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A mysterious collage

Mystery novels by Josephine Tey
&
the Josephine Tey mystery novels by Nicola Upson

I discovered Josephine Tey through Nicola Upson’s mystery series that feature Tey as an amateur detective. I only learned that Tey was a real person when I searched “Josephine Tey” at the library because I couldn’t remember Upson’s name.

Wait, what?

I didn’t realize Josephine Tey was a real person! I also didn’t know that all the books the character Josephine Tey writes in Upson’s novels are real books. THEY EXIST. I could read those too.

I’ll say it again: wait, what?

So for awhile I was binge reading both Tey and Upson’s books at the same time, constantly trying to pull apart the threads of fiction and reality.

I love Upson’s novels. They imagine the personality and life of a woman who was extremely private. They rely on her novels as much as the scarce known details of her life as scaffolding for a very rich rendering of an unconventional person.

I listened to the audio of a few of Upson’s books (read by the truly excellent Wanda McCaddon) and was addicted almost right away. They are solidly built intellectual mysteries, they feature a likeable main character and rich settings.

Tey lived during the first half of the 20th century. She was a playwright as well as a novelist. Maybe more of a playwright than a novelist. She moved between Scotland and England. Upson places her settings within these frames beautifully. The books explore the world of the theater, of post-war London, of an Alfred Hitchcock movie set, of the Scottish countryside and all are interesting. They describe in Tey a woman who supports herself with her writing (often under a pseudonym) in a world that is changing with a startling rapidity. These are my favorite kind of historical novel – the research is thorough and educational but doesn’t hit you on the head with a “Hey, appreciate all the research I did, writing is hard!” shaped stick. And the prose is just really fluid and beautiful.

And then there are Tey’s books. She was writing at the same time as Agatha Christie, but she is in many ways a renegade. She does wonderful things with the form. It’s as if she turned the thing – the thing that is the golden age detective story – over and over in her hands and then set it back down on the table in a different orientation. And that makes all the difference. When you’ve read/watched/listened to approximately 400 million mysteries, a little difference is significant – and significantly interesting.

And occasionally it wasn’t a little difference either. The Daughter of Time – the British Crime Writers’ Association once voted it greatest crime novel of all time – is truly a masterpiece and truly original.

The writing is intense and psychological. Sentences are beautifully and intricately woven, hanging together like a large piece of filigree.

Agatha was my first love. I fell for her mysteries in a way that changed the way I read forever. And versions of her stories are absolutely EVERYWHERE. I have watched even more Christie mysteries than I’ve read. But Josephine Tey’s work is a new (to me) and wondrous love and one that is somehow more wondrous because of how scarce her stories are. There are only eight mystery novels and the only movie adaptation I know of is the Hitchcock movie, but I believe that veers pretty widely from the original course.

If you don’t yet know either author, well then, I AM JEALOUS. And I don’t know which road forward to suggest.

A, you could proceed with order, read Tey’s Alan Grant novels in the order in which they were written. Read Miss Pym and Brat Farrar. Then dip into the Nicola Upson novels and decide what you think of the imagined life the contemporary author created for the historical one.

Or B, maybe do what I accidentally did, because it was kind of fun and trippy. Read them all out of order, sometimes two at a time, reading books as the library holds come in, overlapping the layers of fiction like a collage, getting dizzy with the immersion.

Either way, you have a lot of good mysteries ahead of you.

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Books to Sleep With

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series



&

The Department of Sensitive Crimes series



by Alexander McCall Smith

Take any of McCall Smith’s books to bed. I promise you will have better dreams.

I read to fall asleep and mysteries are my favorite – but a grisly murder mystery is not always what you want to read just before bed. Enter McCall Smith, who I suspect is the most optimistic person on the planet.

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series is just so lovely. They tell the stories of Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency in Botswana, and the very, very many cups of tea she drinks. The books are not gritty or heart-stopping. They are heart-reinforcing.

Read them in print – delightful. Listen to them on audio – narrator Lisette Lecat is perfect. She makes the humor sparkle. If you want an even more wholesome treat, listen to The Mystery of the Missing Lion and The Mystery of Meerkat Hill, two Precious Ramotswe Mysteries for Young Readers. (Also, there was one season of a TV show starring Jill Scott as Mma Ramotswe and filmed on location in Botswana. Worth checking out. It captures the feel of the books very well.)

These books are like getting together with an old, dear friend. They create a place you want to visit. Characters I desperately wish I could talk to in real life. The prose is quiet and thoughtful and the observations about people feel true. There is heartbreak in these books. There is also, far more often, people treating each other kindly, in ways that feel both gentle and enormously powerful.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes is the first book in a new series set in Sweden. It has the same generous, optimistic spirit with some slightly darker humor. Sweden is slightly less of a vibrant character than Botswana is in the Ramotswe books.

I enjoyed it a little bit less, but I think I was just missing Precious and Grace.

A mystery book with no bodies may sound like it will be boring. And it will be for some. But I like the substance you find in a book that explores relationships and heartbreak and carefully, gently and with the best intentions, sets things to rights.

