Review: Brat Farrar (1949) – Josephine Tey

Brat Farrar is one of the two mysteries by Josephine Tey that does not feature detective Alan Grant. Written in 1949, it was among the post-war novels — the other two being Daughter of Time and The Franchise Affair — that helped cement Tey’s reputation as one of the best of the Golden Age mystery writers.

Tey first introduces us to the Ashby family having a lively lunch in their home, Latchetts, which has been in the family for generations. The eldest, Simon, is soon to be “of age” and inherit Latchetts, and he is joined at the table by Aunt Bee (who has raised the children since their parents died in a car crash eight years earlier) and his siblings, Eleanor, who teaches horseback riding to children at a nearby school, and the young twins, Ruth and Jane. The scene is a warm, happy one and draws the reader into the book.

But then we meet the orphan Brat Farrar, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Simon. Brat is persuaded by a “friend” of the Ashbys to pose as the long-lost Patrick Ashby, Simon’s twin, who disappeared shortly after his parents’ death and whose body has never been found. Brat quickly insinuates himself into the family, explaining that rather than killing himself, as everyone assumed, he ran away to sea and lived in America until recently. As the older twin, Brat/Patrick will inherit Latchetts, not Simon. One by one, he wins over the Ashby family, leaving only Simon believing he is a fraud.

Tey is such a talented writer that she makes it difficult for the reader to dislike Brat despite his dishonesty. By the time he begins to suspect that Patrick was a victim of murder and not a suicide, we find ourselves firmly on his side. Brat’s dilemma is that by proving that Patrick was murdered, he will expose his own crime and bring further sorrow to the family he has come to love.

Brat Farrar has typical Tey touches: a humorous spoof of overly permissive schools like Summerhill and an exciting horserace, as well as some of her most appealing characters in Aunt Bee and Brat himself. It’s a masterful book from start to finish.

Review: A Shilling for Candles (1936) – Josephine Tey

A Shilling For Candles is the second of Josephine Tey’s mysteries about Alan Grant. Tey was not yet the great writer that she would become in the years after World War II, when she published Daughter of Time, Brat Farrar, and The Franchise Affair, among others, but there are some wonderful scenes and an intriguing mystery nonetheless.

The body of a famous actress, Christine Clay, is found on the beach near the cottage she has borrowed for a time from a friend. Her nobleman-husband is out of the country at the time, but she has been sharing the cottage with Robert Tisdall, a young man who has recently squandered a fortune. When Clay’s will names Tisdall as the beneficiary of her ranch in California, he becomes Grant’s number one suspect and then a fugitive from the law. The middle part of the book, which follows the sixteen year old Erica Burgoyne as she tries to prove Tisdall’s innocence, has the quirky charm that Tey’s admirers have come to expect; Erica is indeed an engaging heroine. It’s worth noting that when Alfred Hitchcock adapted A Shilling for Candles for the screen (as the film Young and Innocent in 1937), he chose to dramatize the Erica/Tisdall story and pretty much left out the rest of the book (including Alan Grant).

Grant’s solving of the mystery of Clay’s death is a bit more routine, with an ending that seems to come too abruptly. The actress Marta Hallard, who figures in so many of the Grant mysteries, appears for the first time in this book, and is, as usual, Grant’s entree to the world of the theatre; it’s interesting to see her introduced with little fanfare, as if Tey did not yet realize that Marta would become Grant’s longtime (but platonic) friend.

Readers who love Tey’s later books will find this early installment in the Grant series an interesting step on the author’s path to greatness.