Backlisted - Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Josephine Tey's classic mystery Miss Pym Disposes (1946) is the subject of this special episode of Backlisted, recorded as part of Aberdeen's Granite Noir festival on February 19th 2021. Joining John and Andy to explore the life and career of Josephine Tey AKA Gordon Daviot AKA Elizabeth MacKintosh (her real name) is Val McDermind, bestselling author and Tey's fellow Queen of Crime. Tey was the author of a series of highly successful novels, and film and TV adaptations, including Brat Farrar, The Franchise Affair and The Daughter of Time, yet she remains something of an enigma. As you'll hear, we thoroughly enjoyed immersing ourselves in her work and learning more about her from Val. Please note: this audio version of the podcast is longer and contains more material than the Granite Noir video webcast. If you would like to watch the original, it's currently available via the Granite Noir website or on YouTube athttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omuqekhpM8A.Timings: (may differ due to variable advert length)16:36 - Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey.* To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops.* For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm*If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hello, everybody. It's a soft opening to this episode of Batlisted

because you're going to hear the theme music in a bit because we're recording this with Granite Noir in Aberdeen for a thing. We're very lucky that we've got Val for a kind of warm-up. We're just testing out the bongos and the bass and the drums. This is the sound check. Val, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. I had my first jag a week ago so, so I'm feeling that I've started the light at the end of the tunnel. That's very good. My mum's had her first jab. That's good.

I'm hearing about other people getting their jabs. That's all good. Val, in the show, John and I normally talk about what we've been reading over the last week or so, but the truth is, I've been reading the novels of Josephine Tay to the exclusion of all else. I don't want to stop reading the novels of Josephine Tay. I'm getting that feeling I don't want to run out of them. We can't do too much Tay content, but just to say what a pleasure.

What a pleasure to be given this as a task for a podcast. It's wonderful. Thank you so much. Is this a new discovery for both of you? Yes. Ah, right. It's new for me. I thought I'd read, but in fact, I was making a fatal error

of confusing her with Marjorie Allingham, which, you know. Also wonderful. Who's also very good, but the book I thought I'd read, I hadn't read. But I've read three now, and I want, they're like crack. I've binged.'s not let's not let's not pretend otherwise yeah Val so I'm going to ask you what have you been reading this year I've been reading all sorts of things um many of them the usual kind of things that I read um a lot of debut novels for my um new blood panel at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival uh but for me the big uh excitement going into lockdown

was the imminence of Ali Smith's Summer, the final novel in her season's quartet. And it did not disappoint. She's an extraordinary writer. I love her prose. I love her rhythms. And I love the way that even when she's writing about dark and terrible things,

there's always a spark of delight somewhere in the book. And I think she's the great novelist of hope. We've covered three of those four novels, including the most recent one, at various points during the last few years on Batlisted. We're both really big fans of those books. It's a magnificent bit of publishing. And also, Ali's such a brilliant

reader as well. If you're lucky enough to see her read any of the opening sections of any of those novels, she's incredible, right? She really leans into it and really performs it very, very intense. Do you have a favourite of the four seasons? I don't think I have a favourite, but I think what I want to do probably as we come into spring again is read all four again. Yeah, yeah. Nice. I've been doing quite a bit of the joy of rereading during lockdown,

as I know a lot of other people have, going back to old favourites in an almost talismanic way at times. So that really is everything from the Shalley School books through Agatha Christie to Reg Hill. Is that a kind of comfort thing or just because you've got more time? I think it's a comfort thing as well, but also having more time, theoretically more time to read, although it doesn't seem to feel like more time.

But doing events with people is a great excuse for plundering their backlist as well. I did an event with Mick Herron last week, which gave me the opportunity to revisit not just the Slough House novels, but his earlier Oxford novels. So it just felt like an absolute binge of joy, like having the biggest box of chocolates in the world. felt like an absolute binge of joy, like having the biggest box of chocolates in the world. One of John's great ideas over the last few months has been to take on the reading for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. So I don't think he's had much time for rereading. Have you done any rereading this year? No, I mean, not this year. I mean, I reread the Susan Coopers that we did for the Christmas podcast.

That was rereading. But no, I've been in the land of the new for that. Fifty-four books read for the prize down to a long list of ten. And I realise I am going to have to reread some of the books on the long list to get it down to a short list and then finally a winner. But it's a it's a peculiar kind of reading i always think reading for a for a prize it's it's you know you're you're trying to um you're trying to you're trying to obviously find the books that you you that you admire but you're also trying to think about what the prize is for and how best to represent the

val you were a booker judge yeah i've you? Yeah, I've done Booker. I've done Women's Prize as well, back in the mists of time. And it's a huge task. It's a mountain of books. Taller than me, the pile of books, you know. You have got a ladder behind you there. I have, yes. Speaking of mountains of books. Yes, I have a ladder.

Can we describe, well, this will be audio only. So Val has got some very impressive shelves crammed with books by Josephine Tay and herself, as far as I can see. But you've also got a reading ladder. Is that a reading ladder? It's a library ladder, yeah, because the shelves go from floor to ceiling and we've got quite high ceilings because it's a Georgian house. And it goes around corners.

It's the dream. It is. I am living the dream. You know, the shelves actually are the same shelves that the Toppings bookshops have. The first time I went into the St Andrews shop, my partner said she had to prize me off the shelves. I was stroking them, you know, gently stroking them and saying, we need a house that we can put these shelves in.

So, yeah, did you go to the manufacturers? Did you get Topping to tip you off? Same joiner. Same joiner. Lovely guys came down from perth installed the shelves uh installed the ladders uh and and it's just it's it's heaven really it's i do feel like uh this is this is the room i always dreamed of brilliant it's very important to get shelves right anyone who's been a bookseller will will know that but let's do 20 minutes on shelves guys so Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books.

