This week on the Really Like This Book‘s podcast scripts catch-up I am urging you to read Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes. Tey (her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh) is, I maintain, a better writer than any of her Golden Age detective novelist colleagues. She chose to focus on the detective novel format, but she was also an acclaimed playwright in the 1930s and 1940s: she really knew how to write, and how to construct a plot. She was also a fine writer of character. All her novels work on you as soon as you begin them, because the characters lead you in and pull you along: you simply have to know what’s going to happen to them. She wrote a short series of traditional English police procedural novels, with the brilliant, tormented Inspector Alan Grant and his devoted sergeant, but she also wrote three spectacularly good non-police novels, where a detection situation is presented, but the characters and the reader work through to the solution unaided by the Law. Miss Pym Disposes (1946) has a psychologist as the focalising protagonist, so much better as a leading character than a boring policeman, because she relies completely on gut instinct, human psychology and observation to make her deductions. Miss Marple did that too, of course, but Agatha Christie is nowhere near as good a writer as Josephine Tey. Miss Marple also can’t compete with Miss Pym’s high heels, silk dresses, lipstick, her interest in the elegancies of life, and in the importance of good food.
The novel begins when Miss Pym woke up one morning to find herself famous, and a bestselling pundit, because she had written a highly successful book on psychology. Like all good ground-breaking books, this one came about because she found psychology interesting but was infuriated by the nonsense written about it, so she read everything she could, and then wrote her own book. Thus we know at the start of this novel that Miss Pym is absolutely to be trusted on psychology, and no amount of self-doubt throughout the story to follow can shake our confidence in her judgement. Her fame leads to invitations to give talks, and she is invited by an old school-friend to talk to her students at a very respectable physical training college.
We’re in the mid-1940s, but there is curiously almost no mention of the war: only one brief sighting of a tank convoy near the end of the story. The social effects of the war can be seen in the calm assumption by these very competent young women that they would of course have a career in teaching or the clinical therapies. They are 1940s women, not girls of the 1930s, and many of them seem as mature as if they had already served in the forces. Another odd thing about the novel’s post-war setting is that rationing – an inescapable fact of life in the UK until the 1950s – is never mentioned, which is simply bizarre for a novel of this date and composition, unless it is to be considered as a fantasy, where meals of any size and composition can be had for the asking at any time, and no character ever thinks of points or ration books. In contrast, the plot contains the social norm of the period that if one of these students gets married, she obviously won’t continue to work. Not that any of them do want to get married: I’ve never come across such a dedicated group of female professionals in a novel of this period. Their instructors are all experts in their field, impressively high-achieving unmarried individuals. The headmistress of the school – Miss Pym’s old school-friend – is also unmarried, and is also the only one who shows anything remotely like bad judgement, on one occasion only. As a result of that bad judgement murder is committed.
To avoid spoilers I shall concentrate on why this novel is gripping and unputdowneable, and the kind of detective novel that you skim through again once you’ve finished it, looking for the things you missed that make the final revelation such a surprise. Our instincts and human psychology are used against us expertly by Tey, just like Miss Pym. She knows, for example, that once we are shown a sympathetic side to a character, or given a very good reason to long for that character to turn out all right in the end, we find it increasingly difficult to consider that that character might be a murder suspect. She takes advantage of our mental discomfort to lay clues and present us with red herrings that will make us miss things that we might interpret otherwise, were we not so engaged emotionally. Contrariwise, we are presented with a highly unsympathetic character who is later injured, and it is a bit of a shock for us to realise that we are actually glad that Miss Unsympathetic has been removed from the action, has received a comeuppance, and been tidied out of the way. The death of Miss Unsympathetic complicates this feeling: the fact of death is reintroduced here as a physical shock. This is a genre in which we normally wait for a death to occur with impatience, rather like waiting for the lions to finish their meal, so we can get on with the detecting. This death is not expected, it is a surprise and a nasty event, because it makes everyone present no longer perfect and deserving, and cranks up the tension when we don’t think we can bear any more, thank you.
The novel is almost completely female. There are four male characters with a role in the story, and these are very small roles indeed, as fathers or suitors to the much more important female students and teachers. It’s rather refreshing to realise, once the novel is finished, that the story needed no male authority, no representative of established law or order to bring resolution to the hideous disorder that the story describes. Tey’s strength in writing characters has carried the story so effortlessly to its ending that we simply don’t notice that one sex has been mostly dispensed with, even though the men do play their social roles. We are reminded of Tey’s theatrical background when we meet her outrageously vain ageing actor – let’s assume she was caricaturing Laurence Olivier – who thinks that the girls at the college have extraordinarily good manners because none of them has asked him for his autograph. He doesn’t realise that they have no idea who is, and don’t much care either, because he is not of their world, and certainly not of their generation. The most entertaining character is a student fondly called the Nut Tart, because she is glamorous, exotic, Brazilian, beautiful, good-natured, and a spectacularly good dancer, and worldly beyond the formal, upper-class English custom of the college. She has no English restraint, especially not with (inexplicably unrationed) food, and is a mouthpiece for views about the college that the reader needs to hear from an insider, but not from someone with English self-restraint, or with English college loyalties.
