know the author wrote and published them in her 'present'.

What I had a bit of trouble with:

In my opinion, the 'sleuth' Alan Grant, is a tiresome, annoying condescending pretentious snob. He's terrfied of falling for some woman and ending up getting married.

In fact, most of the characters seem to be a bit bisexual, or maybe it's just my fan fiction/slash-tainted mind that sees them that way, but that wasn't meant to be a negative, it's just connected to Grant's fear of falling in love (and being lost to crime-solving). Actually, it feels quite modern.

I won't go into any more about the negatives, because they're very few and I did like the books. It's very obvious that they're of far higher quality than most internet freebies.

Some of the books are standalones, others are a part of a series about Alan Grant, apparently one of Scotland Yard's finest (and he'd be the first to agree with that). As far as mystery solving talents go, I agree too. He is brilliant.

In one of the books, The Daughter of Time, Grant's hospitalized and going stir crazy with boredom. With a little help from his best buddy (faghag?) actress Marta Hallam, he finds a historic mystery to solve. ("Did Richard III kill his little nephews?"). It's probably the best of the books (or maybe The Singing Sands is or - actually I'm not sure - most of them are really good). The title isn't explained in the book, so obviously Josephine Tey expected her readers to be as edcuated as she was. Is the meaning clear to most people? I didn't know what it was referring to, until after quite a bit of research, I ended up finding the explanation in a review on Goodreads. The Daughter of Time, apparently, is Truth, rather than Duty. I'm sure that makes sense as far as history is concerned but I'm not sure if it helps with murder cases. Not in real life. Agatha Christie makes the same claim in The Mysterious Mr Quin (that murder cases can become easier to solve after some time has passed), and it certainly works in her book.

One of the books had a rather unusual (for the time) twist at the end, but I won't go into that because I don't want to spoil it for any future readers).

I must say Miss Pym Disposes is probably the one I like the least. It's about a former teacher, turned best-selling author (a bit like Josephine Tey herself, apparently) who is invited to a girls' school by an old friend from her own school days. She ends up staying much longer than she'd intended and finds herself fascinated by the students. This book is as well written as the others, but ultimately it ends up being about Miss Pym thinking she can make a life-or-death decision that affects many people and failing because she didn't have all the facts and that pretty much ruins it at the end.

More than one of these books have been turned into movies and tv series. In fact, I seem to have seen at least one movie and one tv series, not knowing they were based on Josephine Tey's books. I hardly remembered the movie (Young and Innocent) so that story wasn't spoiled for me, but I turned out to remember more about the tv series (The Franchise Affair), so that book was pretty much spoiled for me, in the sense that I knew where it was heading right from the start. Strangely enough, that didn't ruin the story for me, since it was fascinating to follow it anyway.