On behalf of Aberdeen Performing Arts and the festival partners, welcome to Granite Noir. We are delighted you've joined us for this event, part of the digital staging of Aberdeen's International Crime Writing Festival. Today you find us in the provincial England of the late 1940s. It's the open day at a physical training college for young women. A warm midsummer afternoon, we're watching a demonstration of gymnastics, paying particular attention to the girls' faces, the length of their noses, the set of their mouths, and the eyebrows in particular. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound,

the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by a very special guest, none other than the queen of crime herself to talk about another queen of crime herself, mcdermott thank you thank you thank you for coming val needs no introduction but she's going to get one anyway she has sold over 17 million books she is translated into more than 40 languages and had her work made into a string of hit tv series she's won take a deep breath

the cwa gold dagger the cwa cartier diamond dagger the grand prix de roman de venture the lambda literary foundation pioneer award the stonewall writer of the year the la times book of the year award and uniquely has been shortlisted in four different categories in the Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards. And if that ain't a queen, ladies and gentlemen, I don't know what is. Incredible. In 2016, she received the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award at the Thiexton's Old Peculiar Harrogate Crime Festival. And in 2017, she was elected a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Her best-known

crime novels are the Wire and the Blood series, featuring clinical psychologists Dr Tony Hill and DCI Carol Jordan. Val has also created three other series, including one featuring cold case detective Karen Pirrie. Her latest Karen Pirrie novel, which I happen to have displayed behind me here in hardback. Still Life is now available to buy in paperback. Is that correct, Val? I believe it is. It's correct. Just a couple of weeks ago,

straight into the charts at number three and gone up this week to number two. Not that I'm boasting or anything. A queen. A queen, ladies and gentlemen. A queen. And there's a new hardback novel coming in August. Yes. Is that correct? That is correct. And there's a new hardback novel coming in August. Yes.

Is that correct? That is correct. And a new series. Yes, I'm planning a quintet of novels set over four and a bit decades of 10-year intervals, so starting with 1979, which was a great year to write about. The Winter of Discontent, Blizzards, Shawadi Wadi at the top of the charts.

Brilliant music. Perhaps the greatest year ever for music. I feel insolent for having asked you if you've been reading anything because you've clearly been super productive. We should also say that you also had a radio series in 2017 called Resistance, which is appearing as a graphic novel isn't it in may this year that's right yeah now i haven't heard resistance but i my wife says to tell you that throughout the last year she has thought of little except resistance because she heard it when

it went out and i can remember her saying to me, I've just listened to this Val McDermott thing. It was absolutely brilliant. It was all about the practicalities, Val. That's what she said. It was how you deal with certain issues. So has it felt weird over the last year, knowing you wrote that thing,

which has been probably quite topical? It has felt very strange. It's a three-part radio drama about a pandemic, a much worse pandemic than COVID. It's a bacterial pandemic and, of course, the drugs don't work anymore because we've run out of antibiotic effectiveness. And so it starts at a music festival in Northumberland and rips through the population until there's really only

about two million people left in the entire world. And I didn't think this was a very cheerful thing to be talking about too much in the present climate. But we had just decided to turn it into a graphic novel. Well, not just, it was actually almost finished, the production of turning it into a graphic novel when we all went into lockdown. And it was ready for the summer last year,

but I was very uneasy about putting it out in the summer last year because at that point, none of us had any idea where this was going. There didn't appear to be much in the way of light at the end of the tunnel. And I didn't want to upset people or frighten people any more than they were already upset and frightened. So we've held it back. And I think now that we can all have, I think, a better grasp of how this is going, it's coming out in May.

So if you want to... Who's the artist you've worked with on that? The artist is a young American artist called Catherine Briggs. She's done short comic books before. This is her first full-length graphic novel. And she was working in Dundee at the time that we were looking for an artist. And she's now back in America because, of course,

the usual thing, a visa ran out. But she's done a fantastic job. She's drawn in lots of different styles of drawing. I mean, drawing. What do I know about drawing? I can't draw a straight line. But I think she's done an amazing job, and I hope that people will read it and take heart from it

that things could be so much worse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, that's coming out in May. So that's resistance. That's coming out in May. And we've got three other Val McDermid fun facts. So you've had an online video series called Cooking the Books. Yes.

Like people do. What is that, please? Tell us what that is. Cooking the Books is recipes from the fiction kitchen. Okay. So I was at the start of the lockdown, I was doing a lot of events online, a lot of virtual events. And I was a bit worried that I kept doing the same thing because, you know, writers only have essentially one shtick. We can't make up a whole new backstory. How I came to write is how I came to write. So I thought

I need to do something a wee bit more offbeat, I suppose, that will entertain my readers and make them feel engaged and connected without having to listen to me tell them about the public library for the 12 billion in time. So a lot of people

ask me about the things that characters eat in the books, recipes in the books or vague recipes in the books. And so we thought it would be quite fun to start doing a lot of people ask me about the things that characters eat in the books, recipes in the books, or vague recipes in the books. And so we thought it would be quite fun to start doing a sort of cookery videos of cooking some of the things in the books. And that's how it started. And it became a thing. We did eight initially, and then we've done three specials since then. And there will probably be more.