There’s a lot to be learned about the different attitudes to college, to class, and to the communal group by comparing this novel with Dorothy L Sayers’ Gaudy Night, published only about six years earlier. Gaudy Night is also about a murder in a women’s college, but with a completely different perspective on the important factors at play. Sayers focuses on sexual roles and sexual jealousy throughout her novel, whereas Tey looks briefly at sex and then goes on to consider more interesting factors in how humans, specifically women, function. Tey’s restraint has the effect of making Sayers feel like an sex-crazed obsessive, which is interesting given that Sayers is usually considered to be the cerebral intellectual of the women detective novelists of this period. Miss Pym, like a classic Golden Age detective, has self-doubt, is diffident, reviews her facts with caution and assumes too often that she must be mistaken, but all the way through she has seen the right clue at the right time, and comes to the right conclusions, even if we don’t actually recognise those conclusions until too late.
This novel is simply so good. It is a perfect orchestration of tension and moral signifiers in a woman’s world, where the code of honour at play is reassuringly almost Edwardian, and the traps for the reader are invisible. It’s impeccably constructed, and irresistibly told.
Kate Macdonald 
The title caught my eye (being a Barbara Pym obsessive!) and I used to read very little detective fiction (being a coward) but this wonderful post, and your whole series, will change all that… Thank you!
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The Pym in the title IS a coincidence, but I think you’ll enjoy the quiet and methodical unfolding of the novel. There are also some very sharp social observations to enjoy too, a la Miss B Pym.
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You’re really making me revisit my past this week! I recently sent Miss Pym to an old friend as the college reminded me so much of the school we were at in the late 1940s, where the headmistress was a retired gym teacher who had trained at Dartford College of Physical Education in WWI. I’m wondering if the ageing actor might have been John Gielgud, since he had played the lead in Richard of Bordeaux, by Tey’s alter ego, Gordon Daviot. We did that at school, too, directed by another teacher who was a huge Gielgud fan.
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Oh how lovely! Gielgud was a luvvy, certainly.
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Tey never does mention World War 2 and rationing in any of her novels written in the 1940s – I wonder if she felt that she would make them ‘timeless’ so that they could be read without being dated by future generations. In any case I don’t think it matters. Enjoyed your review very much, Miss Pym is one of my favourite Tey novels and I do agree, she was a far better writer than Agatha Christie although perhaps this is not fair as Christie was a genius at plotting and was thus an entirely different kind of writer.. Wish that Tey had lived longer and written more though.
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I just finished this book and tremendously enjoyed it, as I did your review. Some things struck me, though. I am not so sure that Miss Pym´s judgment is “absolutely to be trusted” – it is stated in the beginning that the success of her book was not so much due to its subject-specific quality but rather to its having been written at the right time to meet a demand for literature of this type. While Miss Pym certainly has the right instincts, we (as the readers) should not blindly rely on her judgment, just as she keeps questioning it herself. (This is a refreshing take on the all-knowing detective who sees through everyone else). The scenes in which Lucy talks to Teresa about her impressions of the college, Henrietta explains her decision and obviously the ending all show that Miss Pym does not always get the entire picture and her judgment can be as flawed as anyone else´s. This, in turn, raises the question whether Henrietta´s decision is indeed such an instance of bad judgment. At that point in the story, both of the options she has to decide between appear equally unsuitable, each for its own reasons – so perhaps the worst judgment Henrietta displayed was to choose between those two at all and not consider a third alternative. (Although this probably would have set the same events in motion, just with a different victim.) (Granted, one character later acts in a way to redeem herself, but Henrietta, when faced with her decision, has no way of knowing this – especially since until it was known that Miss Unsympathetic was not just injured but actually dead, this character was perfectly willing to benefit from her misfortune.) Also, while there is no mention of food rationing, there is a certain lack of food noticeable in the background. The one meal at the college that is described – “beans and milk pudding” is rather spartan; the students talk about being hungry all the time and stealing food someone else got sent from back home is “the one crime of the college”. (At some point, even the teachers talk semi-wistfully about the food at the students´ party). While this may be due to the dietary and exercise regime of the college, it increases the atmosphere of tension among and pressure on the characters, and also makes a point about “lack of proper nourishment” (in the non-physical sense) for certain characters – but at the same time it also fits in with the real-life experience of food rationing going on at the time of writing.
