Review: To Love and Be Wise

To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

To me, the best mystery novels take the familiar framework of the mystery story - which, along with the romance, is one of the two most familiar and prevalent story shapes in modern western culture - and build something more on top of it, a story of human relationships and emotions that makes the term "novel" an apt one. This is one of those.

It's not even clear for a long time what crime, if any, has been committed. A good-looking young man's advent in a village which has become fashionable with the arty set has set everything askew, so when he vanishes overnight, it might well be murder, by any of several suspects. Or he might have been kidnapped, or fallen in the river, or jumped in the river, or just walked away of his own accord for his own reasons. It's up to Inspector Grant of Scotland Yard, who knows some of the people living in the village, to find out which.

The answer, when it comes, is surprising, but not contrived; it makes complete sense. And the observation of human nature that we get along the way, along with that unexpectedness in what can easily become a genre full of cliches, is what earned it five stars from me. I also appreciated the fact that Grant admires his friend Marta but realizes, being an adult, that they wouldn't really work as a couple, so he enjoys the friendship that they have - another instance of averting the easy trope.

It's true that Josephine Tey has a strong vein of contempt running through her books for people who, in one way or another, are not quite Her Sort, and I would have preferred less of that. But it doesn't become as distorting or distracting as in one or two of the earlier books, particularly the first one, and the whole thing is so well crafted that it deserved its high rating.

If you want to write this well, you have to practice a lot. Although she didn't write many novels, she did (under a masculine pseudonym) write a good many successful plays, and it shows in her characterization, her dialog, and her plotting.

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