I think you've done your bit to keep morale up over the last year second fun fact Val is a lifelong supporter of Ray Throver's football club when was the last time you went to a football match? tail end of last season

no was it even the tail end of last season was it? No it was last January, February. It's hard not being able to go to the football. But especially since we're having such a great season, I mean, we've had some exceptional results. We've beat Dundee 3-0, we beat Morton 5-0, we beat Hearts. I mean, we're second place in the division,

which is quite remarkable. We've only just moved up to the championship and here we are're second place in the division, which is quite remarkable. We've only just moved up to the championship and here we are in second place. We should all be at Starks Park shouting on Saturday afternoons, but instead we're all in our living rooms shouting. It's not quite the same. It's a year of contrasts, yeah. And finally, of course, Val is the lead singer of the band

The Fun-Loving Crime Rises with our friend Mark Billingham. And I'm always fascinated to know what the chemistry in that group is like. Is it really volatile? Is it like a Kinks or a Who? Or is it not like that? I'm sorry to disappoint you. It's really not like that at all. Oh, okay.

Crime writers tend to be quite convivial and pally. And we're just like, we're a bunch of mates going out and having fun. I think one of the key elements to our success and our friendship is that we're not doing original material. We're doing cover versions of songs about murder, basically, and crime generally. But nobody's coming in saying, I've written this great song, and everybody else going, well, that's crap.

So there are no musical differences. And presumably you're looking for, again, another thing we can't do at the moment, play music. But presumably you'll be, you played Glastonbury, didn't you? Yeah. We did, we played Glastonbury I mean how nuts is that? A bunch of middle aged crime writers

playing Glastonbury really? It's so absurd it wouldn't even have made our bucket list two years before that Isn't Stephen King in a famous Yes he's in the Rock Bottom Remains The Rock Bottom Remains With Matt Groening, is Matt Groening in The Rock Bottom Remainders?

Someone will tell us. They're not as good as us. I think that's a given. Absolutely. We'll be back in just a sec. Well, we should talk about the book that Val has chosen for us to discuss today is a classic crime novel by a classic crime writer, Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tay,

first published by Peter Davis Limited in 1946 and described by the Saturday Review as leisurely, amusing, penetrating, with a thumping terminal surprise. For some scene setting for those of you who may not have read this novel, Miss Pindisvose is by Josephine Tay. Here is some audio to help you place it. That's right, it's science fiction. No, it's not. I'm going to read the blurb straight away so everybody knows when and where it's set. And then Val, I'm going to ask you to tell us a bit

about the golden age crime novels of which this is one. So, Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tay, the blurb on the back of the book says, Lay's physical training college was famous for its excellent discipline and Miss Lucy Pym was pleased and flattered to be invited to give a psychology lecture there. But she had to admit that the health and vibrant beauty of the students made her feel just a little inadequate. Then there was a nasty accident, and suddenly Miss Pym was forced to apply her agile intellect to the unpleasant fact that among all those impressively healthy bodies,

someone had a very sick mind. Ding, ding, ding. Val, Josephine Tay is synonymous with the, correctly or incorrectly, with the golden age of crime writing. What do we mean by the golden age of crime writing? Well, when people talk about the golden age, they generally mean that sort of period between the wars, when the crime novel really emerged as one of the most popular forms of fiction. And they talk about the four queens of crime, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjorie Allingham, Niall Marsh. There were,

of course, men writing as well, very successfully, people like Michael Innes. But it's the queens of crime who stand out. Essentially, this is the murder at the vicarage kind of thing, the body in the library. I suppose you could call it a random murder bolted onto a random English village solved by a spinster or a Belgian detective with strange moustaches. There were certain conventions, they had a whole set of rules from the detection club,

which included marvellous things like no more than one secret room or hidden passage per book. That's right. No sets of twins, isn't that one of them? And no Chinaman. Well, it is. Who knows why? But these books were immensely popular,

and they did emerge around the same time as the crossword puzzle emerged. And there were certain elements of similarity, that there was a certain structure to these books. At the end, of course, the criminal was always unmasked and either by the police or handed over to the police to go and face their fate at the gallows. ideas of the detective novel and morphed them slightly. And I think Josephine Tay is preeminent among them. And I tend to see Tay not as the epitome of golden age crime fiction, but as a kind of bridge between the golden age and the more modern period. She's concerned with issues of identity, of gender, of sexuality,

not in any overt and vulgar way, but all of those things are the kind of undercurrent, the figure disappearing behind the curtain. And she's also fascinated by psychology, by why people do the things they do. And I think she's the foremother, if you like, of Patricia Highsmith and Ruth Rendell when it comes to that sort of work. Yes, definitely. Sort of a bridge between.

Yeah. I'd never read Miss Pym Disposes before, and one of the things, well, we should have discussed this before we started. We're going to do it now in front of you all. We can't give away the ending. No. No, we can't. And we can't give away the ending of many of these books

that we might talk about. We can't even give away the ending that you think is the ending until you get to the ending. Indeed, indeed. It's got classic double ending. Yeah. Or more. Or more.

But I think one of the things that we can say without giving too much away is that the murder doesn't happen until about... Chapter 16. It's a long way. It's page 170 or something, about 200 or something. There's nothing to suggest this is a mystery or crime novel until two thirds of the way through the book.

Yeah. Which is, I mean, pretty audacious. I mean, considering it's 1946, so yes, it is maybe getting a bit later. But that's a pretty audacious way to write a crime novel. Yes. I started reading it. Page 50, I was thinking, well, the pace here is quite,

that's quite interesting. No sign of a murder. Page 100, no violence, no menace. Page 150, hmm, this is interesting. It's like it's 40 pages to go, isn't there, before. And that, Val, I found totally fascinating because it made me think well what is what is this novel really about what is the where am i meant to be looking there is no body for me to look at so what else am i meant to be looking at i think i mean i think

what what she wants us to look at is is why do the things they do, but also the ethical decisions that people make, why people make those choices. And that takes us through right to the end. The morality of what lies behind our actions. This was the very first Josephine Tay novel I ever encountered. I hadn't heard about Josephine Tay. At the time I was devouring as much crime fiction as I could get my hands on. Almost all of it from second-hand bookshops. When I was at Oxford, there was a wonderful second-hand

bookshop at the bottom of the Cowley Road, Jeremy's 10p Bookshop. Was it really called that? It was called Jeremy's 10p bookshop. Passes the run seal test. Yeah, and you bought a book for 10p. If you didn't like it, you took it back, you got 5p back. Modern booksellers, they know nothing.

