I’ve read every Josephine Tey mystery, and the ones I like best are The Singing Sands, The Franchise Affair, and Miss Pym Disposes, with my greatest fondness reserved for the first. It’s not just the story — it’s not even the story: it’s the storytelling. It’s the loving economy of language (I’m big on that: the right words said at the right time, like Goldilocks writing poetry).

It would be easy for modern critics to find fault, and the late Robert Barnard in his introduction to my editions does so, with some overlap in his criticism of Agatha Christie. But these were Golden Age writers, and in many ways they are both ‘of’ and ‘out of’ our time. One reads them (or at least I do, when I do) in part for the nostalgia of the atmosphere — the world of telegrams, train travel, motor cars that did 50 miles per hour top speed (in the 1920s), service revolvers left over from ‘the war’ conveniently to hand in suspects’ desk drawers. It’s true that Tey’s books are more mid-century (she died early in 1952, and The Singing Sands was published posthumously), but her books still have an away-feel, an enjoyable sense of another era. Indeed, the premise of The Franchise Affair derives from an actual criminal case of 1753! That sort of borrowing would, I suspect, be much harder for an author of our time. Our world is so transfigured that the distant past is not, as it was for Tey, readily translatable to the present.

But whatever the cultural atmosphere, the greater pull is Tey’s landscapes and characters: Inspector Grant in Scotland, in The Singing Sands, for instance. Grant’s Scottish cousin Laura, and her son Pat: now there is a beautifully rendered, carefully observed and winning portrait of a boy between the knowingness of childhood and the innocence of adolescence (however knowing the latter may consider itself to be). If the poet William Logan is right that ‘[t]he believable children in literature are rarely interesting, and the interesting rarely believable,’ then Tey is unusual in achieving both. There is a sense of fun, of the vividness of life in these books: just for a day, I feel I wouldn’t mind being Lucy Pym, for instance. Tey holds some strange opinions about what one can surmise from people’s physiognomy — she believed in it so much that an entire novel, The Daughter Of Time, is founded on it — but when she says in Sands that ‘eyebrows are the keynote of the face’, you’re struck by the truth of the fact that most of us would do almost anything to avoid losing them. Those paired strips of hair, registering with great subtlety our tiniest reactions and deepest emotions, do seem to bear a vast weight of character.