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Golly. Thanks for this. I’m not sure I can make a sensible reply because the novel is not fresh in my mind, but I’ll have a go. On the food issue; it was certainly standard for British boarding schools and the less well endowed colleges to not have great food. That’s why food was sent from home. Also see Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ for terse remarks on that subject, and any boarding-school novel from the 1960s backwards. It’s just a British thing: institutional food was dreadful. Also, if there were food rationing in place, then there would be very little available in the cafés and restaurants that the characters visit, so I think my point still holds up.
I do take your point about Miss Pym’s judgement, and her potentially unreliable narration.
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I am enjoying MIss Pym Disposes, but certain references baffle me. For example, at the beginning of Chapter 2 Miss Pym wonders if she should “go in her mock” (or, mook, as Project Gutenberg Australia has it), then uses Charles II as a good excuse for not bathing. I can’t find a translation of this phrase. Do you have one?
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Regional English cultural reference! ‘Mook’ here is a rendering of the Lancashire / NW English accented ‘muck’, ie, she would dress without having a bath. A morning bath ws the norm for the middle and upper classes at this period, because they had servants to deliver the hot water, or had modern bathrooms with hot water taps and everything. Anything else I can help you with?
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Thank you! This ‘muck’ is a new phrase to me. I’ve been searching the internet for “go in my mock.” No wonder I found nothing, but I’ve encountered quite a whole lot about Charles II. To change the subject, I wonder whether Daughter of Time started out as a stage play. It all takes place in Alan’s hospital room, and the entire cast totals 6. One of the best passages I’ve ever read in any book was Marta’s description of her leading man’s “stroke” in the middle of his performance. Only a short paragraph, but I felt as though I had been around the world and got back just in time for tea. Switching again, The Franchise Affair was a stunner, though I missed Alan Grant. The town was lovely to look at. Attorney Blair was a delight, and even the detective he hires was wow. Tey gave the impression that you could slice your hand just by touching him. I like Tey’s books because she explores areas no one seemed to even think of at the time. It’s as though you believed a square has 4 sides, and along she comes and shows you it actually has 6.173.
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It could very well have done, since it only has one set (unless you have the British Library scenes in a spot at stage front). I saw a splendid Georgian house in Pershore the other day that would have been perfect for The Franchise Affair, had it had a large walled garden. The raised pediment completely blocked the view for all the servants’ rooms: very satisfying to see.
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Josephine Tey was a great mystery writer of that era.. I became a fan when “Brat Farrar” was serialized for BBC Radio’s “Book at Bedtime” in 1965. I found it mesmerizing.These days of course a simple DNA test and the story of impersonation would have ended right there.
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I have only read this novel for the first time in 2020 under CV-19 lockdown so here I am 4 years late! I agree with your wonderful analysis and would make 2 points:
First, I believe Josephine Tey avoided the war and rationing to prevent her books becoming quickly dated in fast changing circumstances. She likely assumed rationing would be lifted speedily before publication and could not foresee that the Labour government would keep rationing in place for years after the war when virtually no other country did. It was not fully lifted until 1953 under Churchill’s second term. That said, I live in an English village like the novel’s setting. Everyone here has gardens. allotment or acres of land. Many keep hens and grow all their own produce. Church fetes grown with cream cakes and fresh cheese. The countryside is not London and so much of our impression of WW2 is from London sources – the Blitz, evacuation, rationing. In the countryside, surrounded by rich farmland, the population was not bombed, accepted evacuees and still grew all its own food in gardens in abundance. ok, so no bananas or pineapples! There was no rationing of eggs or butter or summer berries round here as they were all home produced. So I think the semi rural setting of Leys and the Bridlington cafe could account for an abundance of food.
Second, I don’t think Henrietta shows bad judgement. What she shows is bias and favouritism possibly based on a crush. She is perfectly able to rationalise her judgement which Lucy, Miss Pym, believes to be her genuine and reasoned opinion. Of course, it’s bad politics with an unexpected tragic result.
It’s a terrific read although Brat Farrar remains my own favourite of Tey’s novels. But then I’m a guy!
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That’s a good point about local produce being circulated off the ration, I’d forgotten that.
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I hate to contradict a high opinion of a novel that I did enjoy readng, as I did with all of Tey’s novels (of which The Daughter of Time was both my first and my favourite) but I have to take issue with some aspects of or review, especially when it comes to the question of concealed revelations. I am not a Detective Fiction buff and never solved an Agatha Christie in my life, not even after reading the solution, but reading ‘Miss Pym Disposes’, I identified the murder victim, the character who would be accused of the murder and the real killer fifty pages before the murder took place. I can only say that all three stood out as obvious, which is not a good thing for any detective story.
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We all read novels in different ways.
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