It was the foundation of my crime fiction library. So at that point in my life, I was haunting second-hand bookshops and charity shops, and essentially I would buy anything that looked like a decent crime novel. And I saw this book. Wow. Miss Pym Disposes. Yes, yeah, yeah.

Oh, that's a good jacket. Yeah. Inside it says that I bought it in April 1976 and I paid 15p for it. Good Lord. Yeah. You paid a premium. Yeah.

And I read it. It says, on my blurb, says, Accessory to murder. To Lucy Pym, author of a bestseller on psychology, the atmosphere at the college where she is lecturing is heavy with tension. Beneath the so normal surface runs sinister undercurrents of rivalry and jealousy. Then comes tragedy. An accident or murder?

Respectable, law-abiding Miss Pym discovers some vital evidence. But should she reveal it? It's like you say, it's the moral dilemma, isn't it? It's a huge moral dilemma. And again, without giving anything away, it's quite a shocking book. Yes. Morally. It is.

It is. I think it's built up beautifully. And the thing that draws you in from the beginning, I mean, right at the very beginning, Josephine Tay writes great opening paragraphs. She draws you in from the beginning. I mean, right at the very beginning, Josephine Tay writes great opening paragraphs. She draws you in. They're not overly dramatic. They're not exciting particularly. But what she does is she paints a picture either of a person or a scene and it immediately connects to something we recognise. We feel immediately involved in the book.

We're drawn in because we're in a world that is familiar and yet there's always a little bit more to take us on. There's a great opening section in The Singing Sands, which is her final novel. It was posthumous. And it opens, I think, wonderfully, atmospherically. It was six o'clock of a March morning and still dark. The long train came sidling through the scattered lights of the yard, clicking gently over the points,

into the glow of the signal cabin and out again, under the solitary emerald among the rubies on the signal bridge on towards the empty grey waste of platform that waited under the arcs. Right away, it's the opening of a black and white movie. Yeah, lovely. You're there, you see it, you know where you are. And she situates us wonderfully either with a person or with a place

and you want to read on. I mean, there's none of that sort of Miss Marple kind of scene setting. I mean, this book, she starts with somebody being woken violently by an alarm bell and slapping around trying to find a watch. The second chapter is even madder. The second chapter is she was being beaten with canouts by two six-foot Cossacks because she persisted in using the old-fashioned safety pin when progress decreed a zip fastener

and the blood had begun to trickle down her back when she woke to the fact that the only thing that was being assaulted was her hearing. Another alarm bell and a dream interrupted. I mean, it's quite disorienting if you're expecting, as you say, village, sort of cosy village life. And even in the cosy village life novels, they're not really like that. It's also a niche within a niche.

I've got a very short list here of golden age or post-golden age detective novels, in which specifically educated women and criminality come into violent contact so the idea of all female establishments being corrupted by some kind of accident or murder and they would include god unite dorothy l say is good you know can anymore. It is hard, this. Death on the Cherwell by Mavis Doriel Hay. Right. That's one of the British Library ones, isn't it? It is.

Yeah. There, John. See, Val knew it. I think there's a Patricia Wentworth, Miss Silver one, but I can't recall precisely which one, but no doubt people will tell us. It's not the answer I have on the card. Okay. I've got one more.

Gladys Mitchell. Ah, yes. Ah, yes. Laurels are Poison, 1942. That was in the biography. That's set at a teacher training college. You could probably, as a post-Golden Age one, pull in a P.D. James Shroud for a nightingale.

Which is set in a nurse's training college. There you go. Let me go see. Did I get that for a bonus point? Yeah, you did. Yes, I think you do get a definite bonus point for that. You say violent criminality, Andy. There's none of that in Miss Pym Disposes.

Well, there is some violence and there is criminality i mean there are there are there isn't a gang of criminals to give nothing away but um i suppose what i suppose one of the things that Tay novels that I've read in the last few weeks really cleave to that model of cosy crime at all. It seems like what she does is she takes that as her starting point and then she finds different ways to take it to bits. So to love and be wise while set in a village with a number of suspects.

Again, we can't talk about the ending of that one either, can we, Val? Absolutely not. There's very little we can say about that that isn't crucially giving things away. But it's a moral dilemma rather than a whodunit there is an element of a whodunit yeah and the same with brat farrer yeah there's a moral dilemma at the heart of that and she starts she starts these moral dilemmas with quite small

seeds and that's one of the things that i think is a common feature in the books is they start with with uh this apparently innocuous small stuff and gradually that sort of spreads its tentacles out and people's lives are infected in ways that you wouldn't imagine at the start of it that this could lead to. It's a great way of describing it. It's that sense of criminality actually kind of emerging out of just small mistakes, small errors that people make rather than…

Yeah, actions have consequences. Yeah, yeah. And she's sort of more interested in the consequences than the actions. Yeah. So that's the thing you're left as a reader to mull over. She really does understand what makes people tick. There's a point where Miss Pym, she's supposed to be there for one night in this college,

but she's sort of sucked into it. And she finds herself being drawn to these young women and their life, and she becomes interested in them. She's written this popular book about psychology, and she makes that her excuse to herself for staying on. But actually it's because she's fascinated by these young women and their lives. And she actually, there's a moment where,

it's actually quite a sad little moment, but she's talking about how this is giving her all this wonderful human contact. And she says, Except for Mrs Montmorency from one of the suburbs of Manchester who was her daily help, and her Aunt Celia down in Walberswick, who sometimes had her for weekends, and the tradespeople. She never talked to anyone who wasn't somehow connected with the publishing or the academic worlds.

