Miss Pym Disposes

Miss Pym Disposes - Josephine Tey Josephine Tey is one of my favorite authors, and though this novel isn't as well-known as her Daughter of Time or Brat Farrar I still consider it a standout and one of my favorite mystery novels. Like Dorothy Sayer's mystery Gaudy Night, this novel is set at a women's college--but not the rarefied Oxford of Sayer's Harriet Vane. This is set at Leys, a British college of "Physical Training" with subjects like gymnastics, ballet, kinesiology, anatomy, diet and hygiene. Lucy Pym is a the bestselling author of a pop psychology book and a visiting lecturer and friend of the headmistress. She remarks to a student from Brazil, Teresa, known as "The Nut Tart" that she sees the students as normal and healthy. But Teresa, as an outsider, has a different view, and that's the first hint we get there might be more to this bunch. (And incidentally--one example of Tey's deft storytelling is that she uses idiom and syntax to indicate Teresa isn't a native English speaker instead of using the usual hard-to-comprehend phonetic spellings and elisions that make a foreign speaker come across as an uneducated moron.) One review complains the novel is "plodding," and Tey certainly takes her time in this one. Nothing much happens through three-quarters of the book. This isn't a suspenseful novel, but more a psychological study. Most mysteries start with a murder, then add one or two by the end, with Clues(tm) along the way. Here it's more that the subtle clues of character are what builds up to the tragedy. Action packed this is not. This is one of the most memorable mysteries I've ever read, to a great extent because of the twist at the end. And yes, in a puzzle piece Agatha Christie sense, it's a good twist, but the impact of it for me was so much more than that of any Agatha Christie I've read, because of the consequences and because of how in its way it's so subversive of the whole tidy cozy mystery genre and amateur sleuthing. The title takes on a rather significant meaning at the end.