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osprey_archer) wrote2016-08-23 11:21 am
osprey_archer) wrote2016-08-23 11:21 am
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Book Review: Miss Pym Disposes
I just finished Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes, and it maaaaay have displaced Daughter of Time as my favorite Tey book, although it’s hard to displace that impassioned defense of Richard III. (And in fact even in Miss Pym Disposes Tey can’t resist a dig at Shakespeare’s Richard III: “A criminal libel on a fine man, a blatant piece of political propaganda, and an extremely silly play,” one of the secondary characters fulminates.)
The book takes place in a women’s physical training college. I like books set in girls’ schools of all kinds - actually just books set in female spaces in general, although it’s somewhat rarer to find something that is set in say a nunnery - and Miss Pym Disposes does a charming job evoking it through Miss Pym’s outsider eyes.
Miss Pym comes to the school to give a talk on psychology, having become famous by writing a book on the topic, although the book never defines her precise psychological theories - aside from a firm belief in face-reading, which Miss Pym shares with Tey’s other great detective, Inspector Grant. I find it less disturbing in Miss Pym than Inspector Grant, because she’s not a police officer and therefore not empowered to hound anyone into prison on the strength that they have the eyebrows of a murderer.
In any case, Miss Pym meant to leave the day after her lecture, but she finds the energy and atmosphere of the school so charming, and the students so welcoming, that she ends up staying through the last couple of weeks of finals… Only of course to become embroiled in a murder.
I do feel that Tey lost her nerve a bit at the end, although oddly enough this doesn’t bother me; I read lots of mysteries and love mysteries and am yet weirdly indifferent to whodunnit. I realized this fact recently and am pondering what it means.
However, although it certainly doesn’t spoil the book, it is a bit painful because the book is almost excellent and morally complex and meaty for a bit there, and then Tey steps back from that and it’s a bit painful to see her walking back the excellence of her own work like that.
I loved the revelation that Mary Innes killed Rouse, because it was so painful - it’s so rare for the murderer in a murder mystery to be someone whose guilt genuinely pains you - and so clearly a terrible accident, far in excess of the amount of harm that Innes meant to cause. So Miss Pym’s dilemma - should I show the broken shoe decoration that is a damning piece of evidence to the police and perhaps get Innes hanged? - had a lot of real force to me.
But then Tey walks it back by pinning the murder on Innes’s best friend Beau Nash in the last couple of pages. Nash also has a shoe with a missing decoration, it seems. However - it occurs to me as I write this - although Miss Pym feels that this is a satisfactory solution to the mystery, and one that allows her to rest easy in her belief in the powers of face-reading, the first solution is still more convincing, I think. Nash betrays no surprise or guilt at the sight of the missing shoe decoration, while Innes instantly realizes that it may be a damning piece of evidence.
And not in the sense that it may be a damning piece of evidence against her best friend, unless you assume that Innes somehow knows which shoes Nash wore to the gymnasium to sabotage Rouse’s exercise routine. She might, of course; but it seems much more likely that she knows which shoes she wore herself, and knows that they’re now missing a filigree rosette, and realizes when she sees it in Miss Pym’s hand that the game may be up.
So perhaps Miss Pym is trying to shield herself from the truth. She can’t bear to think of Mary Innes, who seems in every other way to be such an excellent girl, as a murderer; so when she comes upon a little piece of evidence that suggests it might not be so, she seizes upon it with glad relief.
I don’t think this is what the book means us to think, but I also don’t think there’s anything contraindicating that reading. And I do prefer the reading where Mary Innes is the murderer, even though she only meant to cause an injury, and will have to live with that fact for the rest of her life.
The book takes place in a women’s physical training college. I like books set in girls’ schools of all kinds - actually just books set in female spaces in general, although it’s somewhat rarer to find something that is set in say a nunnery - and Miss Pym Disposes does a charming job evoking it through Miss Pym’s outsider eyes.
Miss Pym comes to the school to give a talk on psychology, having become famous by writing a book on the topic, although the book never defines her precise psychological theories - aside from a firm belief in face-reading, which Miss Pym shares with Tey’s other great detective, Inspector Grant. I find it less disturbing in Miss Pym than Inspector Grant, because she’s not a police officer and therefore not empowered to hound anyone into prison on the strength that they have the eyebrows of a murderer.
In any case, Miss Pym meant to leave the day after her lecture, but she finds the energy and atmosphere of the school so charming, and the students so welcoming, that she ends up staying through the last couple of weeks of finals… Only of course to become embroiled in a murder.
I do feel that Tey lost her nerve a bit at the end, although oddly enough this doesn’t bother me; I read lots of mysteries and love mysteries and am yet weirdly indifferent to whodunnit. I realized this fact recently and am pondering what it means.
However, although it certainly doesn’t spoil the book, it is a bit painful because the book is almost excellent and morally complex and meaty for a bit there, and then Tey steps back from that and it’s a bit painful to see her walking back the excellence of her own work like that.
I loved the revelation that Mary Innes killed Rouse, because it was so painful - it’s so rare for the murderer in a murder mystery to be someone whose guilt genuinely pains you - and so clearly a terrible accident, far in excess of the amount of harm that Innes meant to cause. So Miss Pym’s dilemma - should I show the broken shoe decoration that is a damning piece of evidence to the police and perhaps get Innes hanged? - had a lot of real force to me.
But then Tey walks it back by pinning the murder on Innes’s best friend Beau Nash in the last couple of pages. Nash also has a shoe with a missing decoration, it seems. However - it occurs to me as I write this - although Miss Pym feels that this is a satisfactory solution to the mystery, and one that allows her to rest easy in her belief in the powers of face-reading, the first solution is still more convincing, I think. Nash betrays no surprise or guilt at the sight of the missing shoe decoration, while Innes instantly realizes that it may be a damning piece of evidence.
And not in the sense that it may be a damning piece of evidence against her best friend, unless you assume that Innes somehow knows which shoes Nash wore to the gymnasium to sabotage Rouse’s exercise routine. She might, of course; but it seems much more likely that she knows which shoes she wore herself, and knows that they’re now missing a filigree rosette, and realizes when she sees it in Miss Pym’s hand that the game may be up.
So perhaps Miss Pym is trying to shield herself from the truth. She can’t bear to think of Mary Innes, who seems in every other way to be such an excellent girl, as a murderer; so when she comes upon a little piece of evidence that suggests it might not be so, she seizes upon it with glad relief.
I don’t think this is what the book means us to think, but I also don’t think there’s anything contraindicating that reading. And I do prefer the reading where Mary Innes is the murderer, even though she only meant to cause an injury, and will have to live with that fact for the rest of her life.
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I think my least favorite is probably The Franchise Affair, even if it did warn me about the dangers of those nymphomaniacal people with light blue eyes, just because they all hate the girl so much. And it's not that I think they should like her when she's basically ruining their lives, but... she just seems so sad and misguided and young and if only one character had noticed I would have enjoyed the book so much more.
But Miss Pym is just plain awesome. If she is right, she's just accidentally let a totally unrepentant murderer off the hook. There's no way Beau Nash is going to bury herself in the countryside committing good works to atone for her sins.