And though all the ladies and gentlemen belonging to those two worlds were, of course, both intelligent and amusing, there was no denying that their interests were limited. intelligent and amusing. There was no denying that their interests were limited. You couldn't, for instance, talk to one and the same person about social security, hillbilly songs, and what won the 330. They each had their subject. And their subject, she had found to her cost, was only too likely to be royalties.

Yeah, yeah, that's a great passage. But also the books, the novel is sort of about her, it struck me anyway, it's a great passage. But also the books, the novel is sort of about her, it struck me anyway, it's about her identity. You know, she's put, there she is. What is she? She's a writer, but she considers herself to be a writer by accident. And she's in a girls' school, sorry, a physical training college where she feels she doesn't fit.

She doesn't fit with the girls. She doesn't fit with her ex-schoolmate who's now the head teacher. And without giving away any of the endings of this book, her idea of herself is one of the things that the last few pages of the book really burrow into very deeply, don't they? Yeah, I think that's it's interesting that this is, I think, of all Tay's novels, the one that actually draws most specifically on her own life experience. She did attend, she trained as a PE teacher. And after she trained, she went and taught in various schools and ended up in a school in Oban where she had an accident very similar to the one that happens in the book.

And she drew on that experience. Clearly, I imagine that many of, if any of the people that she was at college with had read this book, they'd probably have been quite cross because the descriptions are not always sparing of people. Well, I wanted to ask you, Val, from a professional point of view, as a writer, when you look at Miss Pym Disposes,

and we know that it was inspired by, you know, a period in her life and a thing that happened during that, was that the starting point of the book? Or do you feel like she had a moral issue she wanted to explore and that fit or doesn't it or can't we can't we break it up like that uh i think because of if you look at the the rest of tay's work it's clear that these kind of hard moral choices were what uh inspired her uh she's also been inspired by by real cases uh that I think have appealed to her as possibilities for fiction.

So with Brat Farrar and the Franchise Affair, they're both rooted in real cases, historic cases. And of course, The Daughter of Time deals with what she feels is the historic injustice done to Richard III. So I suspect that she was provoked to fiction by issues that she thought she'd like to explore and then found a way to tell those stories. And I also imagine that you get to a point

that this was quite a bit into her career and you sort of think, oh God, I need a setting. I need to put this somewhere different and interesting. What do I know about? She was 50 when she wrote this, wasn't she? She has this incredible purple patch as Josephine Tay. We're going to talk a bit about her biography in a minute, but basically the novels for which she's most famous

are written towards the end of her life, one a year for five or six years in fact she's even more productive than that isn't she because she's also writing plays and it's interesting you also that that status thing about that there were some issues within penguin about whether or not she should be included in the green penguin crime series you know so it wasn't as it wasn't as though this wasn't an issue at the time it's not a thing i mean she it's they were all i think they were odd and powerful books when they were published elizabeth mackintosh her real name not her playwright name which was gordon david also

it's quite confusing this also used for for for some of her novels or j Josephine Tay, the name she used for many of her novels, was born in Inverness in 1896. And I wanted to give you, I looked for a few things that I thought would give us a taste of Inverness in the early years of the 20th century. And fortunately, in 1935, following sightings of the Loch Ness monster, Pathé Newsreels sent a camera team to Inverness, where they offered people round Britain a two-minute tour of the city. And we're just going to hear a clip from that now. Lying on both sides of the River Ness, not far from the now famous Loch of that name, is Inverness, often known

as the capital of the Highlands. This title is given to the town because of its situation, its fine buildings, and because of the beauty of its environment. Many students of our mother tongue consider that the finest English is spoken here, rather strange at first thought, but not difficult when the town's thousand years of history is considered. It is easy to imagine how hardy those men of the North became in the fastness of the Highlands. With such a history which we can read, and with such grand scenery

which we can see, it is no wonder that the Highlander is still so proud and so famous throughout the world. Patronising gits. Yes, i thought you'd enjoy that yeah look at them look at those look at them working look at those proud highlanders proud highlanders i have to say on a personal note that it was in inverness in 1982 that i first became familiar with the concept of debauchery famous famous for it not not personally but we were we were on holiday and um it was august and it was a saturday afternoon august it was the inverness carnival and my my my dad um had been evacuated to scotland in the war and and lived in that part of the world

for for several years and loved it. I can remember him laughing out loud at the sheer drunken insanity of the average Saturday afternoon at the Inverness Carnival. It was absolutely fantastic. I can still remember it to this day. Val, is Josephine Tay seen as a Scottish writer? Yeah, well, we claim her as a Scottish writer because she was from Inverness and she lived there for a long time and she sets some of her work in Scotland.

Singing Sands is set mostly in Scotland. I'm always slightly taken aback when I think of her date of birth. She was an exact contemporary of my granny. And my granny would have had no interest whatsoever in the things that Josephine Tay writes about in her books. Identity, gender, sexuality, moral dilemmas. None of that would have even crossed my granny's mind. So she's an absolute oddity and she's a real one-off.

She's an absolute oddity and she's a real one-off. She was teaching in schools after she trained and then her mother died and she had to go back to Inverness because she was the unmarried daughter and somebody had to cook her dad's tea and take care of the house and do the things that you needed a woman's touch for. So she went back to Inverness, and that's when she really started writing her crime novels later on. She went back to Inverness when she was 30, so still a young woman.

