The Martin Edwards Column: A Suitable Job for a Crime Writer?
In the fourth of his exclusive monthly columns for Bookdagger, crime novelist and commentator Martin Edwards takes a lookd at authors’ use of real-life characters and crime writers as fictitious detectives, and wonders who of today’s authors might be featured in future mystery fiction.
The idea of featuring characters from real life as fictional detectives has been around for years, but Nicola Upson’s current series, published by Faber and featuring Josephine Tey as series heroine, is an intriguing example of a crime writer who died almost half a century ago given a new, invented life as an amateur sleuth.
Among the most notable historical figures to have become fictional detectives are Edward, Prince of Wales, in a regrettably short series of breezy mysteries by that accomplished writer Peter Lovesey, and more recently Oscar Wilde, who appears in books by the television personality and former MP, Gyles Brandreth.
Tey is much less flamboyant, but nevertheless an attractive figure. Upson introduced her, along with Detective Inspector Archie Penrose, in An Expert in Murder in 2008. The book opens with Tey on the train, travelling down from Scotland to London for the final week of Richard of Bordeaux, a play she had written under the pen-name of Gordon Daviot. When a woman she meets is murdered almost immediately afterwards, Archie suspects a link to the play, and the question is whether Tey’s own life is in danger.
The duo re-appear in Angel with Two Faces (2009), which is set in Cornwall and features the (happily, not fictional) open-air Minack Theatre. The third and latest novel in the series is the just-published Two for Sorrow, in which Tey sets out to write a book about two notorious baby-farmers and becomes embroiled with the brutal murder of a young seamstress.
Quite apart from their merit as mysteries, the books perform the valuable service of reminding a new generation of readers about a detective novelist of lasting quality. Josephine Tey was, in fact, another pen-name, chosen by Inverness-born Elizabeth Mackintosh for her second detective novel, A Shilling for Candles – the first, The Man in the Queue, which introduced Inspector Alan Grant, first appeared under the Daviot by-line. A Shilling for Candles was filmed by Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, a strange choice of title that really gives no clue to the nature of a movie which departs drastically from the source material.
Grant’s most famous case is recounted in The Daughter of Time. Laid up in hospital, he re-investigates the alleged responsibility of King Richard III for the deaths of the Princes in the Tower. He has a less central role in The Franchise Affair, based on the 18th century case of Elizabeth Canning; the main protagonist is a small town solicitor. The Singing Sands, Grant’s final outing, was published posthumously, after Tey’s untimely death in 1952, at the age of just 55.
Among Tey’s other work, Brat Farrar is an excellent novel involving an apparent impersonation – it was adapted very successfully for TV in 1986, while To Love and Be Wise reflects an interesting and unusual aspect of Tey’s crime fiction. She demonstrated more than once that a good mystery need not necessarily involve a murder.
Eight crime novels, published over a period of 23 years, is on the face of it a relatively thin haul. However, Tey’s work still attracts many admirers, because of the sheer quality of her writing. Most notable crime writers associated with the Golden Age wrote many more books, but Tey – like the lawyer Cyril Hare – was exceptional in producing just a handful of novels, yet of tremendous appeal.
The mystery writer Catherine Aird (whose real name is Kinn Mackintosh, and who is related to Tey) has done some spadework on a possible biography of Josephine Tey, but various commitments have slowed progress and I gather there is no likelihood of the book being published in the near future – more is the pity. In the meantime, though, we have Upson’s fictions to relish.
Tey, a very private woman by all accounts, is an intrinsically unlikely series detective, and the Upson books do make me wonder which contemporary crime writers might one day feature in mystery fiction. P.D. James undertaking unsuitable jobs for a baroness? Colin Dexter suspecting fellow travellers on the last bus to Woodstock? The mind boggles. One thing is for sure. A story about Martin Edwards as a gumshoe is one for which the world is not yet prepared!
