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.
Miss Marple did that too, of course, but Agatha Christie is nowhere near as good a writer as Josephine Tey. 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. 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.
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 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. Tey (her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh) is, I maintain, a better writer than any of her Golden Age detective novelist colleagues. 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.
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