But she would go down to London because she had this success, huge success with her play Richard of Bordeaux, which was a global success, went to Broadway. It's the play that launched John Gielgud's career. And she would get on the train in Inverness, she'd get on the sleeper in Inverness. I love this mental image. She'd get on the sleeper in Inverness.

You can imagine her tweed skirt, cardigan, pearls, sensible shoes. And then she'd get off the train at Euston in the morning and she'd go to her furriers and collect her basically her London wardrobe and then check into her London club and this is completely schizophrenic she'd get on the train as Berthe McIntosh and get off the train as Gordon Daviat or Josephine Tay depending on who you were talking to. And Nerda Twain should meet. She had a circle of friends in London who were all connected to the theatre or connected to racing.

She didn't hang out with other writers at all. She bucks the crime writers are convivial trend completely. She was never elected to the detection club, presumably because she was not deemed to be sufficiently clubbable, which is one of the criteria for being elected to the detection club. And none of her London friends

ever visited her in Inverness. It's a completely compartmentalised life. So there was Inverness where, you know, she was this deuce Invernetian with her nice house and lovely garden. People used to come and go past and comment on how lovely her garden was. And then there's this other secret life on the night sleeper, collecting her furs and being the lady author with all her theatrical friends, were almost exclusively it has to be said either gay men or lesbians there's some very interesting very interesting things in jennifer morag

henderson's biography of josephine tay um i asked you whether she was considered a scottish writer that she seems to have had an ambivalent relationship with her hometown, certainly. And Jennifer suggests that the hometown had a slightly ambivalent relationship with her. I mean, you were saying to us earlier, she was sort of, she's a real Anglophile, isn't she? She left all her estate to the National Trust in England, which is a strange thing to do if you're Scottish.

Yes, and she was very much a lone wolf as well. I mean, people that she was at school with talk about how she never really made friends. She always kept her distance. But yes, it's clear from the books that she loved the English countryside and she loved the whole racing community in England. She loved to go to the races to go to new market or or to go to aintree these were the highlights of her year um and she

had her friend you know she did have these strong connections of friendship with people in england she also writes though very very movingly and and with great affection about the scottish landscape as well both in the singing s Sands and there's a little section towards the end of To Love and Be Wise where she's talking to a painter about paintings of the mountains of Sutherland and Skye. But I'm not sure what the disconnect was, but also in The Singing Sands there's a character who is a Scottish nationalist and she absolutely lacerates this character

and he's horrible. He's deeply unpleasant. And I would say that at this point in history the SNP was a pretty deeply unpleasant right-wing party. Tartan Tories as they're known in memory. But something clearly was problematic for her. Maybe it was simply that she got dragged back from this life that she was really beginning to enjoy teaching

and making her own way in the world and starting off her career as a writer and then had to go back and do the groceries in Inverness. And that's definitely there in the book, isn't it? The Mary Innes character in the book is somebody who doesn't want to go back and live in a provincial town and rebels against it, that school has opened her horizons. One of the reasons why

Josephine Tay was a very popular novelist for film, TV and radio adaptations in the post-war period, certainly in the 50s and the 60s and that's partly because of Gordon Davy's success with Richard of Bordeaux. But actually, it's also because having left her copyrights to the National Trust, as Jennifer Moore O'Kenderson points out in her biography, it was very easy to get hold of the rights to adapt Josephine Tay. So she has this second life as material for different filmmakers

and TV makers and radio producers to make what they will of her work. And, for instance, there was a very successful film of the franchise affair made in 1950, which is on Talking Pictures TV fairly regularly. It's terrific. Hitchcock made an early film, the adaptation of Shilling for Candles, didn't he? Young and Innocent.

Yeah. He's trying to get some of that 39 Steps magic, but it doesn't quite come off. It's full of lovely things, that film. And in the 80s, the last couple of serials that terence dicks made as part of the classic serial on bbc tv were brat farrah and um the franchise affair but also in the early 60s hammer films made and now i don't think either of you have

seen this. I have been spared that delight. We're going to hear the trailer and you'll hear how sensitive it is to the material. It's based on Brat Farah, right? It's an adaptation of Brat Farah, but they've changed the title to Paranoiac. That's the first word

that springs to mind. The dictionary says paranoia, one who suffers from delusions of grandeur, persecution, mental disease, mental disease. Eleanor Ashby, whose beautiful young life is darkened by a sinister shadow. Her sister is sick. Sick? Well, she's... She's very upset. Aunty dear, my sister's insane.

Simon Ashby, whose twisted, greedy mind was obsessed by an inheritance of half a million pounds. For eight years, they presumed that Anthony Ashby was dead. Now, his unexpected return engulfs the Ashby family in a wave of terror. Don't come near me! I'm like silent! I'm mad! I'm insane! Glorious. I don't remember that scene.

I will say it does. Have you seen the film? Yeah, yeah. The best thing about it, I watched it this week because I knew we were doing this. It's got Olly Reid in it. It's got early, a beautiful. Playing Stephen Ashby. Yeah, Simon Ashby.

Simon Ashby, sorry, yeah. Olly Reid at his most early 60s, loose and beautiful. So it's worth it for that. But it does look like they made the film based on whatever sets they happen to have lying around. It's not great. But the book of Brat Farrow I meant to say to you about, I mean, that book alone seems to break most of those crime club rules.

Yes. Doesn't it? It's got twins and it relies on coincidence preposterous coincidence and yet again it's not really about the events it's about the psychological brad farrah himself the first half of the book he's almost got a kind of proto entertaining mr sloan style blankness to him or a ripley. You don't know what he's going to be. Is he going to be Ripley? Yeah, he could.