Ulf stood quite still. Then he bent down, patted Martin reassuringly on the head and took him back along the path by which they had come – which is, of course, the path that you can always trust to take you back to where you belong.

The Department of Sensitive Crimes by Alexander McCall Smith

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Sad, cranky parade

“Let’s take a walk,” I say.

The kids aren’t sure. The dog is activated.

“C’mon,” I say. “It’ll be fun. Fresh air, stretch our legs.”

I’m lying to them. It will not be fun.

But every few days I look at their gray, tired faces and their hunched spines and I hustle them out the door and into the outside with fake cheer. Online school and cancelled everything makes for long, dreary days. I see sunshine out the window. Outside we go.

On the way out I turn on the air for our Halloween inflatables.

“C’mon, it’s fun!” I lie again. The ghost and the black cat rise up out of the lawn but the 20-foot pumpkin-headed man can’t stand up. His face is planted in the grass.

“We should fix that,” I say. My oldest shrugs.

“It doesn’t matter. He can’t stand up,” he says, “I didn’t even want to put him out this year.”

Together we gaze at the sad pumpkin man. I nicknamed him Sir Pumpkin Head because he looks debonair, a charming if roguish gentleman. Like a minor royal who parties too much but is super polite about it. The kids and my husband put these decorations out, like usual, even though Halloween is a big, sad question mark this year. It was an attempt to inspire some happiness. Normalcy.

The walk is a disaster. Before we’ve gone two blocks we’ve had to cross the street four times to avoid other dog walkers. Our 85-pound lab mix fights with other dogs and so we weave, avoiding every other Portlander with a dog who is outside grabbing a chance at sunshine. We started out as a halfway energetic group of four but soon we spread out, the dog in the lead, actively trying to dislocate my shoulder as he lurches along, then me, stomping and grumbling at the dog, then my son in flip-flops (nonsensical for a walk in October), my 10-year-old last, angry at something her brother or I said to her.

I keep twisting around to look at my daughter because when she’s upset she tends to look at the ground and I’m anxious about her crossing the streets. Her dark eyes come up to meet mine and they look sad. I look at my son. He shrugs. None of us have had a haircut since March.

At five blocks I call it. Forget it. Let’s go home.

In front of our house we pass a knot of young women talking and laughing together by their car. They look amazing in the highest waisted jeans I have ever seen. They have just been at the weed shop on the corner and they are talking about what they’ve bought. I try to stand straighter and look better as I walk past but I know that to these young women, I look like a cautionary tale. My hair, my ill-behaved dog, my children who would rather be anywhere than walking around the block with me.

Back at the house the kids and dog go inside and I begin to dance with Sir Pumpkin Head, trying to push him up to standing. He keeps smiling and tipping genteelly over onto my head. I swear and stomp my feet and push him up again. He falls. I punch him in the gut. He falls. I stomp my foot and scream.

He is politely but resolutely fallen.

Fine. Maybe if I untangle the strings attached to his sides and re-stake them in the ground he’ll be more balanced and he’ll inflate. But for some reason I don’t move. I stand underneath the yards of wet nylon and work on untying all the knots. It’s kind of peaceful under there. I can hear my breath. But also, there are slugs. I mutter to myself. Damn knots. Damn pumpkin man.

I finally manage to untie the knots in the strings. I stake him in place and watch him stand up again to his full height, shedding rainwater. I move over to the ghost and sit on the wet grass to work on the knots in its strings. The strings are all in a wad, with a metal stake jammed through the center. I grumble about how nobody has the attention to detail I have to do these things properly. In reality, my anxiety sometimes makes it hard to walk away from messes. I don’t want to go inside knowing the knots are there, and so I work.

Halloween used to be a wild, headachy, adrenaline-filled night. Every year the kids were gaining more independence, pulling farther and farther ahead of the adults, berserk with sugar and independence and hilarity, going almost but not quite out of our sight. It was the opposite of the sad, cranky parades we now perform around the neighborhood; it was the normal way of things. An evening snapshot of our children’s natural line of development – stretching the boundaries of our eyes and our arms until they are off, free to create their own worlds, boundaries and all.

As I sit with the strings of the ghost, an old woman walks past me on the sidewalk. She had been to the weed shop too. She carries a white paper bag and she walks with a cane, very, very slowly. Her eyes are fixed on a point ahead of her with grim certitude. That look is familiar to me and I think, She’s in pain. I wonder if the marijuana in her bag will help her. I wonder how long she has to walk until she gets to her car.

I start to cry, still working on the muddy strings. I don’t even know why I’m crying, except that it’s a major pastime these days. Maybe the tears are for all the women here on this little corner of the world, living all the timelines, feeling all the things.

Finally all the inflatables are arranged in a way that will let my irritable brain rest. What a weird yard we have, I think. And me, the dingy Halloween gamekeeper, standing here among them, loving and hating them. Thinking about all the things I’m scared of and all the things I’m grateful for. And my and my kids’ slow, mad, sad, beautiful-to-behold procession through it all.