Tey for You and Tey for Me

Well, it's a new month at The Passing Tramp and that means, of course, that it's time for another blog post taking issue with Julian Symons!

Julian Symons

Readers of this blog will know that I have most recently disagreed with Symons about hard-boiled crime writers, humorous crime writers and Rex Stout.  But it's not just your Passing Tramp who disagrees with Mr. Symons.  Lucy Worsley, it will be recalled, was so outraged by Symons' comments in his book Bloody Murder about Dorothy L. Sayers' Gaudy Night--a book she considers one of the great 20th century crime novels--that she threw her copy of Bloody Murder on the floor and stamped on it!

While the generality of opinion these days no doubt agrees with Symons that the modern era of the "crime novel" is superior to the Golden Age of detective fiction (What Golden Age, one wisenheimer modern crime writer, recently asked, Dan Andriacco tells us), it strikes me that a lot of Symons' opinions about specific crime writers actually are out of sync with modern views. 

Josephine Tey

Take Josephine Tey, for example.  Of Tey's eight crime novels, published between 1929 and her sadly premature death in 1952, Symons likes The Franchise Affair (1948) best, praising the opening section as "wonderfully good."  However, Symons goes on to pronounce that the "solution is a little disappointing, not only because it is foreseeable, but because the central figures are no more than conventionally sketched."

Symons doesn't mention another great Tey favorite, Brat Farrar (1949), but he considers Tey's The Daughter of Time (1951) at greater length.  He does not like this book, which was voted the greatest mystery novel of all time by the Crime Writers Association in 1990, four years before Symons' death (by the by, Symons won a Gold Dagger from the CWA in 1957 for his crime novel The Colour of Murder).

Most readers of this blog no doubt know that The Daughter of Time tells the story of Tey's Inspector Grant, laid up in hospital, researching the mystery of Richard II and the infamous murder of the Princes in the Tower. When The Daughter of Time was first published in the middle of the twentieth century, it was heartily praised for doing something different with the mystery fiction format (though John Dickson Carr's The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey, 1936, somewhat anticipated Tey's book).

Framed? Richard III

Symons, however, was not impressed with Time, complaining that there 

is nothing new about the theory [of the murders advanced by Grant]....Grant's almost total ignorance of history is the most remarkable thing about the book.  The pleasure taken by critics in the slow unfolding of a thesis already well known suggests a similar ignorance on their part.  Still more to the point is the fact that this amateur rehashing of a well-known argument, interspersed with visits from friends to the detective's bedside is, as one might expect, really rather dull.

Whatever one thinks of Tey's books, Symons concluded, they were "not only preoccupied by the past but also belonged to it."  The cutting edge novels of the mid-twentieth century, Symons argues, were concerned with realism and human psychology.

Yet don't Tey's fans believe that Tey's novels--at least the six post-WW2 ones--have much greater realism and character depth than most Golden Age puzzle-oriented mysteries? Don't they admire them precisely because they feel they are "real novels"?  Was Symons possibly reacting more to the traditional social milieus of the Tey novels (schools, villages, country houses).  What do you think?

And what are your favorite Teys?  I think it's safe to sat that the Big Three are The Daughter of Time, Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair, with Miss Pym Disposes perhaps nipping discreetly at their heels.  The other four Tey mystery novels tend to be comparatively neglected.  I soon will post a review of one of the latter four books.