What draws us into the book is the way that she writes about characters. She had tremendously, trying to skill at bringing people to life on the page and she was obsessed with observation. She was always studying people and there's a passage in a letter she wrote to Caroline Ramsden, who was a very close friend. She used to go racing with and used to go and stay with and go on holidays with. And she said in this letter,

Oh, for one of those spy cameras that one wears as a tie pin. When I was in town this last time, I thought that apart from a well-fitting new suit, there was nothing in the world that I wanted. Yes. direction altogether while one was doing it. This is a permanent need with me. I'm always seeing faces that I want to keep. Yes. Faces that I want to keep. Now, faces. Let's talk a bit about faces.

Faces. So important in this book, right? Yeah. And that's a really big thing in Miss Pym Disposes. And throughout her books as well, there is a faint obsession with eyebrows. She really, really means it. The whole of The Singing Sands starts off because her detective, Inspector Grant, sees a dead man on the London Sleeper who has tumbled hair and extraordinary eyebrows.

And this becomes a fixation with him. I've got a little section here. You were talking about her eye and faces and her eye for detail. There's a scene in Miss Pym Disposes set in a tea shop, which I just want to read you uh a brief bit um the tea shop is called the teapot it had all the properties stigmatized by the literary frequenters of village inns the indian tree pattern china the dark oak tables the linen curtains in a Jacobean design, the herbaceous bouquets in unglazed brown jugs. Yes, even the arts and crafts in the window.

But to Lucy, who in the Allen period, that's her former fiancé, I believe, had had her share of undusted snugs. It was quite frankly charming. There was a rich scent of spiced cakes straight from the oven. There was, as well as the long window on the street, a further window that gave on a garden bright with colour. There was peace and coolness and welcome. And into this tea shop comes a couple. And in the light, Val, of what you were just saying about eyebrows, I thought it was worth sharing this as well, her eye for detail. The couple moved about looking at things quietly, unselfconsciously, and then took the table at the other window.

Lucy was relieved to see that the man was the mate she would have chosen for such a woman. A little saturnine, perhaps, more self-absorbed than the woman, but quite admirable. He reminded her of someone, but she could not think of whom. Someone whom she admired. The eyebrows, it was. Dark level brush marks, low over the eyes. His suit was very old, she noticed, well pressed and kept,

but with that much cleaned air that overtakes a garment in its old age. The woman's suit, a tweed, was frankly shabby and her stockings were darned, very neatly darned, at the heels. Her hands, too, looked as if they were accustomed to household tasks and her fine grey hair was washed at home and unwaved. grey hair was washed at home and unwaved. What had she got to look so happy about this woman who struggled with straightened means? Was it just being on holiday with a husband she loved? Was it that that gave her grey luminous eyes an almost childlike happiness? I mean, that's writing of the highest order in terms of sketching out detail as she finds it, whether it's the tea shop or the characters involved. And she does that so often with characters

that are just passing through the pages. They're not major figures in the plot or whatever. But that couple we later discover are the parents of one of the students. And that student is, and I'm just going to do a little bit of description here, which again plugs into this thing of writing beautifully and creating an immediate image in your head that you know exactly what she's talking about.

Who's the girl who fluffed the balance exercise? Was she not going to get away from Innes for two minutes altogether? Her name is Mary Innes, why? What a wonderful face, pure Borgia. Oh no, Lucy said sharply. I've been wondering all afternoon what she reminded me of. I think it's a portrait of a young man by Giorgione, but which of his young men I wouldn't know. I should love to see them again. Anyhow, it's a wonderful face, so delicate and so strong, so delicate and so strong, so good and so bad, quite fantastically beautiful.

I can't imagine what anything so dramatic is doing at a girls' physical training college in the 20th century. Yeah. It's very good. Yeah. I mean, but also I was very surprised with Miss Pym Disposes how many characters there are. Yes.

Do you know what I mean? I mean, if you were being ruthless, you would have half that dramatic persona. Yeah, the staff room in particular is sort of, you know, lots and lots of characters and minor characters. What's going on there, Val? What does she gain from doing that? She gains coming at everything from lots of different directions.

So you never get to settle entirely on what you think of any one character because you're seeing them through several pairs of eyes. You're seeing them through, if it's one of the girls, you're seeing them through her friends, through her other contemporaries, through members of the staff. So you get these multifaceted sense of people, which wrong-foots you as a reader. You're not quite sure what to think. You think you make a decision about a character, and then you see them through someone else's eyes, and you may have to go, wait a minute, why am I making that decision?

Isn't this a better assessment? And so that's what it does give you she's very good at differentiating between the characters i don't think it's at all confusing uh which is is astonishing given that there are so many of them you know it's no editor would would tell you to cut them back no it's a kind of misdirection isn't it she she she you you i'm i found like you andy going through the book trying to think who's going to… Who's going to do what to whom? Yeah, is the issue. But she's brilliant at misdirection. You spend time with all sorts of different people through the course of the book.

But there's an amazing passage, I think, at the end of the book, which feels to me more like Josephine Tay or talking when Miss Pym refers to herself as a feeble waverer and wishes that the deity had found another instrument. That's the idea of who God disposes and obviously connects to the title. She'd always hated responsibility. So she says, however rabbity and inadequate she was by nature, there was always her other half, the Letitia half, which stood watching her with critical eyes. She could never get away from that other half of herself.

It sent her into fights with her knees knocking. It had made her speak when she wanted to hold her tongue. It had kept her from lying down when she was too tired to stand up. It would keep her from washing her hands now. Just going back to what you were saying, Val, about Tay herself and this incredibly partitioned character. It felt to me that she's definitely projecting something of herself into the character of Miss Pym there.

Yeah, I think you're probably right. But like all good writers, her character, her own personality is fragmented among the different characters in the books. Her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is a very atypical policeman. He's a man of sensitivity and intelligence. He's somewhere, a sort of marriage of Albert Campion and Roderick Allen, but with, I think, a much more appealing personality.

And so that's clearly sort of part of herself. Then his very dear friend, who in anybody else's hands would have become the love interest, or at the very least the unresolved sexual tension, Marta Hallard, the actor. But he allows Grant and Marta to be the best of friends. And there's moments where Grant says, if he was remotely the marrying type,

then Marta would make someone a very good wife, but it wasn't him. And I think those sort of balancing acts between the different characters are the balancing acts that Josephine Tay, Elizabeth McIntosh, Gordon Daviat, whatever we're going to call her, was doing herself. Yeah. You were saying earlier that she was um she she she had she would get off the train in london and pick up her furs and and hang out with her theatrical pals um she's very one of the things

i as a co-host of this podcast thoroughly enjoyed reading these books was how waspish she is about writers and she hates writers, right? She thinks they're all ridiculous. And publishing as well. She's very funny on the topic of books and publishing. There's a brilliant passage about, you know, because obviously the conceit of this book is that Lucy Pym has written this unexpected book bestseller,

which is called The Book, capitalised all the way through it. And it's a book of psychology, popular psychology. So towards the beginning of the novel, now in normal times, a publisher would have rung for brandy at the mere suggestion of publishing a book on psychology. But the previous year, the British public had shaken the publishing world by tiring suddenly a fiction and developing an interest in abstruse subjects such as the distance of Sirius from the earth and the inward meaning of primitive dancers in Botswana land. Publishers were falling over themselves therefore in their effort to supply this strange new thirst for knowledge and Miss Pym found herself welcomed with open arms that is to say she was taken to lunch by the senior partner and given an agreement

to sign. This alone was a piece of luck but Providence so ordained it that not only had the British public tired of fiction, but the intellectuals had tired of Freud and company. They were longing for some new thing, and Lucy proved to be it. So Lucy woke one morning to find herself not only famous, but a bestseller. She was so shocked that she went out and had three cups of black coffee and sat in the park looking straight in front of her for the rest of the morning. famous but a bestseller. She was so shocked that she went out and had three cups of black coffee and sat in the park looking straight in front of her for the rest of the morning. There's a brilliant pen portrait dripping with disdain for,

what's he called? Silas Weekly. Silas Weekly. Which is clearly D.H. Lawrence, right? D.H. Lawrence, yeah. She thinks that everything is downward in his books everyone's down and depressed that's right she she thinks that he he would like to imagine a kind of manure that steamed downwards that's right inspector grant but bursts in on him at work in to Love and Be Wise.

And there's a brilliantly waspish thing where he reports weekly, turning around, going, who on earth is breaking in? Don't you see I'm hard at work? And Grant notes that the ink on the paper is so dry that he hadn't written a word all morning. You know, he's a fraud, I think is the feeling that Tay has. As a general reader, I think John feels the same. I was really bowled over by how simultaneously

these books don't cleave to a model of crime fiction as I would understand it, yet are incredibly readable, are page turningly readable in the true sense. And you are an expert at writing books of this kind that every reader will read them and want to know what happens next. every reader will read them and want to know what happens next. When you read Josephine Tate, can you see how she does it? Or does she still have a kind of mystery and magic? I could kind of see how she does it, but it's not how I could do it. And I admire her expertise and her skill, while at the same time knowing it's a different one from mine, that her concerns are different from mine, and her approach is different.

But it doesn't stop me admiring the skill and the craft she brings to her work. It's masterwork, really. When you picked up Miss Pym Disposes all those years ago, is it a book that you referred back to? Or was it just there in the background as one of many things? No, it was a real boom. I thought, this is different, this is special. It's not like anything else I've been reading.

And I sought out the rest of her books. You can see from the fairly tatty state of them that they were picked up. Those wonderful pan covers. The pan covers and the green penguins and the man in the queue. So they were almost exclusively picked up in second-hand shops over a period of time. Every time I saw one, I snatched it because they weren't in print at the time. That's so interesting.

Well, I've got good news for people in a minute. They are in print now. So, all of them. Ah, but now, alas, we must wave goodbye to the Granite City. Huge thanks to Val for giving us the best excuse ever to plunge into the seductive, often surprising universe of Josephine Tay. To Nicky Birch and the tech team at Granite Noir for transforming this into a watchable and listenable event. And to Unbound for the virtual train fare.

The Granite Noir book selling partner is Waterstones. So if you visit their website, you can purchase books by Josephine Tayordon daviot val mcdermott or any of the other granite noir writers just go to waterstones.com or follow links on the festival website all granite noir events will remain online so you can go back and view any of them at your leisure they're free to view but please do consider making a donation to aberdeen performing arts to support the ongoing work of granite Noir. Click the link on the Backlisted website or on any of the Granite Noir pages.

Visit the Granite Noir website for more information. You can download all 132 previous episodes of Backlisted. 132! I know. Plus follow links, clips and suggestions for further reading by visiting our website at batlisted.fm and we're always pleased if you contact us on Twitter or Facebook or now with pictures, Instagram as well. You can also show your love directly by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com

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and expend almost no physical energy in doing so. Lot-listeners also get to hear their names read out on the show as a mark of our thanks and appreciation. And this week's lot listeners are, Johnny, you go first. I will. Kay Polly, Michael Regan, Emily Alexander, Paul Gerrit, Andrew Stubbs, Lisa Goldman, Joe, Judith Trail, Robert Thomas, Chris Myrna, Ian McDowell, Tonya Haugland-Sorensen, Vicky Webb, Hilda Kaiser, Claire Deidre, thanks Claire, Erin Mayer, thanks Erin, Steve Barrington, thanks all of you.

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